Introduction

Despite thousands of labor union protesters packing the Michigan State Capitol building, Michigan’s Republican legislature passed, and its Republican governor signed, the state’s first “right-to-work” law in December 2011. Dozens of states have similarly forbidden mandatory collective bargaining dues for unions from workers, so this was not unique legislation.

What made this legislation different is that Michigan, the automotive capital of the world and the home of the United Auto Workers (UAW), had been at the forefront of the labor movements that brought industrial unions to America. Some states name highways for political or sports heroes; Detroit’s most recent metropolitan highway was named for Walter Reuther, UAW president during the high point of the American auto industry from 1946 to 1970. With its industrial history and union culture, this was not a normal state for right-to-work legislation.

Twelve years later, after Democrats took majority control of the state’s legislature for the first time in forty years, the legislature passed the first repeal of a right-to-work law in the United States in over fifty years. It propelled the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, to the top of lists of likely future Democratic presidential candidates.

The passage and repeal of the right-to-work legislation in a state that had not previously been divided on the issue indicates how polarized state party politics can be these days. Even in a state where party competition has been close, legislators and governors proved ready and willing to push an ideological issue that has economic and symbolic importance. This is indicative of how party competition, ideological divisions, and party polarization drive state politics in our current era.

Role of Political Parties in American Democracy

Americans have always viewed political parties with mistrust. James Madison highlighted the need for a new Constitution and governing system based on controlling the “mischiefs of faction.” George Washington also warned of the dangers of faction in his farewell address. Skepticism of political parties has only continued.

Blended with this skepticism is a recognition that parties have helped democratize and organize American political life. Moreover, following the horrors of World War II, where democracies whose party systems failed led to countries with extreme, antidemocratic parties invading neighbors and murdering millions, many American political scientists called for a clearer role for political parties in helping American democracy thrive.

These party scholars argued for what has become known as the responsible party model in a report in the discipline’s top journal.^[1] Accordingly, each party should take clear policy positions from the other party, and parties should highlight their policy positions in their party platform, which is a party’s statement of its issue positions they will implement if elected. The responsible party model asserted that parties should require their candidates to pledge their support for the platform, which would clarify the choice for voters, who could more easily reward or punish party candidates based on the success or failure of the policies implemented when elected.

For many other party scholars, the model has always been unworkable in the American political system. One primary criticism is that Americans are not as ideologically divided as the electorates of other democracies, so clear ideological positions taken by all candidates have never matched where the American public is, particularly given the dissimilar life experiences and beliefs people have in a spread out, diverse federal democracy.

A second criticism is that the responsible party model, by definition, makes winning elections secondary to carrying out policy if elected. To critics, winning elections is the primary focus of parties, and parties should be pragmatic on issues to win office. Even if they win, there is no promise that the winning party can carry out their policies if there is a divided government, where one party controls one branch of government and another controls another branch of government. Ultimately, these scholars posit that a healthy party system is one with solid competition between parties, which brings better party organization and encourages candidates to differentiate themselves from each other.^[2]

This is not a stale academic debate. Rather, these models are a means to evaluate aspects of a political party to determine whether they champion timely political issues, compete in elections, and represent public interests in healthy ways. When we start to unpack how parties are doing across the fifty states, it is vital to see how parties connect voters with leaders, represent citizen interests, and produce good policy. These are critical areas for evaluating how well representative democracy is doing in American states.

The American Two-Party System

Seventy percent of Americans say that the phrase “I often wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country” fits their views extremely well, very well, or at least somewhat well.^[3] So the fact that our two-party system remains such a steady force in American politics seems out of step with American views. Further, if one looks at California, Texas, Florida, and New York, the largest states in the US, each is very different from the others and is actually larger and sociodemographically more diverse than many smaller European democracies with multiple competitive parties.^[4] Moreover, these large states typically have a single party that dominates. How can American states be larger and more diverse yet have fewer parties? American political culture and election laws explain why this is the case.

