Читать книгу The Bellwether - Kyle Kondik - Страница 11

ONE

Swing States, Bellwethers, and the Nation’s Shrinking Political Middle

To a cynic with a good vocabulary, using the word “bellwether” to describe any aspect of the United States’ political system must seem fitting. The term describes leading indicators or trends, and a “bellwether state” is a place that often votes for the winning candidate in presidential elections. But what does it actually mean?

A bellwether, traditionally, is a castrated male sheep (a “wether”) that wears a bell and leads a flock of sheep. The bell attached to the bellwether tells anyone nearby where the flock is at any given time, and its lack of reproductive ability keeps its mind focused on the task at hand.

An impotent sheep leading the mindless flock through the dark? What a way to describe the states that pick the occupant of the most powerful office in the world.

That some states are more important than others in presidential elections is a consequence of the Electoral College, which chooses the United States’ president. Instead of just a straightforward national popular vote in which the candidate who wins the most votes wins the presidency, each state is awarded electors based on the size of its population. The candidate who wins the popular vote in a given state gets its electors. As of the 2010s, there are 538 electors, meaning that a winning candidate must win more than half—a bare minimum of 270—in order to win the presidency. The Electoral College winner almost always also wins the national popular vote, but there are exceptions: 1876, 1888, and 2000, for instance.

The New York Times’ first reference to a “bellwether state” comes in 1948. “Missouri might well be the bellwether state for determining Presidential sentiment,” William M. Blair wrote for the Times from Jefferson City, the Missouri capital. The state, Blair noted, had voted for the winning candidate in each of the past 11 elections. Blair suggested that at the time, in March, Democratic President Harry Truman’s home state was leaning to the Republicans.¹ Missouri indeed picked the winner that year—Truman—by nearly 17 points in a nationally competitive election.

A related term, “swing state,” appeared in the New York Times intermittently beginning in the 1930s, although the paper did not use that term (or another, “battleground state”) with much frequency until the late 20th century.²

In 1960, the Times referred to Minnesota as a bellwether state,³ and in 1976 R. W. Apple Jr., in a preelection guide on how to follow the results, cited Illinois as a bellwether that had voted for the winner in every election since 1920.⁴ The Land of Lincoln backed the loser, Republican President Gerald Ford, over Democrat Jimmy Carter. Later years saw states like Pennsylvania, Oregon, California, Colorado, and, increasingly, Ohio receive the designation from the Times. For at least the past few cycles, “swing” has appeared far more times than “bellwether” to describe competitive general election states.

According to Presidential Swing States: Why Only Ten Matter, an analysis of the competitive states in the Electoral College, the proliferation of “swing state” is a relatively recent one. “The phenomen[on] of a state being labeled a swing state is largely a product of the media and recent campaign invention,” Stacey Hunter Hecht and David Schultz argue.⁵

Bellwethers? Swing states? Are these the same thing? Sometimes, but not always.

DEFINING THE BELLWETHER STATE

Whether one refers to a typically competitive state in the Electoral College as a bellwether or a swing state, both seemingly have the same definition: a state that both is competitive in a close presidential election and reflects the national voting in a given election. But these terms are not really interchangeable.

Just because a state is close in an election doesn’t make it a bellwether. For instance, Missouri achieved a reputation as perhaps the nation’s most notable swing state throughout the 20th and into the 21st century, voting for the national winner in all but one election from 1904 to 2004, so the New York Times was right to flag it in 1948. The single time it voted with the loser was when it backed Democrat Adlai Stevenson over Republican President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, picking the challenger over the incumbent by about two-tenths of a percentage point, making it the closest state in that election.

Missouri was a swing state in 1956, meaning that either side could have won it, but it was not a bellwether, because it was not representative of the national results. Not only did it vote for the losing candidate, but it did so in an election when the winner, Eisenhower, won nationally by 15 percentage points and captured 86 percent of the electoral votes. Four years later, Missouri was again a swing state—Democrat John F. Kennedy narrowly won it—but it was also a bellwether, because Kennedy’s margin there was about the same as his national margin: he won both by less than a point.

Here, then, are definitions of both terms.

• Bellwether states reflect the national voting not only in close elections, but also in blowouts.

• Swing states can be won by either side in an election.

In competitive contests, bellwethers and swings are often the same states. In noncompetitive elections, they probably won’t be.

