The other day I posted some evidence that, however things used to be, congressional elections are increasingly nationalized, and it’s time to retire Tip O’Neill’s slogan, “all politics is local.” (The discussion started with a remark by O.G. blogger Mickey Kaus; I also explain why I disagree with Jonathan Bernstein’s disagreement with me.)
Alan Abramowitz writes in with an analysis of National Election Study from a recent paper of his:
Average Correlations of House and Senate Votes with Presidential Job Evaluations by Decade
Decade House.Vote Senate.Vote
1972-1980 .31 .28
1982-1990 .39 .42
1992-2000 .43 .50
2002-2008 .51 .57
This indeed seems like strong evidence of nationalization, consistent with other things we’ve seen. I also like Abramowitz’s secret-weapon-style analysis, breaking the data up by decade rather than throwing all the data in at once and trying to estimate a trend.