Political Science

McGee Examines Missouri Move to Republican Governance

Posted Aug 2, 2017

                 In the 2016 elections, Republicans swept five of the six statewide offices to unify Republican control over Missouri government. Previously, Democrats held the governorship 20 of the past 24 years until Eric Greitens won the governorship in 2016. Even in the one term that Republicans held the governorship, Matt Blunt made some unpopular decisions such as removing 100,000 people from Medicaid and his chief of staff was under investigation for misuse of his office which hurt his approval and led Blunt to decide not to seek reelection. Moreover, Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2000 which suggested greater political strength at the state and local level. Thus, why didn’t Republicans win the governorship more frequently?

                In Research Methods this past Spring, Josiah McGee decided to answer this question by examining why Missouri has had divided government (when one party controls the executive and the other party controls at least one chamber of the legislature), even though Republicans are stronger politically in Missouri. In this blog post, we will summarize the literature on divided government, present various explanations for why Democrats did well statewide, explain McGee’s research design, and then show that partisanship, incumbency, and quality challengers impact races the most.

Reasons for Divided Government

                Political scientists first began to study divided government after Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan would win easy victories but never leading Republicans to take Control of Congress, outside of Ike’s first two years. Over time, scholars have developed multiple explanations. First, strategic choice theory argues that voters are rational and make strategic decisions with their votes (Peress 2008; Alesina and Rosenthal 1996; Bailey and Fullmer 2011). Some voters want to maximize efficiency in government and vote for one party for all offices to increase the chance of receiving policies they prefer. Scholars call this “policy-stacking” (Peress 2008). Others fear the possibility of one party controlling the executive and legislature and so intentionally split their tickets to divide the government and force the two parties to compromise which should lead to more moderate policies (Alesina 1996).  

                Second, Mulligan (2011) argues that ambivalent party identification may explain divided government. He contends voters choose split tickets due to an internal disagreement about the value of partisan identification, which correlates to a rise in voters who identify as independents. These voters would make voting decisions independent of party labels.

                Third, economics may influence voting in several ways. First, some voters vote based on their pocketbook. If the voter is doing well financially in terms of having a well-paying job, the voter votes for the incumbent. Second, voters reward fiscal responsibility and punish parties that raise taxes and that economic distressing times leads voters to punish the incumbent party and replace them with the other party which leads to united government (Calcagno and Lopez 2012).

Finally, urbanization may explain divided government. Cutright (1963) finds that urbanization creates more competitive parties which produces stronger candidates for each parties and an increase in voters splitting their tickets. Alternatively, McKee (2008) argues that urbanization creates polarization between rural and urban voters. As Republicans make gains in rural counties, it becomes easier to predict votes based on residence as Democrats are usually stronger in urban areas. Thus if Republicans make inroads into urban areas, it should increase their chance of winning more statewide offices by cutting into the normally Democratic vote.

Explanations for Election Outcomes

In his paper, McGee tests multiple explanations for Democrat’s ability to win the governorship and other statewide offices. First, he uses McKee’s urbanization theory arguing that Republican in-roads into urban areas provided Greitens with his margin of victory in 2016. Second, incumbency may retard Republican success. Incumbents are usually the strongest candidate in any race to their name recognition, fundraising ability, established campaign organization, and demonstrated political skill (Desposato 2004). Thus if a Democrat holds a statewide office, he or she is more likely to keep it. Third, party in power may influence voting as voters reward or punish the incumbent party based on the incumbent’s performance. If a Republican controls the White House, his performance will influence voter perceptions of Republicans at other levels of office. Moreover, performance of the party of the incumbent may also impact voter decisions in open seat races. Fourth, quality opponents matter. One cannot beat a somebody with a nobody which makes the decision of who runs for office important (Dunk 1997). Candidates with previous political experience usually run better campaigns because they have a political base to draw votes from, have showed they can raise money, run a good campaign, etc. Finally, partisanship should explain votes. Since Missouri has more Republican voters, Republicans should receive more votes than Democrats as voters vote a straight-ticket or policy-stack.

