We have previously explored the hyper-partisanship and polarization that exists in America.

A past client of mine disagreed with my bleak assessment and said reform is “easy” – just make all races non-partisan and THEN the campaigns will be about character and not politics. 

I am known for my candor, and how that has gotten me into trouble in the past.  I have been making an effort – a true effort – in selecting my words more carefully.  Instead of saying “You could not be more wrong!” I found myself saying “Well, let’s see if we can find any research that agrees with your position….” 

 We are fully aware that party identification is the leading factor in voting – said another way – “Republicans tend to vote for Republicans and Democrats tend to vote for Democrats”.

In voting behavior, most don’t need to know details other than party to vote the “right way”.  If we both identify as a member of the same party, we are very likely to share values and I don’t need to know much more than the party of a candidate in a general election to “vote correctly.”

So, the conventional wisdom – if we REMOVE the party especially from the ballot by making all elections non-partisan, it will force candidates and voters to go deeper.  The short cut is removed…..so simple, right?

Not so fast my friend!  Chris W. Bonneau, University of Pittsburg, and Damon M. Cann of Utah State explored the non-partisan elections of judicial candidates.

I believe this is a brilliant way to approach this subject.  The state bar associations take many extra steps in a futile attempt to remove “politics” from a political process.  In addition, judicial elections are … lower intensity races (said another way – kinda boring) with lower spending and lower voter engagement.

PERFECT for exploring the strength of party ID on nonpartisan races.

In short, what they found is there is no shortage of cues or shortcuts available to interject partisanship into a campaign.  In fact “voters are able to identify the partisan identification of candidates from ideological and issue based cues even when candidates’ explicit partisanship is omitted from the ballot.”

In fact, the results show it is kinda easy.

In a sense, they conclude “nonpartisan elections ineffective at removing the partisan element from elections.”

We observe the exact same thing in municipal races we have worked in and or polled.  Whether it is the local party interjecting to activate party ID or outside groups endorsing to activate party ID – there are NO shortages of signals and for the most part – the numbers don’t lie.

CONCLUSION

Sorry to be the popper of bubbles – but the proposed reform of nonpartisan elections being a solution is not backed by research.  In fact it is explicitly dis-proven. 

Sadly, in America, for the most part there is no such thing as a nonpartisan election – especially if one party has an incentive to interject partisan cues.

I once met an attorney who was at the top of her field.  I mean she is a cracker-jack attorney with a crazy intellect and extremely well respected in the legal field. 

I asked her how she became such a great attorney.  Her answer was simple, “When I was in law school, I read every footnote.”

In today’s Science Friday, we have a case where the supplemental information is as interesting, if not more interesting than the study itself. 

Today’s study: “Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion”  Authored by scholars from Columbia, Stanford, Wharton, and Cambridge. 

It is an interesting study that explored effects when ads are matched to one of the big 5 personality traits, the OCEAN MODEL. 

Study Findings

In research that will stun no one, the authors find”people’s psychological
characteristics can be accurately predicted from their digital footprints, such as their Facebook Likes or Tweets.”

This is the part the drives me nuts – of course this makes sense.  If you tell me what you like, I can then predict things, and I can tailor my messaging….but HOW does one do it?

The authors go on to write “that matching the content of persuasive appeals to individuals’ psychological characteristics significantly altered their behavior as measured by clicks and purchases. Persuasive appeals that were matched to people’s extraversion or openness-to experience level resulted in up to 40% more clicks and up to 50% more purchases than their mismatching or unpersonalized counterparts.“

Cool, right?  That is a pretty big lift.
But the real cool stuff is in the supplemental.

How to match Likes to Personality

The supplemental demonstrates HOW they matched advertising to personality types.  That’s the magic.

And it all started with one of those stupid personality tests on facebook.

So, there you have it…easy peasy….except for the organization that was conducting the personality tests stopped making the data available to researchers.

But could one reverse engineer what the researchers did?   I think so….

