Despite Biden’s victory, Republicans carried every countywide office in Maricopa, save for the sheriff (which an incumbent Democrat held), including flipping the county recorder and winning the open treasurer seat....Add to this fact that very vocal Trump-supporting members of Congress, like GOP Reps. Andy Biggs and Debbie Lesko, won their re-election contests in Maricopa County districts by massive margins, and now the red flag is starting to go up.
That does seem odd! Hm...
8 comments:
Yes, it does.
An article from 2016.
However, districts’ willingness to split their tickets – choose one party’s presidential nominee and the other party’s candidate for representative – has been on a steep decline for more than two decades. In 2012, only 26 House districts out of 435 (6%) split their votes, according to our analysis of district-level election results. Of these, 17 voted to re-elect President Obama but sent a GOP representative to Capitol Hill; nine opted for Mitt Romney and also a Democratic representative. (On an individual voter level, a Pew Research Center analysis in 2014 estimated that about eight-in-ten likely voters in areas with multiple major contests would vote a straight-party ticket that fall. Split-ticket voting also has declined at the state level.)
Split-ticket districts used to be much more common. In Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide re-election, for example, 190 districts that voted for Nixon also elected Democratic representatives; just three, all in Massachusetts, went for both George McGovern and a GOP representative. As recently as 1988, at least 145 of the 435 House districts went one way for president and the other for representative (Mississippi data were unavailable for that year).
The article notes that the overwhelming majority of split-tickets between 1972 and 2012 were in the southern US with the Presidential vote in the district going GOP while electing a Democrat Representative. That appears to have flipped in 2012 both in party id and in geography, and the trend continued in 2016.
In 2016, 35 U.S. House districts voted for the presidential candidate from a different party from the U.S. representative it elected. Twenty-three districts voted for a Republican representative and Hillary Clinton (D). Twelve districts voted for a Democratic representative and Donald Trump (R).
None of the districts that voted for both Trump and Democrat Representative in 2016 were in the south.
How did Z end up here after being banished from Bookworm Room?
Amazing.
As I told you and others, Grim. Donald T Red won with 100 million votes. California, I flipped to Red. then Dominion and America allowed it to be flipped back to Blue.
It was a landslide. Kama JO are usurpers and pretenders to the American throne, or maybe that was the British and Vatican thrones.
He’s not welcome here. I just hadn’t gotten around to deleting him yet.
Also, the Georgia Secretary of State is a lying snake. Citations to his office are not ‘facts,’ they’re propaganda. This is also true of the governor.
You're not welcome here, as I said. Go sell your act somewhere else.
Revising and extending my remarks ...
I had remembered a Michael Barone analysis, probably from 2016, that noted the decline in ticket splitting from the 'Regan Democrat' 1980s. So in one sense I think that view of the AZ 2020 situation is correct. In another sense, however, voting for a strongly Trump supporting Republican Representative and a Democrat President appears to follow the trend from 2012 and 2016, where if a split exists it's about twice as likely to be House(R)/President(D) than the reverse. I'm not familiar with those Congressional districts but that comparison could be complicated if they either aren't fully contained in Maricopa county, or have been drawn to include only heavily Republican areas of the county.
As to the state offices, we had a similar situation here in Kentucky a couple years back where every statewide office except Governor went Republican due to a weak GOP incumbent (Bevin) in that position. Even then in 2020, despite Beshear's supposedly popularity and negative COVID press for the GOP, Republicans extended their majority control of the state Legislature.
I think it comes down to voters probably leaning more heavily on party identification for less known individuals like Congressional candidates or state offices as well as more politically savvy folks voting strategically, since party control of a legislature is more significant than any single member, and a desire to split control of the government between the parties.
So, cases like you're describing are likely where a candidate is weak or unpopular with his own party. There are definitely some Republicans (especially those of the establishment) who would have happily voted for Biden and yet for Republican Congressmen. However, Trump had titanic support among Republican voters according to all the polling I ever saw; in fact, more Republican voters said they supported Trump than the GOP itself from 2019 until earlier this year.
The case is different, I think, in 2008 and 2012 when Obama was on the ticket. There was a lot of social approval to be gained by supporting "The Nation's First Black President," and a lot of people wanted to say they'd voted for him as a hedge against being thought racists. Biden didn't have that going for him, and in fact has never in his whole career done as well as Obama -- unless, of course, this last election was (against the evidence of the eyes) legitimate. Then somehow he wildly outperformed the best Obama ever did, even his landslide election of 2008.
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