The analogy of a wave is a common one in politics, with big ones indicating smashing victories for one side or the other.⁶ Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, a political news analysis and aggregation website, has a useful analogy to describe how this works in the Electoral College:

Think, if you will, of a 51-rung ladder descending into a tidal pool. At the bottom of the ladder is the most Democratic state in the country. . . . At the top of the ladder is the most Republican state in the country. . . . The water represents the Democratic tide, driven by national forces such as the economy, presidential popularity, and so forth. As the tide rises, increasingly red states cast their ballots for the Democratic candidates. As it falls, blue states begin to turn crimson.⁷

When that 51-rung ladder is assembled every four years—one for each of the 50 states and another for the District of Columbia—Ohio is typically right near the middle, winnable by either side so long as the national election is close. If a party’s tide rises high enough to cover Ohio, history suggests that that is almost always sufficient to win the election. If the party’s tide does not rise to Ohio’s level, then that party’s candidate almost always loses.

In close elections, Ohio is a swing state, but it generally is not when national elections are blowouts. For the most part, its voting patterns reflect those of the nation in elections decided either by few votes or by many votes. It’s a state that can both decide the winner in a close election and reflect the nation’s movement in a blowout. It moves the way the nation moves, and it has for quite some time.

WHEN A SINGLE STATE DECIDES

The first presidential election in which there was widespread participation by average citizens—average white male ones, that is—was 1828, the year of Andrew Jackson’s sweeping victory over incumbent John Quincy Adams. This was arguably “the first truly ‘democratic’ election, in that eligible voters participated to a degree not seen before.”⁸ It also saw the emergence of a true two-party system, even if it would take another three decades before both modern parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, would actually emerge (1856 is the first year both parties would face off in a presidential election, as they have in every presidential election since).

If the election of 1828 was “the birth of modern politics,” as Lynn Hudson Parsons argued in his breakdown of the Jackson-Adams clash,⁹ the first modern elections were not particularly close in the Electoral College. Take any state and its electoral votes away from any of the winners in 1828, 1832, 1836, and 1840, and that candidate still would have had enough electoral votes to win.

The first true electoral nail-biter, then, was 1844. While Democrat James K. Polk won with 170 of 275 possible electoral votes to Whig Henry Clay’s 105, the seemingly lopsided total is deceptive. New York, with its 36 electoral votes, voted for Polk by just a single percentage point, a difference of about 5,000 votes of close to 500,000 cast. Flip New York to Clay and, leaving all else equal, he would have been elected. “As stunned Whigs surveyed the wreckage, they quickly saw that the key to the election had in fact been New York,” although “Clay, the savvy head counter, had known all along that New York was the key to the contest.”¹⁰

That election marked the first of 10 times in the modern era (beginning in 1828) where the result in a single, closely contested state made the difference in the election. Those other elections are 1848, 1876, 1880, 1884, 1888, 1916, 1976, 2000, and 2004. In each of those elections, if the loser had won just one state he lost by a close margin (less than five points), he would have won the election. Additionally, in 1968, if Democrat Hubert Humphrey had won California and its 40 electoral votes (he lost by about three points to Republican Richard Nixon), he and George Wallace, the former Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president as an independent conservative, would have combined to deny Nixon an Electoral College majority, throwing the election into the House of Representatives, something that has not happened since 1824. Had that happened, Humphrey likely would have won, because Democrats controlled 26 of 50 US House delegations. (When a presidential election goes to the House, each state gets a single vote, which presumably would go to the candidate whose party controlled that state’s House delegation.)

So there’s a long history of a single state making the difference in a close election. The nature of the United States’ Electoral College allows for the possibility that a single state, closely fought, can determine the victor.

In a year with a big wave, states that ordinarily vote for one party will often vote for the other. States that aren’t usually competitive turn into swing states, but that doesn’t mean their results will look like the nation’s.

Minnesota has the longest streak of voting Democratic for president of any state in the country (the District of Columbia’s stretches back even further, but DC is not a state, to the chagrin of its residents). The North Star State has voted for a Democrat in every election since 1976, withstanding even incumbent Ronald Reagan’s 49-state reelection tide in 1984. The state instead opted that year for former Vice President Walter Mondale, who had also served as a senator from Minnesota, by less than 4,000 votes. Reagan won 59 percent to 41 percent nationally, but Mondale won his home state 49.7 percent to 49.5 percent. For simplicity’s sake, let’s round that up to a 50–50 tie, meaning the state was nine points more Democratic and nine points less Republican than the national average. Thus, it was still far to the left of the nation’s center, and had Mondale not been a home-state candidate, perhaps even this reliably Democratic state would have voted for Reagan. Again, Minnesota was a swing state that year, but it definitely was not a bellwether. It was just that the Democratic wave in the tide pool, to borrow Trende’s analogy, was little more than a puddle, so low that it barely colored even a very Democratic state with a favorite-son candidate’s blue.

