Even after reading your gracious responses to Rob & Henry, I remain highly dissatisfied with the whole thrust and emphasis of this blog. I cannot accept an interpretation of the statements “once again, the country has voted for divided government” and “for whatever the reason, the voters last Tuesday essentially opted for the status quo” that simply notes that “divided government only requires a minority of voters to split their ticket”.

Also I don’t like the reliance on Mayhew’s study of divided government from 1946 to 2002. In my view, this country has travelled light years from that period in the last ten years.

In sum, I think sweeping statements like those quoted above require recent, thorough research on voter behavior and motivations, placed in the context of the last ten years of shifting population distribution, fast-paced demographic and values shifts within that changing distribution, and the rabid partisanship displayed by a growing number of key political actors on the state and national levels.

I am not up on the latest political science research, as I know you are, so perhaps you can bring some recent studies to bear on the issues raised in the blog and comments. My gut feeling is that very few if any voters these days vote for divided government, although some surely recognize that is what they are likely to get these days in a nation-wide election. In fact I suspect that we could and in fact may be getting divided government despite the wish of every voter that the national government be unified — under their party’s leadership, of course.

Bob

PS. I might add that the three ways in which we aggregate votes in national elections — through the Electoral College every four years for the presidency; at the state level for one third of the Senate second year; and in most instances within parts of a state every two years for the House — may be a major reason why divided government occurs as frequently as it does. One could argue that is what the Framers hoped and planned for but that doesn’t make it necessarily desirable in today’s close-knit and dangerous world.

I’m not sure I concur with your assessment that Americans opted for divided government, though it certainly appears that way. The problem has more to do with the way legislative district lines are drawn within states. If we had a national system of proportional representation we’d have a unified Democratic Party government (based on the numbers I saw yesterday…50.2% of Americans voted for Democrats in House races). But we don’t. Maybe I’m guilty of micro-analyzing but it appears to me that in many of the races where Americans had real choices the Democratic candidates prevailed.

Rob