Due to American founding beliefs of limited government and individualism, American political culture avoids a large role for government in the lives of its citizens. Americans of both parties avoid the levels of taxation and redistribution of wealth that are the mainstream positions of parties in other democracies. The resulting more compact ideological space in American political culture relative to other democracies means that citizens would not support the major parties of the left that thrive in other democracies at the federal or state level.

A second reason for only two competitive parties in American states is the fact that American states overwhelmingly use plurality electoral laws, where the party that wins one more vote than the other party wins the election and governs. Other democracies use proportional representation electoral laws, where the number of seats one gets in a legislature is roughly proportional to the percentage of the vote they receive. Unlike plurality election law countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, or Canada, coming in second, third, or even fourth in countries with proportional representation laws typically means you have representation in government.

How American Parties Have Developed and Changed

Just because the US has two parties does not mean that the parties or party competition is uniform across the country. The complex blend of party competition and changing social group makeup of parties across the states is the consequence of historical political and cultural beliefs and critical moments in American political history where the social group makeup of parties realigned dramatically.

Distinct Regional Political Cultures

The United States is a relatively young country but a rather older democracy. Despite its age, the differing regional beliefs about politics and party politics from its founding time have projected forward in time and across the country’s regions. The result is regions that have different beliefs about citizenship, the role of politics in everyday life, and the role of parties. As previously discussed in Chapter 8, Figure 10.1 presents Daniel Elazar’s blend of three different state political cultures in the US based on the original beliefs of colonial settlers across the American states.^[5] Those who came to the northeastern United States believed that politics was about empowering community and consensual decision-making. This moralistic political culture promotes citizen participation and supports institutions like political parties that can represent citizen concerns and bring them into governance. As these northeastern colonies spread westward, they created a northern band that led to a culture and laws that encouraged participation and empowered parties to carry interests into governance.

Those who settled the mid-Atlantic colonies tended to be continental European farmers whose political drive was personal independence. This individualistic culture views politics as a utilitarian way to make choices. Politics is not a pursuit of an ideal community; it is a limited set of decisions that independent citizens use to infrequently participate in decision-making. Consequently, states do not need to encourage widespread participation beyond fundamental choices, and parties do not need a role beyond electioneering. This model calls for limited government, and participation is driven by utilitarian electoral choice rather than moralistic participation. This view of politics spread through middle America as the country grew westward.

Finally, those who settled the Southeastern United States viewed politics as a preservation of the established social structure. Widespread participation is not needed and could upset the social status quo. For this traditionalistic political culture, participation is not broadly needed if leaders preserve social order, so political parties and widespread participation are not central to the day-to-day operations of politics. This view traveled westward through a belt of Southern and Southwestern states, and there is little real defined role for parties.

While these differing political cultures may seem oversimplified, evidence of participation levels, party competitions, election laws, and institutional openness to citizen demands continue to differentiate northern moralistic cultural states, middle-belt individualistic cultural states, and Southern traditionalistic states. These are not value judgments; they are residual traditional beliefs about parties that are codified or socialized in states that have projected forward to contemporary beliefs about governance and the roles of political parties in society.

Party Change Through Social Group Realignment

These historical, political, and cultural differences explain how the development of party politics has differed across regions and have led to distinctive patterns of party politics across American history. State political party fortunes and competition have also changed due to American political, social, and economic crises in particular realigning elections.

Not all elections are equal in their effect on American history, and scholars differentiate elections as far as their long-term influence on party competition across states and regions of the United States.^[6] The most consequential elections for long-term party competition are realigning elections, where in one or two election cycles, one-fifth to one-third of voters shift their party support, and often the majority party becomes the minority party and vice versa. These elections have high intensity and higher voter turnout and are driven by a large-scale social change, such as whether slavery should remain legal in the 1860 realigning election, checks on industrialism in the populist 1896 realigning election, and the Great Depression in the 1932 realigning election.

