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Edited by David Leonhardt
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VOTER BEHAVIOR
The Power of Political Ignorance
MAY 23, 2014
Lynn Vavreck
@vavreck
Split-ticket voting is quite rare for top offices like president and senator.
But those who do choose candidates from different parties on Election Day
have at least one thing in common: They know less about politics than
people who vote the straight party line.
Where you live and who is running for office certainly shape the odds
that you will split your ballot, but by far the best predictor is how much
general political knowledge you have.
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It is easy to come up with examples of cross-party statewide outcomes:
New Jersey (which voted for President Obama twice) and its two-term
Republican governor, Chris Christie; or California and Arnold
Schwarzenegger. There are plenty of reasons for split-party statewide
outcomes, including popular incumbents and changes in who turns out to
vote for different offices in different years.
But dont be fooled. State-level splits do not imply a prevalence of
cross-party voting at the individual level. Consider this simple example. If
100 voters cast ballots in the presidential election and vote for the
Democrat 52 to 48, the Democrat wins with a four-vote margin. If those
same 100 voters cast votes in a Senate election and break for the
Republican 51 to 49, the Republican wins with a two-vote margin. When
elections are close, a few voters splitting their tickets can flip outcomes
between the parties if the electorate is made up of the same people. (When
different people show up across years, outcomes can swing between the
parties without anyones splitting a ticket).
In 2012, nationwide, only 7 percent of voters who cast ballots for both
the presidency and the Senate split their votes across the two major
parties, according to the Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project run by
YouGov.
Theres a lot of variation around this 7 percent. Rates of ticket
splitting vary by state, with lows near 1 percent in Wyoming, a state that
went 69 percent for Mitt Romney in 2012 and simultaneously re-elected
the Republican John Barrasso with 76 percent of the vote, to highs of 23
percent in West Virginia, which also went to Mr. Romney at 62 percent
but re-elected the Democrat Joe Manchin with 60 percent of the vote. But
within each state, the kinds of people who move back and forth between
the parties have some things in common.
Whether youre a man or a woman doesnt matter much in this
context; neither does your age or race. While youre more likely to be a
ticket-splitter if you are a moderate or independent, the single best
predictor of cross-party voting is still how much you know about politics:
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the less you know, the more you vote for two parties.
To measure political awareness I used a short quiz. The questions
ranged from easy to difficult and asked people to choose the current job or
office held by a somewhat prominent government official from a set of five
choices. The questions, which were fielded in December of 2011, asked a
representative sample of 45,000 people about legislative, executive and
judicial branch leaders like Eric Cantor, Nancy Pelosi, John Roberts,
Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Joseph Biden. Most
people (88 percent) knew what job Mr. Biden had, but many fewer (54
percent) knew that Mr. Cantor was a member of the House of
Representatives. The least well-known person was Chief Justice Roberts,
whom only 12 percent correctly identified.
I combined the questions to form a scale of general political
knowledge or awareness. In the bottom third, 12 percent of voters cast
split tickets between president and Senate in 2012; this share decreased to
8 percent for those in the middle third of knowledge. Among voters with
the highest levels of political information, only 4 percent split their votes.
Consider an otherwise average voter who is a self-described moderate
and independent. At low levels of knowledge, this voter splits his or her
ticket a third of the time (34 percent). At an average level of knowledge,
the rate decreases to 18 percent of the time, and at the highest levels, these
voters rarely split their tickets (10 percent). Thats a 24-point difference,
which is a shift of nearly the same size as the one observable in the
different political environments of Wyoming and West Virginia.
Incumbent Democratic senators in states that went for Mr. Romney in
2012, like Mary Landrieu in Louisiana and Mark Pryor in Arkansas, need
some of Mr. Romneys voters to cross over and vote for them in 2014
their re-election most likely depends on it. Its not exactly a split ticket
since its happening across elections, but the characteristics of people who
cross party lines in a single election are likely to be similar to the
characteristics of people who cross party lines across elections. This means
that control of the Senate may rest in the hands of voters who know the
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least about politics.
How much should we worry about this?
On issues like same-sex marriage, a pathway to citizenship or taxing
families that earn more than $200,000 a year, people with low levels of
political knowledge are more likely to say that they dont know what their
own position on the issue is, or that they are unsure about it. Those with
low levels of political knowledge are also less likely to have graduated from
high school or have any kind of college experience compared with those
with higher levels of information.
Despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, it is tempting to think that
something as important as control of the Senate lies in the hands of voters
who carefully pick and choose which candidates to vote for in each race on
the ballot, but this seems unlikely. It is more likely that split-ticket voters
are buffeted by idiosyncratic factors, like incumbency status, recent
campaign advertising, and the tone and share of news coverage candidates
receive.
All of this makes the quality of the campaigns and the fund-raising it
takes to wage them very important. If the early ads for the 2014 midterm
elections are any indication, cross-party voters are in for several months of
intense appeals, whether they are interested in them or not.
Lynn Vavreck, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A., is co-author of The Gamble, about the
2012 presidential campaign.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 25, 2014, on page SR3 of the New York edition with
the headline: The Power of Political Ignorance.
2014 The New York Times Company