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Voters have been trending this direction becoming more and more polarized.
538
Geographic sorting — Voters tend to cluster near other people who share their cultural and political values, and the parties’ coalitions have become far more geographically isolated in recent decades. In the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon election, 52 percent of the nation’s voters lived in states decided by 5 percentage points or less. In the 2012 Obama-Romney race, just 17 percent of all voters lived in such states.
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As a corollary, there are far fewer truly competitive congressional districts. Just 90 of 435 House districts had a Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index score, an attempt to measure the partisan lean of an area independent of the candidates on the ballot, between D+5 and R+5, down 45 percent from 164 in 1998.
Sure, gerrymandering has played a role in the House, but sorting is the dominant factor: In the impossible-to-gerrymander Senate, the number of seats with a score between D+5 and R+5 has declined from 52 in 1998 to 28 today.
2. Straight-ticket voting — Voters are splitting their tickets — voting for a Republican for one office and a Democrat for another — at lower rates than we’ve seen in decades. They’re just not making distinctions between parties’ presidential and congressional candidates like they used to. The decline of local news readership probably plays a role — after all, these outlets have traditionally provided an avenue for candidates to build a personal brand independent of their party’s.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-political-process-isnt-rigged-it-has-much-bigger-problems/
