The End of the Swing Voter

Jonathan Chait: “A new paper by political scientist Corwin Smidt… documents the decline of swing voters, or (as many political scientists call them) ‘floating voters,’ which means voters who pull the lever for a different party than the one they supported in the previous election. From the 1950s through the 1980s, 10 to 15 percent of voters floated between the two parties in presidential elections. Recently that rate has fallen to about 5 percent.”

“The sorting of American politics into semipermanent, warring camps unfolded over decades… But every effort to break the stalemate in the age of polarization has failed. Red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans have tried to create separate, localized identities for their candidates that can allow them to compete in hostile terrain. It doesn’t work because elections at every level have increasingly grown nationalized. The divide between red and blue America is comprehensive.”