the 2000s illustrates why this can be a useful exercise.
In 2000, Gore received 48.4 percent of the total national vote (including all votes cast for all candidates). Four years later, Kerry got 48.3 percent of the all-party total vote. By that metric, it appears that Gore and Kerry performed almost exactly the same.
But in practice, Gore did significantly better, winning the popular vote by about half a percentage point while Kerry lost by about 2.5 points in the national popular vote to Bush. The difference between those years is that close to 4 percent of all voters in 2000 voted for third-party candidates—mostly for Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, who probably cost Gore the election—while just 1 percent of all voters picked a third-party candidate in 2004. The national two-party vote in those years tells the more accurate tale. Gore won 50.3 percent of the two-party tally in 2000, while Kerry captured just 48.8 percent four years later.
Third-party candidacies come and go, but since 1856 the two major parties have remained constant, and tracking the change in the votes for these parties paints a clearer picture about the evolution of the nation’s voting from election to election. While there will be exceptions, most of the results reported throughout the rest of the book will be just the two-party vote.
The second concept is presidential deviation. This is the difference between how a county, state, or other political subdivision votes in a given election compared with, usually, the national results. It’s a way of expressing how reflective a given place is of the national results. This is, again, calculated through the two-party vote (although it can be figured through the all-party vote just as well) and it’s expressed as a rounded number.20
For instance, the national two-party vote in 2012 was 52 percent to 48 percent in favor of Obama over Romney. That same year, Romney won Wyoming 71 percent to 29 percent. Romney’s share of the vote in Wyoming was 23 percentage points larger than his national share (and Obama’s was 23 points lower—again, all numbers are rounded). So Wyoming deviated 23 points from the national average in 2012 in favor of the Republicans. For shorthand, this makes Wyoming an R +23 state.
Measuring this deviation isolates where a state stands in relation to the national voting in elections that are both narrow and lopsided. For instance, in Virginia in 1976, Ford beat Carter by about two points. Four years later, Virginia backed Reagan by about 14 points. That’s a 12-point swing in the two-party vote. But its presidential deviation from the nation was the same in both elections: it was two points more Republican than the nation in 1976 (narrowly backing Ford while Carter won nationally) and then two points more Republican in 1980 (giving Reagan a slightly bigger victory than in his overall national triumph). So, while Virginia’s margin of victory for the Republican presidential candidate changed quite a bit from 1976 to 1980, the Old Dominion didn’t get any more Republican relative to the nation from one year to the next. The deviation separates the swing in the state from the swing nationally.
Presidential deviation is used later in this book to compare county-level results to state and national results, placing the outcome in certain places in both state-level and national-level contexts. For instance, in Ohio in 2008, Obama got 52 percent of the two-party vote, while he got 54 percent nationally. In Athens County, home of Ohio University, he got 68 percent of the vote. So Athens County was D +16 compared to the state versus D +14 compared to the nation.
THE NATION’S SHRINKING MIDDLE
The two-party vote metric, combined with presidential deviation, makes it possible to compare election results over time. It also illustrates which states were close to the national presidential voting average in both blowouts and nail-biters.
The 1960 election, when 20 states were decided by five points or less in the all-party vote, is already noted above. Compare that to 1956, Eisenhower’s reelection victory. That year, only three states were decided by less than five points.
But the two elections are not really comparable: Ike captured 457 electoral votes and 57 percent of the national popular vote against Stevenson in their rematch from four years prior. One wouldn’t expect there to be many close states in such a lopsided election—but looking at the election through presidential deviation tells a far different tale.
A whopping 32 states had deviations of less than five points in 1956, one more than the much closer 1960 election. (Less than five points means any state with a deviation of four or less in the election. Practically speaking, because of rounding, this means any state with a deviation of less than 4.5 points.) This can be less than five points in either direction, which is actually a fairly large range: In an election that was 50–50 nationally, a state that voted 54 percent to 46 percent either way would be included in this definition as a state with a deviation less than five.
The examples of 1956 and 1960 represent a high-water mark for the number of states clustered near the nation’s middle in the 30 presidential elections from 1896 to 2012. They also represent a high mark for the number of electoral votes in states with deviations of four or less. In those two elections, roughly three-quarters of all the available electoral votes were in the states with low deviations. Those are also the two highest in the time frame studied.
So an equal number of states were clustered close to the national average in both elections—it’s just that Eisenhower’s much higher tide of victory meant that the states voting with the middle of the country were giving Ike big victories that mirrored his national victory, while JFK’s tiny tide meant that those states whose voting deviated only narrowly from the national voting mimicked Kennedy’s narrow 50-state win, and thus were close in absolute terms as well.
Figure 1.1 shows the number of electoral votes in states that voted close to the national popular vote in a given election from 1896 through 2012. As should be clear from figure 1.1, the number of electoral votes in states that vote near the national average has been dropping over the last several decades.
FIGURE 1.1. Number of electoral votes in states with presidential deviations less than five in presidential elections, 1896–2012
The figure shows how the number of states—and the number of electoral votes—that reside near the nation’s political middle was about as low in the mid-2010s as it was a century earlier. The number dipped to very low levels in the first part of the 20th century. They steadily rose throughout the dozen years of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, staying generally high through the very close election of 1976, before steadily declining over the past four decades.
That suggests a sorting of the states into opposing camps with near-impregnable walls, making most states effectively uncompetitive in tight national elections. This dovetails with other trends in American politics and culture.
SORTED AMERICA
Bill Bishop argued in The Big Sort that the United States is becoming increasingly clustered, with like-minded people choosing to live closer together. This sorting, Bishop argues, is reflected in our politics: “As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogenous groups.”21
A yawning urban/rural split has emerged in the nation’s politics, with Democrats performing well in big urban counties while Republicans win much of what remains. In 2012, Obama captured 46 of the nation’s 50 most populous counties. Back in 1976, Carter won just 27 of these counties against Ford.
Obama won only 7 percent of counties that are part of Appalachia, the country’s sparsely populated and historically economically depressed region that is defined by the federal Appalachian Regional Commission.22 In his 1976 victory, Carter won about 70 percent of these counties; in 1996, Democratic incumbent Bill Clinton won nearly half of them. Both of these candidates, as southerners, had special appeal