As many of the post-election commentaries pronounce a
host of reasons (the better
candidate
in political workmanship, the novice
challenger,
a localized race that went national) why the once disgraced, now redemptive,
Sanford won, we might want to view a more important component of his victory:
the voters of the first congressional district.
If it wasn’t for Sanford and his baggage, most all analysts
would have written off the Lowcountry contest as a “safe Republican” seat, due
to the fact that Mitt Romney carried the district by 18 percent in the 2012
presidential election.
In fact, this kind of “landslide” district has become the national
norm in U.S. House contests.
In Nate Silver’s
analysis
of the 2012 U.S. House races, he found that in 2012, only 35 districts—less
than ten percent of the 435 contests—were “swing” districts, meaning that the
district results were within five percentage points of the national popular
vote margin.
More importantly, it appears that House elections are
showing a closer alignment with the overall electoral patterns of voters,
especially using the presidential returns.
In the 1st Congressional District election, I
took the precinct returns from the 2012 presidential election and asked, would
those presidential results have any possible predictive power to an election
six months later?
Meaning, would Romney performance in each precinct give an
indicator of Sanford’s performance as well?
Conversely, would Obama’s performance indicate how Colbert Busch would
perform as well?
Using Romney’s performance on the horizontal axis and the
preliminary numbers for Sanford on the vertical axis for the largest county
(Charleston) in the 1st District, here’s the result:
Romney’s Vote Share
in 2012 Presidential Election and Sanford’s Vote Share in 2013 Special Election
in Charleston County
With a few exceptions (most notably a precinct where Romney
got only 8% of the vote, but Sanford got 34% of the vote), the vote share
alignment between Romney and Sanford is pretty striking.
And even though Obama won Charleston County in 2012, the
relationship between his vote share and Colbert Busch’s vote share in that
county is also striking.
Obama’s Vote Share in
2012 Presidential Election and Colbert Busch’s Vote Share in 2013 Special
Election in Charleston County
So what might this mean?
One explanation might be that the United States is becoming more
“parliamentary” in its national legislative elections: it doesn’t matter who
the candidate is (hiking boots and all the relevant baggage), but what does
matter is the voters’ party allegiance.
This would tend to make us more along the lines of British
elections, where the voters cast their ballots for the party; the “candidate”
standing as that party’s choice to be the member of Parliament really doesn’t
matter, because that candidate was
picked by the party
without any voter input.
Granted, U.S. primary elections have become “the” election,
rather than the general election, because, as Silver pointed out, more and more
districts are “landslide” in their behavior (117 Democratic and 125 GOP
districts in 2012’s House elections were 20 points or more above the national
popular vote).
So, it appears that even in a contest, headed by candidate who
suffered from both self-inflicted wounds and a deep drive to win, the district
behaved as it should—and gave the landslide win that most of us should have
expected, but didn’t.