Following the 1932 realigning election, which brought the New Deal party system, the two parties had very diverse coalitions within each party for most of the twentieth century, but the parties were not that distinct from each other ideologically at the national level. The states of the Deep South, due to their antipathy toward the Republican Party following the Civil War and Reconstruction, were solidly Democratic states despite being more conservative. Consequently, Southern conservative Democrats and liberal East Coast Republicans tended to not be far apart on big issues and championed bipartisan legislation in Washington, DC.

In state politics, Democrats governed very conservatively in the South and very liberally elsewhere. Republicans governed rather liberally in the Northeast but were more conservative in other regions. Even though they shared the same party label, Democrats and Republicans governed states very dissimilarly in different states.

The main issue that remained unresolved in the New Deal party system was civil rights for African Americans. Northern liberal Democrats and Northeastern liberal Republicans championed civil rights reforms, while libertarian Republicans agreed with segregationist conservative Southern Democrats that the federal government should not enforce national civil rights standards on states. The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a realignment of the political parties, but it differed from other realignments because it occurred slowly over five decades rather than in a single election.

Political scientists Ted Carmines and James Stimson refer to this slow realignment on the racial issue as one of evolution because the effect of the new issue divide slowly changed the electorate’s relationship to the two parties because only some voters converted to the other party, which is the hallmark of a typical realignment, but many voters were newly mobilized by racial issues, and eventually younger voters entering the electorate identified with a different party from their parents.^[7] Southern White Democrats opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 because they directly empowered the federal government to regulate elections, education, and the workplace against the explicit segregation preferences of conservative Southern White Democrats. Southern states did not support Democrats for president in any significant way from 1964 onward, but congressional Democrats continued to be reelected for decades.

The South had also been much more socially and religiously conservative than the non-South, so when Republicans increasingly pushed for more conservative positions on abortion, religion in public schools, and traditional gender roles beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the culturally conservative South shifted toward the Republican Party in state government in the 1990s and 2000s.

By this point, a younger generation of Southern White conservatives, who identified with the Republican Party and replaced older generations of conservative Democrats, became a critical mass in Southern state elections. This shift can be seen in different snapshots of party control of Southern state legislatures across four decades in Figure 10.2.

Although the years do not quite correspond between the state house (1986, 2012, and 2024) and state senate (1990, 2007, 2024) percentages, Democrats went from holding huge majorities in every Southern statehouse (1986) and state senate (1990) to losing their majority in the 2000s and being in the extreme minority today.

While no shift is as dramatic in terms of a complete flip of state party political control in the South, the same socially conservative cultural issues that helped tip Southern state political control to the Republican Party led more moderate Republican states in the Northeast or California, which were less favorable to the cultural conservatism the party embraced, to tip from Republican to Democratic control or to become more polarized on these very issues.^[8]

Party scholars debate how polarized American politics has become. Some view polarization as something that divides political leaders but not the American public. To these scholars, the problem is that there is a disconnect between a public that is marginally sorted into partisan camps and political leaders who are deeply divided on hot-button issues. This undermines representative democracy because voters lack moderate candidates who fit their beliefs and have to choose among extreme cultural warriors.^[9] Others place polarization squarely in the hands of the American public, who have strongly divergent ideological beliefs across parties and have deep issue divides on religion, gender, race, and cultural matters.^[10]

These scholars focus on polarization at the national level, but it is key to focus on how polarization affects state party politics. The long-term change in party politics at the state level that was triggered by these cultural issues has altered how competitive parties are in different states as well as how polarization plays out in party organizations, in the partisan electorate, and among party leaders in government.

How Competitive Are the Parties in American States?