Research Design

To tests his hypothesis, McGee runs multivariate regression on all of the statewide races (Gov., Lt. Gov., Sec. of State, Atty. Gen., Treas, and Auditor) for the elections between 1996 and 2016 using county level data. The dependent variable for each statewide office is percent of the Republican vote in that race per county. The independent variables partisanship, incumbency, quality candidate, urbanization, and party control. Incumbency is a dummy variable where 1 indicates an incumbent is running for reelection ad 0 is otherwise. Republican president and republican statewide incumbent is also a dummy variable. Partisanship is the percent of the Republican vote for president per county. Urbanization is an ordinal variable ranging from 0-4 with more rural counties on the low end and the most urban counties on the high end. Counties are those with fewer than 50 precincts are a 0, a county with 51-75 variables is a 1, 76-100 precincts is a 2, 101-200 precincts is a suburban county, and 201+ precincts is an urban county. The number of precincts is used as a measure of population density and we would expect more urban areas to have more voting precincts. An examination of this categorization shows St. Louis and Jackson County (KC) as the urban counties, surrounding counties as suburban, etc. which suggests validity for this categorization. A quality candidate is a candidate that has held statewide office previously. By holding state office, the person has distinguished themselves as a strong candidate who has a base, organization, and finances to compete more strongly for statewide offices than someone who just represents a portion of the state in Congress or the state legislature. This is a dummy variable for hold or held statewide office (1) and otherwise (0). All election data comes from the Missouri Secretary of State website.

Results

Overall, the results suggests that partisanship, incumbency, and candidate quality are the most important variables with urbanization playing a smaller role. We begin our analysis with the governor’s race (see Table 1). If we look at the urbanization variable, we see overall that for every move up the scale to urban county, the Republican candidate loses 4.2% of the vote. More importantly for the governor races, incumbency helps Democratic governors get reelected as incumbency drops the GOP vote by almost 12%. The magnitude of that difference is such that a state split 55-45 in favor of Republicans can help a Democratic governor win 57-43. Incumbency, the ability to deliver, and the ability to deliver policy that reflects the state’s policy preferences helps Democratic incumbents. Democrats are also helped when they are trying to succeed a Republican governor as that situation leads to a 12.21% loss in the Republican gubernatorial candidate’s vote. Whether this drop is because there is no Republican incumbent in the race or is affected by Matt Blunt’s unpopularity in 2008 we are not sure.

Finally, partisanship seems to have a lesser impact in these races, with one exception. Basically, the GOP gubernatorial nominee receives .12% of the vote for each 1% of the vote the GOP presidential nominee receives. On the positive side for partisanship, a Republican running for governor receives almost 2% more of the vote than if there is an incumbent Republican president. Yet when we turn to the 2016 race, we see the importance of partisanship as Greitens receives approximately 84% of the GOP presidential vote when controlling for urbanization.

Table 1

Explaining Missouri Gubernatorial Elections

** significant at the .01 level. * significant at the .05 level.

Turning to the Lieutenant Governor races, we find that all variables are significant including quality candidate. Urbanization and GOP presidential vote have similar impacts as counties vote 4% less Republican as they become more urban and presidential vote still has a small impact. GOP presidential incumbency helps Missouri Lt. Governor candidates slightly more as their vote increases by 3% instead of 2%. Incumbency also seems to have less of an impact for Democrat as the GOP vote falls 8%. However, 8% is still a significant percentage of the vote and could easily be the difference between reelection and defeat. Republican Lt. Governors tend to benefit more from incumbency as incumbency boosts their vote almost 14%. Of course, a quality challenger boosts the GOP vote by almost 3%. Overall, party may play a larger role here because Lt. Governor races are not as high profile as governor races. Thus, Democratic incumbents gain a boost but not as much as an incumbent Democratic governor because voters receive less information about the race. The 2016 race tends to support the partisanship contention as the GOP Lt. Governor candidate received 95% of the votes that Trump received. The race received less attention which made party more important in the vote as people voted their partisanship instead of other factors.