Meanwhile, the number of states like Ohio—the bellwethers, the ones that stick close to the national average vote in both nail-biters and routs—has been dwindling.

THE ARCHAIC (BUT AT THE TIME, DEFENSIBLE) 50-STATE STRATEGY

Two days before losing an achingly close election to Democrat John F. Kennedy, Republican Vice President Richard M. Nixon campaigned in a state that had previously never cast an electoral vote for president.

On November 6, 1960, Nixon spoke in Anchorage, Alaska, completing an ambitious pledge to campaign in all 50 states. As he pointed out, “This is indeed, a historic moment. It is one that will never be duplicated. This is the first time in the history of the United States that a candidate for the Presidency of either party has visited all of the 50 States of this country.”¹¹

This was a promise Nixon had made in his convention speech in Chicago: “In this campaign we are going to take no states for granted, and we aren’t going to concede any states to the opposition.”¹² So Nixon visited places he would lose by 25 points, like Georgia: “I think it’s time for the Democratic candidates for the presidency to quit taking Georgia and the South for granted,” he said in Atlanta on August 26.¹³ He would also visit Vermont, which would back him by 17 points: “Speaking to you here in the state, speaking to you particularly as a state that traditionally votes Republican, I would like to present the case for our national ticket, not just on Republican lines. That would be the easiest thing to do. I know that in this audience are people who are predominantly Republican.”¹⁴ Later, in the aforementioned Anchorage speech, he would proclaim that it made no difference: “As far as I am concerned, North, East, West, or South, it’s all part of America and a candidate for the presidency should go to every state so that he knows what America is all about—and that’s why I’m here.”

Nixon’s 50-state gimmick is perhaps one of the reasons he lost the election. Might his time in Alaska have been better spent in Illinois, Missouri, or New Jersey, states with more electoral votes, states that Nixon lost by less than a percentage point each? “All through the campaign,” wrote Theodore White in his definitive The Making of the President 1960, “as the race narrowed and it became obvious that it would be won or lost in the teetering industrial northeastern states, Nixon was cramped by his public pledge—so that on the last week end of the campaign, as Kennedy barnstormed through populous Illinois, New Jersey, New York and New England, Nixon found himself committed to fly all the way north to Alaska, which offered only three electoral votes.”¹⁵

As strange as it seems today to imagine a presidential candidate spending some of the final hours of the campaign in Anchorage, it actually was not so crazy back then. In their first elections, both Alaska and Hawaii were rightly regarded as battlegrounds. If Nixon’s visiting Alaska was so foolish, then the Kennedy strategy was perhaps even more boneheaded: JFK made not just one, but two visits to Alaska during his campaign (the state went to Nixon by 1,144 votes). And while Kennedy did not visit every state, he did campaign in 43 of them, so JFK’s strategy was nearly as nationalized as Nixon’s was.¹⁶ Maybe Nixon’s mistake was not making the pledge, but instead saving a time-consuming Alaska trip for the end of the campaign instead of knocking it out earlier on.

Furthermore, while Nixon was the first presidential candidate to campaign in every state, candidates of both parties often campaigned across the nation back then. In his 1952 victory, for instance, Eisenhower campaigned in 45 of 48 states.¹⁷

A half century earlier, the populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan, by his own count, visited 29 of 45 states in his 1896 campaign, traveling more than 18,000 miles and delivering 570 speeches.¹⁸ Republican William McKinley, meanwhile, opted for a “front porch” campaign, staying put at his home in Canton, Ohio, and giving speeches to groups who visited him. McKinley’s strategy was more in keeping with the tradition of the era, and while Bryan was not the first presidential candidate to give speeches across the country in search of support, the level to which he traveled struck some as unseemly, according to Richard J. Ellis and Mark Dedrick in an analysis of presidential campaign activities. They note that John Hay, a Republican, accused Bryan of “begging for the presidency as a tramp might beg for a pie.” But while McKinley won from his front porch against the barnstorming Bryan, presidential candidates who came after acted much more like Bryan than McKinley. Outright electioneering, once a tactic many thought beneath presidential candidates—perhaps born out of the Washingtonian idea that the office seeks the man, as opposed to the other way around—would become both common and something that voters would expect of candidates.¹⁹