The story of political party competition is a mixed one throughout American political history. As noted, electoral realignments hit different regions of the country dissimilarly, so party fortunes differed over time and in different regions. Moreover, the American South supported the Democratic Party for a century following the Civil War, so there was next to no competition. One-party politics was increasingly the norm in much of America.^[11]

Political scientists have used the Ranney index to evaluate how much competition there is between the two parties for control of each state government.^[12] Figure 10.3 provides the Ranney index score for each state. A score of zero would mean that Republicans have complete control of a state’s government, while a score of one would mean that Democrats have complete control of a state’s government. The average score among all states is .450, indicating a slight advantage to governing states for Republicans. Over a quarter of states (thirteen) fit between .40 and .60, indicating significant party competition for state government control.

The current trend of state party competition is toward being less competitive overall. This actually reverts back to what has been the more typical lack of competition in states throughout American history. Party competition surged in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, but by the 2010s, the norm of more one-party than two-party control of states reverted to levels not seen in over fifty years.^[13]

In 1992, only nineteen states were so-called trifecta states, where one party controls the governorship, state house, and state senate, and thirty states had at least one chamber or the governorship of different parties. In 2024, there are only ten states that have divided governments, and thirty-eight are trifecta states.^[14]

Having party competition for state government is not an end in and of itself. Competition brings many spillover benefits for democracy in the states. Scholars point to governing efficiency, better representation, checks against extremism, and attention to citizen welfare.^[15] Indeed, higher levels of competition in the Ranney index led to higher interest in elections in public affairs generally, better voter turnout, and broader political participation beyond voting. This is particularly the case for voters with lower education and income—the voters who are most often to be less mobilized in elections.^[16]

Are State Parties as Polarized as National Parties?

Most scholarship on political parties focuses on the national political parties. Many scholars held a “minimalist” view of the role of state parties due to the overwhelming growth of federal policymaking by the US Congress and a stronger presidency in the twentieth century, as well as the limited budgets, a frequent lack of professional legislatures in states, and the sense that far-flung state party politicians relied on vertical cues from Washington party leaders rather than horizontal cues from other states or even from partisan beliefs within each state.^[17] These constraints were thought to minimize the ability of state parties to drive the agenda in distinct and opposite partisan directions. In reality, state parties have polarized enormously in the last twenty-five years, and Democrats and Republicans differ substantially on almost all issues and pursue very different policy agendas.

The specific reasons for polarization will be detailed later in this chapter, when we break parties into their functions as organizations, in governance, and in the electorate. Each has contributed to polarization. This section focuses on establishing the evidence that party polarization exists in states. One key element of polarization is the distinct policy positions that parties have taken over time.

From 1970 to 1999, very little difference existed on most issues between parties in American states. After 1999, the distinctions in positions between the two parties on issues like abortion, civil rights, environment, guns, health/welfare, housing, immigration, labor, LGBTQ , taxes, and other issues ballooned.^[18] On fourteen of sixteen issues, state parties polarized significantly on policies from 1999 to 2014. The only issues that did not show a considerable difference were criminal justice and education, which, after the COVID-19 pandemic and George Floyd’s murder and associated protests, are two of the areas most vividly divided in the 2020s.

There are some key structural explanations provided by scholars for this polarization as well. The first structural explanation for polarization comes from the competition between parties that was discussed in “How Competitive Are the Parties in American States?” The many positive outcomes from competitive parties in states cannot be denied, but this competition also leads to greater polarization among state legislators.^[19] When the margin between your party being in the majority and being in the minority is small, it leads parties to avoid working across the aisle with the opposing party and to “seek out ways to distinguish their party from the opposition. In a legislative setting, this is likely to take the form of bringing up issues designed to elicit and then communicate partisan cleavages.”^[20]

Competition certainly ends up leading to larger issue divides between parties, but other scholars argue that a lack of competition does not stop state parties from pursuing more ideologically extreme issue positions. In other words, those trifecta states, where one party controls the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature, also pursue strongly ideological policies even if only one party is polarized.^[21] Parties still pursue extremely partisan issue agendas even if they lack the two-party competition associated with two polarized parties.