CLICK HERE TO TAKE YOUR FREE PERSONALITY TEST (Just kidding)

Conclusion

If you believe the press, Republicans are fleeing the party by the thousands – especially after the Jan 6 incident at the capitol.

Well, we don’t believe the press at face value, and we prefer to compile our own data and make our own conclusions.

In the past, we have explored the tremendous amount of churn in Florida’s voters file. 

However, in this case the research question is “In Florida, are Republicans leaving the party?  Follow up:  How does that rate compare to Democrats leaving their party?  Is there an uptick in Replicans leaving the party?”

Methodology

I found some old voter-files in a desk drawer.

file 1 – Florida Voter-file December 2017

file 2 – Florida Voter-file December 2020

file 3 – Florida Voter-file – February 2021

Exploration 1: December 2017 –> February 2021.

Exploration 2: December 2020 –> February 2021.

I loaded each voter file in its entirety.  Then I joined each by the state’s voter ID number.  I dropped any observations that were not on both rolls.  Then I simply looked at the party registration in the first file, looked at the party registration in the second file and if they differ deemed them a “switch”.

Florida Voters December 2017 vs Florida Voters February 2021

In this graph, on the right hand side is Dec 2017 and on the right hand side is the switch.  This graph allows us to see how the switches flowed.  (click the graph for a larger view.)

But this shows us that in that time, 271,431 (22% of total switches) Republicans switched their registration compared to 387,005 (31% of total) Democrats, and 557,092 (45% of total) NPAs.

So in this time period, MORE Democrats in Florida fled their party.

R Detail

In this Rep detail, 46% of the switches moved from Rep to Dem, 44% of the switches moved to from Rep to NPA, and 11% moved to Other.

Dem Detail

In this Dem detail, 53% of the switches moved from Dem to Rep, 40% of the switches moved to from Dem to NPA, and 6% moved to Other.

NPA Detail

In this case, 52% of the switches moved from NPA to Dem, 40% of the switches moved to from NPA to Rep, and 8% moved to Other.

Florida Voters December 2020 vs Florida Voters February 2021

In this case we redo the counting, but comparing Dec 2020 to Feb 2021.

In this graph, on the right hand side is Dec 2020 and on the right hand side is the switch.  This graph allows us to see how the switches flowed.  (click the graph for a larger view.)

This shows us that in that time, 39,815 (60% of total switches) Republicans switched their registration compared to 12,933 (20% of total) Democrats, and 1,718 (3% of total) NPAs.

So, we observe a dramatic increase in the proportion of switches – Republicans are moving in greater numbers than they have in the past two years.

R Detail

In this case, 59% of the switches moved from Rep to NPA, 23% of the switches moved to from Rep to Other, and 17% moved to Dem.

Dem Detail

In this case, 57% of the switches moved from Dem to NPA, 31% of the switches moved to from Dem to NPA, and 12% moved to Other.

NPA Detail

In this case, 42% of the switches moved from NPA to Rep, 40% of the switches moved to from NPA to Dem, and 18% moved to Other.

Plot twist

In an interesting plot twist and going against the conventional wisdom that the GOP is bleeding ‘suburban women’, 51% of Republican party switchers are male.  Of the Democrat switchers 56% of them are female.

CONCLUSION

In the larger context, in the past two years, the Democrat party lost 387,005 voters to other parties while the Republican party lost 271,431 voters to other parties.   This is compared to 557,092 NPAs that registered with a different party – 52% of them registering as Dems and 40% of them registering as Rep.

REMINDER: this analysis is not looking at new registrations or removals (death).

However, the data doesn’t lie and there is a red flashing light:

In the past 2 years, 22% of the voters switching parties were Republicans.

In the past 2 months, 60% of the voters switching parties were Republicans.

The rate of Republicans switching parties has definitely increased in comparison to a base line and it is something to watch very closely moving forward.

Most interesting research questions begin with a real life problem.

A general political consultant we work with wanted to target digital ads to ‘people who are thinking about running for office.’  This is what we do – we build data driven audiences for people to connect with using various media.

