All Politics Is National

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/all-politics-is-national/

How state politicians went from solving the problems in their own backyards to mimicking the gridlock in Washington.
By Craig Fehrman
Published Nov 7, 2016

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Each presidential cycle, someone scolds Americans for not paying enough attention to state politics. (This someone is usually on Twitter.) The criticism both is and isn’t correct. It’s true that a lot of people ignore the policies behind their sewage systems and water pipes. And most of us — voters, politicians, data-driven websites — spend far more time debating national politics than the state (or local) varieties. Yet it’s also true that, in the last few years, we’ve talked a ton about state issues. Voter ID laws, abortion restrictions, minimum wage hikes, legalized marijuana, gun control, LGBT rights — each of these is an exhaustively covered example of state politics.

In 2016, then, the most interesting thing about our state politics is how these two strands, the everyday and the ideological, intersect. State politicians are becoming more partisan and more polarized, much like national politicians. But this party-driven approach isn’t just influencing left-right issues like abortion or guns. It’s spreading through every part of state government, with surprising and potentially troubling results. It’s why Fairview’s water pipes haven’t been fixed — for reasons that have little to do with water, oil or even Montana itself.

Before we dive into the states and their political divide, allow me a bipartisan caveat. The examples I’m highlighting will center on Republicans, because Republicans have become more extreme at the state level, just like at the national level, and because state Republicans are cleaning up: The GOP currently controls 68 of 981 state legislative chambers and 31 of the 50 governorships. One can imagine a future where Democrats create a similar ruckus. But for now, most state policies come from Republicans.

Those policies influence every part of our day-to-day lives. Start with the obvious ones — roads and utilities, of course, but also health care, education and taxes (tobacco, gas, property, sales, income, etc.). The state you live in determines tort law, contract law and a big chunk of criminal law. If you live in Connecticut, for instance, you’d need to steal $2,000 worth of goods for it to count as a felony; cross over to Massachusetts and that threshold drops to $250. With more serious crimes, the state you live in can determine whether you’re eligible for post-conviction DNA analysis or even for the death penalty. The state you live in determines whether you can request a physician-assisted suicide. It can determine how long you stay on food stamps; it can determine the type of fireworks you buy. The state you live in determines whether your teenager receives abstinence-only sex education; it also determines whether the teenager driving in the other lane is allowed to text in the car.

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Although some of these policies are divisive, far more are essential and mundane. In fact, for each new law Congress passes, states pass more than 75 of their own. Those laws loom even larger when we remember that fewer and fewer Americans move. According to the 2010 American Community Survey, six in ten Americans were born in their current state of residence. Your state shapes your world, especially if you can’t (or don’t want to) leave.

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From 2003 to 2014, local newspapers lost a third of their full-time statehouse reporters (overall staffing decreased at the same time); 86 percent of local TV stations lack a single statehouse reporter. Even if there were more coverage, it’s not clear that readers or viewers would notice. One 2012 survey of Tennessee adults found that only 12 percent said they followed state politics “very closely”; 36 percent said they followed them “fairly closely.” But only one in five respondents could name their statehouse representative. [Mine have changed several times due to redistricting.]

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A simpler measure of awareness is to ask voters to identify the party that controls their state’s legislature. Even here, though, the results are lackluster. When the American National Election Studies’ Evaluations of Government and Society Study asked this question in 2010, 47 percent of registered voters got it right, far fewer than got it right for Congress.

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That’s the good news for incumbents everywhere. Here’s the bad: if more than half of voters don’t know who runs the statehouse, then those same voters also don’t know whom to reward (or to blame). The best place to see this is in the research of Steven Rogers, a political scientist at St. Louis University who specializes in state legislatures. Rogers has analyzed decades of data across dozens of states. He’s tested various factors to see how they might influence voters: the state’s economy, tax rates, homicide rate and student reading scores, among others. What Rogers has found is that these measures have little or no effect on whether a state legislator wins re-election. Instead, state races correlate largely with presidential politics — whether the voter approves of the president and whether the legislator belongs to the president’s party. Crafting great (or terrible) legislation on jobs or criminal sentencing doesn’t seem to matter. “Whether or not state legislators are elected,” Rogers said, “has very little to do with them.”

The most surprising thing about Rogers’s findings is their consistency. The proportion of seats a party wins in the U.S. House overlaps to an uncanny degree with the proportion of seats it wins in the state houses, and this national-local link stretches back to World War I. In other words, it’s not just that most voters ignore what’s happening at the state level — it’s that they’ve ignored it for a century or more.

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But there’s no question that our states are changing. While both sides are becoming more extreme, state Republicans are moving further to the right than state Democrats are moving to the left. According to the DW-NOMINATE-style tool, 18 state legislatures are now more conservative than Congress, some of them drastically so. The latest data suggests that 26 state legislatures were more polarized than Congress in 2013.

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