The second structural contributor to party polarization in the American states is the nationalization of political debate in America. It may seem ironic that nationalization leads to party polarization spread across dozens of far-flung states. Arguments about polarization from nationalization follow two paths. First, citizens increasingly vote for state and local offices consistently with their federal voting for president, US House, and US Senate. This has occurred at the same time as voters’ knowledge of federal issues trumps their knowledge of state and local political dynamics as local newspapers and news outlets disappear and national issues crowd out local concerns.^[22]

A second explanation for nationalization centers on how national party gridlock in Washington, DC, has led parties to shift their polarized policy agendas to states. The conventional wisdom of fifty decentralized Republican and Democratic parties uneasily held together across regional beliefs is inaccurate. Instead, both political parties have nationalized and implemented the most ideological policies at the state level.^[23] These two arguments—one where voters focus on national issues and another where party elites deliver national, polarized policies at the expense of the interests of people in a state—illustrate how the borders and unique political flavors in states are being overwhelmed by polarized partisanship.

How Can We Evaluate How Parties Perform in States? The Tripartite Model

The positive and negative consequences of polarization will be weighed in “What Are the Consequences of Polarization?” but it is also important to evaluate how parties are performing in states using a classic evaluation approach by party scholars: the tripartite model. The tripartite model breaks parties into their core functions so that such large-scale entities can be judged on specific areas of performance.

The first area, party in the electorate, relates to how parties relate to citizens. Do people identify with parties and connect their political beliefs with a political party to make sense of politics at the state and local levels? The second, parties in government, assesses how much parties drive the agenda of state politics and how partisan political leaders act. The final area, parties as organizations, focuses on how well organized local and state parties are to recruit candidates, compete in elections, and drive voter turnout.

Political parties are stronger in all these areas and, in combination, have supercharged the role of political parties in governing states. While it may seem natural to root for the vibrancy of any political institution, it is important to evaluate whether these strengthened state parties mean citizens are better represented in their statehouse or not.

What Are the Trends of Parties in State Electorates?

Party identification is a critical concept to understanding the beliefs of Americans and their voting behavior. The strength of party identification comes from the social-psychological connection people have with their party.^[24] Like other identities, such as religious denomination, ethnicity, or even the fandom one has with sports teams, partisanship has been socialized by family and community into an individual-level psychological identity that drives behavior.

Party identification is an attitude that then acts as a perceptual screen in how people view politics, particularly coloring perceptions of issues and candidates.^[25] Instead of an important issue or quality candidate disrupting one’s vote intention or loyalty to their party, evaluations of issues and candidates are a consequence of one’s partisan predisposition.^[26] No one knows who will be running for governor of Indiana in 2032, but it is easy to imagine that Democrats will like their candidate better than Republicans do and vice versa, and this is years into the future. Partisans also flip-flop their position on issues like the appropriateness of executive powers of presidents or governors and deficit spending depending on whether their party is in power or not. Hence issues and candidates should be independently evaluated political phenomena, but to most party identifiers, they are actually the result of their preexisting party identification.

The overall percentage of Americans who identify with political parties has not shifted dramatically, but the strength of party identification among Americans has become substantially stronger over the last half-century.

This classic view of the power of party identification has been fortified by a second, increasingly important attitudinal component of party identification: negative partisanship.^[27] This occurs due to voters being motivated more by a dislike of the other party’s candidate than they are mobilized by their own affinity for their own party. This so-called affective polarization—a dislike, lack of trust, and distaste for the other party—further strengthens the power of party identification in shaping evaluations of issues and candidates by adding aversion toward the other party along with the positive predispositions partisans have for their own party, particularly among the strongest, most engaged partisans.^[28]

The strengthening party identification and distaste for the opposing party is evident in the average ideological distance between Republican Party identifiers and Democratic Party identifiers over time and the divide on key cultural, gender, racial, and identity issues over time. Other scholars point to the gradual merging of lifestyles and worldviews with party identification in recent decades, which amplifies the party divide.^[29] Preferences for types of vehicles, where to live, beer, and even children’s names slowly fused with party identification and strengthened both lifestyle choices and party beliefs.^[30]

