A new study takes a closer look at why. Professor Steven Rogers of Saint Louis University found that voters don’t make decisions about whether to reelect their state lawmakers because of their specific policies, campaign promises, voting records, or any of the other things you’d normally expect to be relevant to their position as local lawmakers.
That’s because the politics of statehouses turn out not to be local at all. Instead, Rogers finds there’s one major factor in deciding who controls the statehouse: the popularity of the American president. [...]
He notes that just 1 percent of local news is about statehouse news. The vast majority of local coverage — more than 60 percent — is instead about the presidential election, one study found.
Fewer than 20 percent of voters can identify their state legislator, according to a Vanderbilt study published in 2013. An even higher number have no opinion about whether said legislator is doing a good job. [...]
Rogers looked at a big data set of online polling from the 2008, 2010, and 2012 elections. He found that voters were more than 40 percent more likely to vote against their state lawmaker if they disapproved of the president. (That controlled for the pull of partisanship, or voting against a lawmaker because he or she is a member of the opposition party, according to Rogers.) Overall, attitudes toward the presidency were more than three times more important for a legislator’s reelection bid than attitudes toward the state legislature itself.
Now, there’s no point at which the unpopularity of a president automatically dooms his party’s state legislators to defeat. But Rogers’s data makes clear that voters are reacting to the presidency when they cast their ballot for these positions, even though they don’t have any bearing on what happens inside the White House.
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