We continue our Presidential Geography series, a one-by-one examination of each state’s political landscape and how it’s changing. Here is Rhode Island, the Ocean State. FiveThirtyEight spoke with Scott MacKay, a political analyst for Rhode Island Public Radio; and Maureen Moakley, a professor of political science at the University of Rhode Island.
In the Rhode Island State Legislature, “there are so few Republicans they barely give them parking spaces,” Ms. Moakley said.
Indeed, Rhode Island is among the most Democratic-leaning states. It ranks as the fourth bluest state in the nation in the FiveThirtyEight Presidential Voting Index, and Democrats have more than a 3-to-1 edge in voter registration, an overwhelming advantage.
Yet Rhode Island has not elected a Democratic governor since 1992. And one of its two United States senators was a Republican from 1976 to 2007: John Chafee, then his son Lincoln Chafee. The younger Mr. Chafee, now an independent, was elected governor in 2010.
What allows for such disparate results? Elasticity. Rhode Island is the most elastic state, a large swatch of its electorate are persuadable voters unaligned with either political party. Rhode Island has very few Republicans (10 percent of registered voters), a ton of Democrats (41 percent), but even more unaffiliated voters (49 percent).
In presidential races, those unaffiliated voters break largely for the Democrat. The last Republican to carry the state was Ronald Reagan in 1984. But at the state level, unaffiliated voters have often opted to elect socially moderate Republican governors as a check on the Democratic-controlled legislature, Mr. Mackay said.
Rhode Island has a lot of swing voters, partly because the state’s main demographic groups do not correlate strongly with either political party. Read more…
North Carolina is a swing state that has relatively few swing voters. Rhode Island is not a swing state, but it has quite a lot of swing voters.
Are you confused yet?
The concept I’m getting at here is a pretty basic one, although it is sometimes hard to explain because the term “swing” is applied in such a wide variety of different ways to describe voter behavior. So it may be time to introduce a new term into the political lexicon, which I’ll call an elastic state in reference to a similar concept in economics.
Let’s define an elastic state as one that is relatively sensitive or responsive to changes in political conditions, such as a change in the national economic mood. (This is in the same way that, in economics, an elastic good is one for which demand is highly sensitive to changes in prices.)
For instance, if there are a series of strong jobs reports this summer, and President Obama’s standing improves by five percentage points nationwide, we’d expect his standing to improve by more than 5 points in an elastic state. This works both ways: if we went into another recession and Mr. Obama suffered a five-point decline in his popularity, he’d experience a larger decline in an elastic state.
An inelastic state, by contrast, is one which is relatively insensitive to these changes. In an inelastic state, a five-percentage-point change in the national environment might only affect Mr. Obama’s numbers by three percentage points instead.
Elastic states are those which have a lot of swing voters — that is, voters who could plausibly vote for either party’s candidate. A swing voter is very likely to be an independent voter, since registered Republicans and registered Democrats vote with their party at least 90 percent of the time in most presidential elections. The swing voter is also likely to be devoid of other characteristics that are very strong predictors of voting behavior. For instance, he is unlikely to be African-American, which very strongly predicts Democratic voting. And she is unlikely to be a Southern evangelical, which very strongly predicts Republican voting, at least recently.
The classic example of an elastic state is New Hampshire. Read more…