The insanity of ticket splitting

The Democratic Party's strategy in this year's midterms was to localize races, and turn races into contests between personalities rather than parties. The same strategy was employed in 2010, with similarly disastrous results, and in the wake of a historic Democratic defeat in 2014, it is surely time to retire it.

Candidate Tom Wolf on the campaign trail in Philly this summer.
Hillary Petrozziello

 In a 1960 Presidential debate, when John F. Kennedy was asked why people should vote for him instead of Richard Nixon, the response he gave would be hard to imagine coming out of a modern politician's mouth.

In no uncertain terms, he told people to vote for him because he is a Democrat.

"What are the programs that we advocate? What is the party record that we lead? I come out of the Democratic Party, which in this century has produced Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, and supported and sustained these programs which I've discussed tonight.

Mr. Nixon comes out of the Republican Party. ... And it is a fact that for most of the last 25 years the Republican leadership has opposed federal aid for education, medical care for the aged, development of the Tennessee Valley and development of our natural resources. I think Mr. Nixon is an effective leader of his party. I hope he would grant me the same. The question before us is: Which point of view, and which party do we want to lead the United States?"

These days, especially during midterms, candidates for office are typically discouraged from strongly associating themselves with their political parties. The Democratic Party's strategy in this year's midterms was to localize races, and turn races into contests between personalities rather than parties. The same strategy was employed in 2010, with similarly disastrous results, and in the wake of a historic Democratic defeat in 2014, it is surely time to retire it.

In March, when the race for control of the state Senate seemed more in play, I wrote a column about five Republican-held Senate seats that state Democrats should pursue.

How did those five races work out? Not only did the Democratic candidates lose every single one, they actually lost ground in the Senate. The Republicans gained three additional seats, expanding their margin to 10 in the upper chamber, and picked up eight more seats in the state House, for a 35-seat margin there.

But how can that be, when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Tom Wolf enfeebled Republican incumbent Tom Corbett in a 10-point landslide?

The problem is ticket-splitters.

According to sources at the Pennsylvania Senate Democratic Campaign Committee, the key swing voters in the battle for con­trol of the state Senate were college-educated, upper middle-class white men in the Southeast and Southwest suburbs.

While it's true the Senate districts are fairly badly gerrymandered, the Republican margin is still largely owed to thousands of suburban white men voting for Wolf, then splitting their tickets for Republican state Senate and House candidates — effectively cancelling out their votes for Wolf.

Ticket-splitters represent everything that is wrong with American politics. While they may fancy themselves as independent and judicious people, their behavior reveals a profoundly immature misunderstanding of how legislative politics works.

In fact everything that people hated about Corbett would not have been possible without the willing participation of the Republican state legislature. And yet these suburban white men sent the very same people back to Harrisburg to keep doing the same things.

What's needed here is a re-education about the virtues of party politics, and a return to the Kennedy view.

Lawmakers in a big legislature represent little more than a basket of policy positions. You're not picking a person, you're picking a team and a set of values. Splitting a ticket isn't insurance against extremism — it's an assurance that nothing will get done, because you've assembled a querulous caucus optimized for bickering instead of passing good laws.

Jonathan Geeting is engagement editor at PlanPhilly. The views expressed here are his own.