The pursuit of lifestyle goals, which overlap with party beliefs, has led to citizens sorting into different geographic areas that concentrate partisans together.^[31] Not all voters move or have the luxury of relocating, but a critical mass of partisans do migrate within states based on preferred lifestyles, race, churches, schools, and so on and a sociologically relevant fondness for living close to others like themselves.^[32] In surveys of people who have moved, partisanship is a statistically significant influence on the choice of where to live, even when controlling for other lifestyle factors.^[33]

This partisan geographic sorting increases polarization in two key ways. First, it creates state legislative districts that increasingly favor one party and lead to the election of more polarized representatives to the statehouse.^[34] Second, with fewer opposing partisans in the neighborhood, there are fewer chances that strong partisan views could be moderated through conversation with an opposing partisan in everyday life.^[35]

The clear trend in the electorate in American states is toward stronger partisanship. With a stronger identity with one’s own party, hostility toward the other party, stronger ideological divisions, and the merging of lifestyle with partisan beliefs and a willingness to move to fit these beliefs, the result is concentrated partisan beliefs in legislative districts and a greater preference for stronger partisans to be represented by partisan representatives willing to push polarized agendas in state policy. This does not mean that minority partisans, moderates or independents, are satisfied with partisan policies or the sharper tone of state politics that has resulted.^[36] It does mean that at least some of the state party polarization in America comes from voter preferences.

How Are Parties Performing as Organizations in States?

American political parties lack the hierarchical organization that other democracies have. Meanwhile, American party organizations developed at different paces and have historically lacked coordination between levels and have unique coalitions of social groups.^[37] Local parties organized to win municipal and county elections. State parties organized to win state legislative and executive elections. National parties organized to win federal offices. This meant that party organizations were remote from each other geographically and organizationally.

The state party organization, typically called the Democratic or Republican State Central Committee or Democratic or Republican Executive Committee, is headed by a state party chair, staff, sometimes elected party officials, and representatives from either county parties or a party official from the areas of each US House of Representatives’ seat in the state.

Local Republican and Democratic parties organize at the county level and focus on county, municipal, or legislative elections in their region by recruiting candidates and helping with get-out-the-vote efforts. The county parties are further subdivided into precincts, where precinct chairs coordinate these efforts at the precinct level.

Beginning with Republicans in the 1960s, the national parties’ increasing support of the sharing of technology and databases among the national, state, and local parties has increased the overall party organizational integration.^[38] State and local parties have increased their organizational capacity enormously in recent decades. Surveys of county party leaders indicate how much they have adopted technology to help with electioneering, voter mobilization, and fundraising and how much they feel their local party is increasingly thriving as an organization.^[39]

State parties have always had organizational responsibilities given the many executive offices and state legislative races they are organized to contest. State parties have had consequential organizational power in the form of state party conventions, which provided organizational power in recruiting and nominating candidates for key offices and crafting the state party platform.

Through a host of activities, including campaign donations, state party leaders have tended to recruit and promote more moderate candidates in the interest of winning general elections given that rank-and-file voters tend to be more moderate than party activists.^[40] State party leaders’ moderation has given way to ideological pressures from the national level and local level. First, national-level polarized political debate on cultural issues has eclipsed state-level issues in the media and in the minds of voters, which has been exacerbated by the loss of local media outlets. Second, local party leaders tend to be much more ideologically driven in their recruitment of candidates, preferring those who will not compromise relative to moderate candidates.^[41] Given their choice, local Democratic Party leaders prefer extreme ideological candidates to moderate candidates by a ratio of 2 to 1, and local Republican Party leaders prefer extreme to moderate candidates by a ratio of 10 to 1.^[42]

Given these top-down and bottom-up pressures, it is no surprise that state party leaders’ moderation has waned. State party platforms have become far more polarized in recent decades as local party activists drive their parties to take more ideological positions on issues in the platforms, which ultimately sets the parties’ governing agendas further from the average public opinion in the state.^[43] Consequently, when state political leaders move to implement their policies in office from their platform, it begins at a much more polarized starting point across all states relative to previous eras of party platforms.