Table 2

Explaining Missouri Lieutenant Governor Elections

** significant at the .01 level. * significant at the .05 level.

In the other statewide races, we find similar results for urbanization and GOP presidential vote in terms of their magnitude and significance (results not shown). However, there are differences in other ways. First, the presence of a GOP incumbent president running for reelection decreases the vote for the other four statewide offices from between 3, 5, and 11%. Since George W. Bush was a controversial president because of the war in 2004 and the war and the economy in 2008, some voters may have punished the GOP candidates in small ways. Most likely, these races were not high profile and voters did not receive enough information about the GOP candidate to counter the dismay they may have felt toward Bush and the GOP. Incumbency mattered in each race but the State Treasurer, though the impact was modest, except for Attorney General.  The impact of Attorney General incumbency was 19% which may be attributed to three-time Attorney General Jay Nixon who was consistently the most popular elected official in the state. He eventually parlayed his popularity into the governorship in 2008 and 2012 which were not good years for Democrats overall in Missouri.

Finally when we examine the 2016 elections when Missouri Republicans did so well, we see the importance of party. The GOP candidates for statewide office received at a minimum 84% of the Trump vote (Greitens) to a high of 95% for current Lieutenant Governor Mike Parson. Thus while people can argue about urbanization, quality challenger, incumbency or other things, Republican officials in Missouri in 2016 have Donald Trump, or at least Republican voters, to thank as a very large majority voted a straight ticket.

Conclusion

 Overall, we see incumbency playing a more important role in high profile races like Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General and less so in low profile races like Secretary of State, State Treasurer, and State Auditor. Since the big three offices are covered more by the media and are more prestigious, these incumbents are able to build a reputation that can withstand partisanship by doing things that appeal to people regardless of party. The case of Jay Nixon is an excellent example of this. For the lower level races, partisanship helps in that people vote their party identity because they know less about the candidates but voters are also willing to punish these party candidates when they have concerns over the Republican president’s performance. Naturally, a quality candidate does better than someone who has not held statewide office before which makes winning these lower level statewide offices important as they are a step on the career ladder and can help someone attain higher office. Finally, urbanization does not really explain the changes in Missouri as more urban areas vote more Democratic which rejects the hypothesis that Republicans are making large gains among urban voters.

These results should provide citizens some confidence that voters are acting rationally. Most tend to vote their party identification which means that they get policy that they usually prefer. However, many citizens are willing to ignore partisanship when an incumbent does a good job and reward that member appropriately while punishing incumbent parties which they do not perform as well. Finally, the fact that quality candidates do better is not surprising as they run better campaigns and thus get more votes which show that voters are not fools but can respond to the political forces and environment appropriately.

References

Alberto Alesina, H. R. (1996, November). A Theory of Divided Government. Econometrica, Vol. 64, No. 6, pp. 1311-1341.

Cutright, P. (1963). Urbanization and Competitive Party Politics. The Journal of Politics, Vol 25. No. 3, 552-564.

Desposato, J. R. (2004, September). Incumbency and Short-Term Influences on Voters. Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3 , pp. 363-373.

Dunk, E. v. (1997, December). Challenger Quality in State Legislative Elections. Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 4 , pp. 793-807.

McKee, Seth C. (2008, January). Rural Voters and the Polarization of American Presidential Elections. PS: Political Science and Politics, Vol. 41, No. 1, pp. 101-108.

Michael A. Bailey, E. B. (2011, June). Balancing in the U.S. States, 1978-2009. State Politics & Policy Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 148-166.

Mulligan, K. (2011, June). Partisan Ambivalence, Split-Ticket Voting, and Divided Government. Political Psychology, Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 505-530.

Peress, M. (2008, November). Strategic Voting in Multi-Office Elections. Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol 33., No 4, pp. 619-642.

Peter T. Calcagno, E. J. (2012, June). Divided We Vote. Public Choice, Vol. 151, No. 3/4, pp. 517-536.

State, M. S. (2016). Missouri Election Results. Retrieved April 21, 2017, from https://www.sos.mo.gov/elections/s_default/results