My home state’s citizens last month elected their next governor. No, I misspeak. Five percent of them elected him. Seven percent preferred a different candidate, and 88 percent never had a say in the decision.
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The party now dominant in Indiana held its May primary, in which 12 percent of the 4.7 million registered voters participated. The winner captured 39 percent of that vote, or 5 percent of the electorate. November’s general election will be a laydown formality; the polls are basically closed, six months ahead of time, with a Republican assured of victory. This is “early voting” of a kind no one should advocate.
We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
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The issue isn’t simply that states lean reliably Republican or Democratic. It’s that now a big majority are heavily, maybe irrevocably, tilted in one direction or the other. Where that obtains, office seekers pitch their initial appeals to the hard core on their side, as primary candidates always have. The difference is that, instead of the winner’s traditional post-primary imperative, to reach out to nonpartisans and even open-minded members of the opposing party, now their job is finished.
It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties. Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election. Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.
I served as Indiana’s Republican governor from 2005 to 2013, limited to two four-year terms. In the first term, the Democratic opposition controlled one house of the General Assembly. The two gubernatorial contests during that period were hotly contested, and thought to be in doubt for most of the two election seasons. Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.
Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.
This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.
What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security. If they had any concrete suggestions more relevant to the job they were seeking, it obviously didn’t make sense to share them.
Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences. The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.
Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politicsThe party now dominant in Indiana held its May primary, in which 12 percent of the 4.7 million registered voters participated. The winner captured 39 percent of that vote, or 5 percent of the electorate. November’s general election will be a laydown formality; the polls are basically closed, six months ahead of time, with a Republican assured of victory. This is “early voting” of a kind no one should advocate.
We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
ADVERTISING
The issue isn’t simply that states lean reliably Republican or Democratic. It’s that now a big majority are heavily, maybe irrevocably, tilted in one direction or the other. Where that obtains, office seekers pitch their initial appeals to the hard core on their side, as primary candidates always have. The difference is that, instead of the winner’s traditional post-primary imperative, to reach out to nonpartisans and even open-minded members of the opposing party, now their job is finished.
It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties. Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election. Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.
I served as Indiana’s Republican governor from 2005 to 2013, limited to two four-year terms. In the first term, the Democratic opposition controlled one house of the General Assembly. The two gubernatorial contests during that period were hotly contested, and thought to be in doubt for most of the two election seasons. Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.
Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.
This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.
What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security. If they had any concrete suggestions more relevant to the job they were seeking, it obviously didn’t make sense to share them.
Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences. The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.