So the question is “What type of insane people run for political office and why?” If we could better answer this question, we could build a rock solid digital media audience to target for this political consultant.

While we do not yet have the ability to read people’s minds as to their political ambition, we start by asking who has done research in this area. At times, the world aligns and you find a good paper that has done just that – reviewed the literature for you.

citation: Gulzar, Saad. (2021). Who Enters Politics and Why?. Annual Review of Political Science. 24. 10.1146/annurev-polisci-051418-051214.

Dr. Gulzar, from Stanford, does a review of the literature – using comparative data and US data.

This paper presents the difficulty of such a “simple question.”

“Who runs for office and why?” is difficult to even conceptualize and attempting to delve into the ‘whys’ illustrates how completely messy human behavior is.

In addition, this paper doesn’t begin to delve into potential difference between candidates in the hyper-polarized parties and voters in the US.

At Ozean, when we begin an analysis for a potential political candidate there are three main areas we look at: political, environment and then and only then do we look specifically at the candidate.

1. What are the political considerations?  This is where we take a look at the rules, the political calendar, the district or political boundaries,  the historical returns, the political media environment.  Items that are constant over time in this district, state.
2. What is the current political enviroment?  This is where we look at district composition, incumbency, current polling information, the national political enviroment, where the party is in recruitment process, what additional items are on the same ballot, who else may be in the race from the same party, who else may be in the race from the competiting party, and potential shifts from considerations observed in first phase.  (example – is there a pending change in political boundaries?)
3. Candidate Traits.  This is the difficult one because depending on 1 and / or 2, specific candidate traits may be irrelevant.  As the old saying goes, the district may pick the representative.  However, assuming 1 & 2 are favorable, what traits make a successful candidate?  Because we have seen in close election after close election, candidates do matter. 

But even that progression shows the difficulty in reviewing this literature.  My conceptualization above is more in line with asking “What makes a successful candidate?” not “Who runs for office?”  Two very different questions. 

The research does a good job of exploring the challenge of “unseen candidates”.  These are the candidates that seriously consider a run and don’t declare for whatever reason.

The research attempts to classify three determinants – individual, group, and institutional.

On the individual front, Black is quoted as saying an individual will consider the probability of winning * the benefit of winning – Cost.  Is that net benefit higher than other options?  Like any models this is very simplistic, and I think assumes way too much rationality in the decision making process.  The model completly ignores some of the most important individual traits – the least of them being EGO.

In addition, the author explores the insitutional factors – primarily party recruitment and allocation and steering of resources.

Another group or instutional factors is one that I despise, but it is a reality – dynastic political families –name ID and political networks mean a lot in this game, and much to my chagrin, kids are able to plug into or grew up in these networks. 

Finally, a final instutional factor is the rules.  Filing fees, timeframes, Hatch Act considerations…etc.  The rules of the game – especially when it comes to ballot access – matter a lot in politics.

The author then explores political competency and asks is there a trade off between political competency and political representation.  Said another way, should the elite (weathy, highly educated (so many lawyers), leadership skills) rule us?  Should they rule us when they are significantly different than the district’s citizens?  It is an interesting section, but doesn’t really bring us closer to answering the pivotal question – “Who Runs for Office?”

Well, in this review of the literature – the author admits in the last paragraph – we really don’t have good data on this. 

“While researchers often focus on work on political entry or leadership that has a formal political flavor, more work is needed on the antecedents of political entry. What activities and jobs increase the likelihood of future participation in politics as a politician? Tracing the pipeline of political entry before it formally occurs could provide insights into how the political class may be broadened, for instance.”

CONCLUSION

While the review of the literature is informative and an relatively easy read, it does shed a light on that fact that we don’t really have great data on who runs for office.

I think some of the more interesting work mentioned in the paper is a new line of research being inspired by Dal Bó et al.  They explored Sweden, but they are attempting to look at individual variables, and I think that has promise.  If you have been in this business, you know there is a ‘type.’ and I would like to see more work done defining the individual traits of those that raise their hand and offer themselves for public service.