Other organizations increase party polarization as well. The National Governors Association (NGA) had been a powerhouse lobbying group of all governors. In recent decades, the NGA has lost some of its relative power as governors have increasingly closed party ranks to champion more partisan positions through the Republican Governors Association and Democratic Governors Association.^[44] Similarly, state attorneys general had often worked together on litigation, one example being the bipartisan lawsuit against the tobacco industry in the 1990s by over forty state attorneys general. Recently, the attorneys general have moved in more partisan directions through their party associations. A majority of the Republican Attorneys General Association members sued to decertify the results of the 2020 elections in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.^[45] Meanwhile, a dozen Democratic attorneys general sued the Food and Drug Administration for overregulating access to the abortion pill mifepristone.^[46] These organizations encourage more partisan approaches to executive action across states.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that the disparate nature of politics across the American states would keep party organizations rather weak and uncoordinated. On the contrary, state and local party organizations have increased their capacity independently and together, including with national parties. The result has been in support of greater party polarization as activists have ensured that Republicans and Democrats have distinctively ideological party platforms across all fifty states.^[47]

How Much Do Parties Influence State Governmental Leaders?

Parties increasingly drive the governing agenda of states as well as the behavior of state political leaders. Likely due to Americans’ distrust of Washington, DC, and the increased institutional power of governors, as well as their willingness to take more partisan positions that emerge on the national level, governors are key partisan figures in American life.^[48] Part of this is due to the high profile governors have in national politics these days, with many considered front-runners for the nomination for president in their own parties and having unusually high approval ratings relative to other officeholders in America.^[49]

Governors increasingly display partisan positions in the governing they pursue and increasingly champion issues that match those of the national party relative to the average viewpoint of citizens in their states.^[50] In trifecta states, they frequently drive the agenda in partisan directions. In competitive states, governors increasingly use unilateral executive action when legislatures are polarized.^[51]

State legislators also increasingly vote in line with their party—even if they do not line up squarely with their constituents—because of the resources their party is able to provide, even when controlling for the common views legislators typically have with their partisan constituents.^[52] The rate of ideologically partisan voting in state legislatures has skyrocketed in the past two decades.

Using a blend of state legislative roll-call votes and survey data of legislators in 2011, Shor and McCarty found that a majority of ninety-nine state legislative chambers were less polarized than the US Congress and that there were vast differences in the amount of ideological polarization among states’ legislatures.^[53]

In subsequent studies using updated data, these scholars found a drastic increase in ideological separation between the parties over time. In 1996, 14 percent of Democrats were more conservative than Republicans, and 16 percent of Republicans were more liberal than Democrats in their legislatures, which reflected a common overlap of moderation in state legislatures.^[54] In 2015, Shor’s study had shifted from mixed results of polarization in 2011 to seventy-one of ninety-nine state legislative bodies being more polarized, twenty stable partisan divided legislative bodies, and only eight legislative bodies that were depolarizing.^[55] As Shor and McCarty note, “By 2020, the overlap is gone.…Note that nowadays this overlap is predominantly between parties across states; there is rarely much ideological overlap within states between the two parties anymore.”^[56]

Even Nebraska, which has a nonpartisan, single-chamber legislature, has polarized, even though its members do not run for office as partisans; only Hawaii and Washington state did not see increased polarization, and Washington already had a large gap between the parties’ ideological positions.^[57] In historical terms, the polarization of parties has led to a doubling of the magnitude of policy differences in states based on party control of the statehouse.^[58]

As discussed, the polarization is more than just ideological; it is also a yawning divide across all major issues commonly tackled by legislatures by 2014 except criminal justice and education.^[59] Again, criminal justice and educational issues have also seen a major divide spring up since this research in the past few years as battles over mask requirements and curriculum in schools exploded in the COVID and post-COVID era and the controversy over policing erupted after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020.