While the completeness of Nixon’s campaign strategy in 1960 was novel, the general concept—hit as many states as possible—was not. And there were good reasons for candidates to approach presidential elections as national affairs—the best one being that they were just that. Nixon knew that he could not plausibly compete in all 50 states in 1960, but many were extremely close—20 states were decided by less than five percentage points. The same was true in 1976, when Carter defeated Ford by two points nationally (Kennedy won the national vote by less than two-tenths of a point against Nixon).

It stands to reason that there would be a lot of close states in a close election, although that has become less true over time. For instance, in Republican George W. Bush’s victory in 2000 over Democrat Al Gore, 12 states were decided by less than five points. Four years later, in Bush’s 2.5-point national win over Democrat John Kerry, 11 state margins were less than five points. By 2012, just four states were decided by less than five points in Democrat Barack Obama’s four-point national win over Republican Mitt Romney: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. So while those elections were slightly more (2000) or slightly less (2004, 2012) competitive than those of 1960 and 1976, the more recent contests featured fewer true swing states.

But that doesn’t tell the whole story, because 1960, 1976, 2000, 2004, and 2012 were all nationally competitive elections. There’s a way to measure how many states vote close to the national average in both close elections and blowouts.

THE TWO-PARTY VOTE AND PRESIDENTIAL DEVIATION

There are two concepts that merit explaining before proceeding. The first is the two-party vote.

This is simple enough. The two-party vote is a way of reporting election results as just the votes cast for the Democratic and Republican candidates in a given race. It subtracts the third-party votes, allowing for comparisons across time without the distorting effects independent and minor party candidacies have on results. Given the longstanding dominance of the two parties, this is a way to cut out the noise that fleeting third-party insurgencies introduce from time to time.

In most modern elections, removing the third-party vote barely makes a difference at all. For instance, in 2004, 2008, and 2012, 99 percent, 98 percent, and 98 percent of all the presidential votes cast, respectively, were for the Democratic and Republican candidates. Removing the third-party votes hardly alters the margins of victory at all. In 2012, Obama beat Romney by 3.86 percentage points in the all-party voting, versus 3.92 points in the two-party vote. In other words, there was no real difference.

However, using the two-party vote creates complications for certain years featuring big third-party votes, like 1912, 1924, 1968, 1992, and 1996, among other years. But only Democratic and Republican candidates have won the presidency since both parties began competing against each other in 1856. Third-party candidates occasionally win electoral votes, but only rarely: the last one to win any state was race-baiting George Wallace in 1968, who won five southern states as an independent candidate.

The main reason to use the two-party vote is to make apples-to-apples comparisons over time. Using two back-to-back elections from 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 to this culturally southern-leaning region, but the disparity in performance in such a short amount of time remains striking.

In the 2012 election, roughly four-fifths of nonwhite voters, who made up close to 30 percent of the national electorate, voted for Obama, while about three-fifths of white voters, making up about 70 percent of the voters, picked Romney.²³ As the country becomes more diverse, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario where voting becomes even more polarized by race.

Others have noted the increasing political polarization of the American public, such as Alan Abramowitz, who coined along with his colleague Steven Webster the term “negative partisanship,” which describes how voters’ increasingly hostile perceptions of the opposing political party inform their voting. “This has led to sharp increases in party loyalty and straight ticket voting across all categories of party identification,” they write, “and to growing consistency between the results of presidential elections and the results of House and Senate elections.”²⁴

In 1900, just 3.4 percent of US House districts featured split results—that is, only a relative handful of districts supported a different party for president and for US representative. Such low percentages remained common throughout the first half of the 20th century: on average, only 12 percent of districts featured split results in the presidential elections held during this period. (Not all district results are available from this time period, but there’s little reason to think that the missing data would change the results much.)

