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Voting for Congress and voting for President

- November 17, 2010

“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/11/2_years_try_two_weeks.php?ref=fpblg tells us that there may be no correlation between the outcome of the Congressional races a couple of weeks ago, and the likely outcome of a Presidential race two years from now.

bq. Virginia, we’re told, is one of those states that went blue in 2010 but has now bounced back to its reddish norm. But the first poll looking at 2012 presidential matchups shows President Obama beating all four Republican frontrunners — two by 11 points. We’ll see a lot of polls over the next couple years. And certainly Obama can’t take Virginia for granted, to put it mildly. But it’s an instructive example of how you can easily read too much into a low turnout midterm election.

While I wouldn’t want to read too much into this kind of data, given the salience of the current holder of the Presidency, low information about Republican contenders etc, there are indeed a whole variety of reasons why mid-term results are not dispositive for future races. But this also touches on the question of the broader relationship between Presidential and Congressional races, which Matt Shugart “wrote a very interesting post on”:http://fruitsandvotes.com/?p=4457. If the patterns that we saw in 2010 repeat themselves (a big if), then we can plausibly surmise that Obama and Congressional Democrats will either succeed together, or fail together.

Shugart builds on his “recent book with David Samuels”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0521689686?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0521689686 to argue that votes for Congressional candidates and votes for the President have become much more closely tied over time.

bq. Electoral Separation of Purpose (ESP) … starts with the difference between presidential and legislative votes, at the district level, for a given party. It then can be expressed in a summary indicator by the average of the absolute values of all these differences. … For Obama and the Democrats in 2008, ESP=10.45. That ESP would be relatively low in the Obama era is yet another window on the much talked-about “polarization” of US politics: votes for Congress now tend to be more similar to presidential votes at the (House) district level. In other words, the fates of members of the House are more tied to that of their co-partisan president (or presidential candidate) than used to be the case. Voters apparently do not “want different things” from congress and president as much as they once did (for instance, 1972 and 1974, ESPs of 20.4 and 25.8, respectively).

bq. … It is striking that in districts [in 2008] where the Democrat has over 50% of the legislative vote, Obama tends to run behind his co-partisan House candidate. That is, there are notably more points above the equality line for winning House Democratic districts than there are below the diagonal. Districts where he runs ahead of the Democratic House candidate tend to be where the party loses the congressional race. For instance, if Obama won about 60% of the vote in a given district, the Democrat tended to win around two thirds of the House vote. But if Obama won around 45% of the vote, the Democratic House candidate tended to get closer to 35% of the vote.

bq. … However, the Democrats lost 29 districts [in 2010] in which Obama had won a majority in 2008. And here is where the pattern of 2008 Democratic House winners frequently having run ahead of Obama becomes so important. They had a “cushion” against an adverse swing against them, stemming from Obama’s unpopularity at the midterm, and they most certainly needed it! … In this second graph we see that ESP actually declined further in 2010. At first, it may seem odd that one could go from unified to divided government, yet electoral separation of purpose decreased. But that is what happened. In 2010, ESP for Democrats dropped to 10.00. Note the near disappearance of winning Democrats who are more than about ten percentage points above where Obama was in their district in 2008. In fact, what really stands out here is the extent to which Democrats who won over 50% of their own district vote are concentrated very near, or slightly below, the equality line. That’s a good case of tied fates!

bq. We really are in uncharted territory by US standards. We have not seen such closely tied presidential and legislative electoral fates at any other point in the last five decades or more. … What this might mean going forward is hard to say. I don’t have that kind of ESP! Or maybe it is not so hard. If Obama is reelected in 2012, it is unlikely to be with a broad personal victory like Nixon in 1972 and Reagan in 1984, which represent two of the three highest ESP concurrent elections. (The other is 1988, when the senior Bush effectively won Reagan’s “third term.”) But therein lies a ray of good news for Democrats-who are surely looking for such rays about now. …in such a low-ESP environment, with partisan fates so tied, it is entirely plausible that a reelected Obama would carry enough of that cluster of districts near 50% to regain a House majority. If he loses, of course, then so might several more Democratic House members. Such are the perils of governing and campaigning when electoral separation of purpose is tending to run so low, by historic US standards.