What Are the Consequences of Polarization?

Parties have upped their organizational game and provided activists with more control of party business. They have driven increasingly the governing agenda and the political behavior of political leaders across the American states. Also, stronger partisans in the electorate have pushed for ideological issue positions, frequently from communities that are more densely packed with fellow partisans and supportive of more ideological representation in their statehouse.

What are the implications for state government? The first is that states pass and execute more ideological policies much more easily than they are implemented at the federal level. This is more easily done in trifecta states. States with partisan divides between legislative bodies or between a governor and legislature can face gridlock, and the consequences emulate what occurs in Washington, DC. Budgetary delays occur more often when one chamber of the legislature is controlled by a different party than the other, and budgetary delays last longer with polarization.^[60]

Budgets may seem politically bland, but these battles can affect states greatly. In 2015, Illinois’s Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and the Democratic-controlled legislature could not agree on a budget. After two years, nearly $15 billion in unpaid vendor bills, underfunded public pensions, deficits, and a wrecked credit rating, the legislature finally passed a budget.^[61]

More than budgets and policy, the growing polarization in states increases inequality and affects citizens, their trust in government, and how well represented they are. Given that there are stronger partisans who follow their partisan lifestyles to move to more concentrated partisan areas, it seems illogical to question aspects of representative democracy when a considerable portion of the electorate seems to be pushing for greater polarized issues.

But what motivates stronger partisans may also demobilize less interested and more moderate voters, particularly with the sharp tones that come with polarization.^[62] Even for stronger partisans, the media’s framing of political conflict in state government and the perception that division is due to the other party’s extremity lead to a decrease in political trust in their legislature, which ultimately saps the sense of representation.^[63]

Representation of state citizens’ beliefs is a genuine concern in this polarized age. For decades, findings from the classic model of state party representation of public opinion indicated that the underlying public opinion was well represented in state legislatures because political parties moderated their positions to fit the public’s views.^[64] In this current polarized era, scholars question whether parties and legislators respond to public opinion in the same way.

The broader spread of views in legislative districts between Democratic and Republican citizens leads to uncertainty about what the average opinion is in a district, so instead of partisan legislators moderating their positions as they had in the past, representatives move toward their party’s more extreme position.^[65] This leaves moderates and citizens of the other party less well represented. This is accentuated by the polarized issue framing from the national partisan debate, which drives legislators toward national party positions rather than their own state citizenry’s position.^[66] Representing national party positions more than the opinion of one’s state is even more common for governors.^[67]

Increased state party polarization correlates with inequality. When state parties are polarized and gridlocked, addressing economic inequality is difficult and controversial. When states do not update policies like the minimum wage, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and the tax credit for families in poverty, the benefits decrease because they are not indexed to inflation, so poorer families’ economic interests are not well represented.^[68]

Further, in this polarized era, both parties listen more to the social and economic interests of the more affluent members of their party, so Republicans do not attend to the more redistribution-based interests of their lower-income members, and Democrats do not attend to either the economic or social issue preferences of their lower-income members.^[69]

The nationalization of state politics diminishes citizenship in the American states. When the public views state politics through a nationalized lens, it also goes against the vision the framers had that citizens would hold their state identities close in political matters of vital importance.^[70]

Vital institutions like local media, which used to contextualize state politics so citizens could actively participate and understand state politics, are breaking down. This increases the perverse incentives for state politicians to press national hot-button issues to motivate their ideological partisans, makes the regional flavors of politics more bland, and weakens the role of citizens in a key dimension of our democracy. American democracy is failing to leverage the benefits of federalism.