But throughout the second half of the century and into this century, it was common for congressional districts to support candidates from different parties for president and for the US House. From 1952 to 2008, an average of 28 percent of House districts split their presidential and congressional ballots. However, the number of split districts has been dropping over time, bottoming out at only 26 of 435 districts (6 percent) in 2012.²⁵

Granted, blowout elections will naturally produce more split districts. The two elections with the highest number of split district results were 1972 and 1984, when Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan each carried 49 of 50 states in smashing reelections. Also, both parties will draw favorable districts for themselves whenever possible, a process known as gerrymandering. This incentivizes the majority party in a state to draw the minority party’s voters into a small number of districts the majority party cannot win, while drawing a larger number of safe districts for themselves.

But the trend over time is a good measure of polarization—and also of the political trajectory of the South, which throughout the second half of the 20th century often elected Democrats to the House while backing Republicans for president. Indeed, the less polarized second half of the last decade doesn’t exactly have noble roots. Brendan Nyhan has argued that “the less polarized politics of the mid-20th century were driven almost entirely by the issue of race, which created a bloc of conservative southern Democrats who acted as a virtual third party for much of this time.”²⁶

Those conservative Democrats in the South would become Republicans: the Deep South (Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina) is now largely a one-party preserve. The same can be said of several other southern states, such as Arkansas, Tennessee, and Texas.

The Republican Party used to have a bloc of northeastern liberals/moderates, known as “Rockefeller Republicans” in tribute to the moderate governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. One of the last examples of these political anachronisms was Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, who lost to a Democrat in the midterm wave of 2006. Nearly a decade later, in 2015, Chafee was not only a Democrat—he was running (hopelessly) for the Democratic presidential nomination before dropping out of the race after a single debate.

The reason to bring all this up is simple: in a divided political world where so few voters and states can be reached, the few states that are near the nation’s political center become even more valuable. When many states are near the average national voting—as was the case in 1960 and 1976, for instance—a truly national electoral strategy is sensible. But when few are, as has been the case in recent elections, much of the country can and should be ignored by any sane presidential campaign.

THE NARROW ELECTORAL BATTLEFIELD

Nowadays, a Nixonian 50-state pledge would be ridiculous. According to an analysis from the Center for Voting and Democracy, the 2012 presidential candidates—President Obama and running mate Joe Biden along with Mitt Romney and running mate Paul Ryan—held public events in only 12 states after the Democratic National Convention, all of which would deviate less than five points from the national average.²⁷ Both parties had an excellent grasp of what the closest states were. If anything, noting that the candidates visited a dozen states makes the number of truly competitive states seem artificially high: the listing includes only one visit apiece in Michigan and Minnesota, and five or fewer in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The remaining eight states enjoyed—endured?—243 visits from the presidential tickets. Nearly a third of those were in Ohio, whose 73 visits were more than double the total of any other state except for Florida, which had 40.

Additionally, the Center found that the two campaigns spent more than 99 percent of their respective television campaign advertising dollars in just 10 states from mid-April (when Romney effectively clinched the GOP nomination) through the November general election: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin. Few would be surprised if these 10 states again ate up nearly all the resources spent by the two major-party nominees in the 2016 presidential election.

If campaigns were run 100 years ago the way they are today, with the same technology, extensive candidate travel, and micro-targeting of television ads, a similar dynamic would have prevailed. A small number of electoral votes—36 percent of them in 1916 in 21 states, versus 31 percent of them in 14 states in 2012—would have been in play (with eventual presidential deviations less than five points), and the campaigns in both eras would have been wise to focus only on these states.

The difference would have been in the states targeted. Only five of them appear on both 1916’s list of states closest to the national average and 2012’s: Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Oregon, and Ohio. In both eras, Ohio was by far the most valuable prize among these states: in 1916, it had double (24) the number of electoral votes of its next closest rival among this group, Minnesota (12), and in 2012 it had nearly double the electoral votes (18) of the second-ranked state among this group, again Minnesota (10). Additionally, while Minnesota, New Mexico, and Oregon are included here as competitive, they really weren’t in 2012: New Mexico and Oregon did not see a single dollar of ad spending and neither presidential ticket visited them, while Minnesota saw only a pittance of ad spending and a single visit, by Ryan.

Ohio spent the entire post–Civil War era—and, really, before that as well—voting at or near the national political midpoint. Sometimes it had a lot of company in this position, particularly in the middle of the 20th century. Other times—including the elections in the 21st century held while many states were moving further toward the Democrats or the Republicans—it was one of relatively few prizes plausibly available to both parties in a competitive national election. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that Ohio has been the best bellwether state in presidential elections for a century or more.