Redder and Bluer States: Are We Seeing a Rise of One-Party Rule in U.S. Governments?
The presence of legitimate competition in business is one of the hallmarks of a healthy economy. Competition is needed in sports to make games interesting and keep fans invested. It’s needed in various other businesses so that customers can “vote with their wallet” by going with the best deals and making businesses respond by catering to said customers, such as with cars, restaurants, computers, and music.
The same goes for politics. One of the most important attributes for a government to have is accountability. That accountability comes, in large part, through competition. If there isn’t another real option to vote for, there is no incentive for a lone candidate to listen to voters that aren’t necessarily enthused with said candidate. We can also be stuck with groupthink, which poses issues to enacting good public policies (though, of course, what counts as good policy is subjective).
Even if there are technically multiple candidates running in an election, it doesn’t necessarily indicate real competition. The other candidate may not be a serious contender due to a variety of reasons, including lack of funds, low media exposure, bad campaign strategy, or running on the label of the major party whose voters are vastly outnumbered (e.g., a state legislative district whose voters are 80% Republican and then 20% Democrat) or a third-party label. (It’s not that a third party can’t ever win; it’s that they very rarely do win).
Many voters grumble about the national state of affairs with just two major parties. But what happens when just one of those is the only real game in town?
Such is the case within many states. Wyoming Democrats and Hawaii Republicans are so outnumbered that they should have National Geographic specials focused on them like they are endangered species. And those aren’t the only states where that is the case. In some state legislative and congressional races across the country, the Republican or the Democratic Party may be so disadvantaged that they don’t ever bother running a candidate.
Almost five years ago from the time of this writing, I wrote about red, blue, and purple states. One aspect that is often overlooked is how the color of the state can differ based on the context. The shade could be lighter or deeper, or the color could even be entirely different, if we’re talking about voting for president, Congress, state executives, state legislatures, state courts, local governments, or the party identification of voters. But in many states, those are largely aligned with one color, sometimes considerably so.
To be clear, this post isn’t saying that only Republicans or only Democrats are running roughshod everywhere. Some states are much more competitive, and even within states firmly in the Republican or Democrat camp there will be pockets of competitiveness or dominance by the other party (e.g., cities are often heavily Democratic, including in Republican states). But there are states, or pockets within states, where sometimes Republicans have the clear, significant advantage, and in other cases Democrats will. They’ve built up more strongholds of support.
So, are we seeing increasing rates of one-party dominance in governments across the U.S.? Let’s look at the data that suggests that is the case.
Voting in Presidential Elections
Gone are the days where a presidential candidate could gather 80% of the states or more. In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan captured all but six states on his way to his first term as chief executive, and only Minnesota went against him in his 1984 reelection campaign. In 1964, Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson captured all but six states as he coasted to his own reelection.
That may sound like there is now greater competition for president than in previous decades, and in some ways there is. But individual states have become much more predictable in which party they support.
Since 2000 (a somewhat arbitrary cutoff), 33 states have supported the same party in presidential voting, 19 of those states always going Republican and 14 of them always going Democratic.¹ For most if not all of these states — such as Alabama and Mississippi on the Republican side and Massachusetts and New York on the Democratic side — that trend is nearly certain to continue.
Compare that to the same length of time for 1980 to 2000, where only 17 states always voted for the same party for president. (All but one of these states, Minnesota, always went to the Republican candidate.)² And from 1960 (the first presidential election where the U.S. was 50 states) to 1980, none of the states always went to one party or the other.³ The 1968 presidential election even saw five states won by a third-party candidate, the fervently segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace.
Much of the shift in electoral predictability can be attributed to the political realignment that began in the 1960s. Political realignment refers to a shift in the party loyalties of voter and candidate demographics and regions. Previous realignments tended to be quick. For example, the 1850s saw the collapse of the Whig Party and the creation and rise of the Republican Party, and the 1932 election saw the forging of the New Deal Coalition with Democrat Franklin Roosevelt’s first presidential election victory, a sound defeat of the incumbent Republican Herbert Hoover.
In the case of the 1960s realignment, however, it was a much slower process, one that is arguably still going on today. The once-stout “Blue Wall” of the Deep South gradually shifted from Democratic to Republican loyalties, and states like New Jersey and Illinois changed from consistently Republican to reliably Democratic. Geographic sorting of partisan loyalties has made the presidential candidate that certain states vote for a virtually foregone conclusion.
State Governments: Trifectas and Triplexes
State-level politics is arguably where one-party dominance is most noticeable, particularly if we look at the number of trifectas over time. A trifecta refers to when one party controls a state’s governor’s office and both chambers of its legislature.
In the case of trifectas, Ballotpedia data shows a sharp decrease in the number of divided governments over the past three decades: 31 of them in 1992 to just 11 in 2023. In other words, there were just 19 trifectas in 1992 but 39 trifectas in 2023. In particular, Republican trifectas rose sharply from three to 22 over that same period.
In some cases, the party in power is so dominant in the state legislature that it’s veto-proof, meaning that the party in power has enough seats that it doesn’t need votes from legislators of a different party to override a governor’s veto. (Sometimes, this is termed a supermajority.) Following the 2022 elections, Republicans had both a supermajority in the state legislature and controlled the governorship in 16 states, and in eight states Democrats had both a state legislative supermajority and the governorship.
That’s not to say that the supermajority party in the state legislature never overrides a governor of the same party. In 2021, the Democrat-controlled Hawaii State Legislature overrode Governor David Ige’s veto of a tourism funding bill and the Republican-controlled Indiana State Legislature overrode Governor Eric Holcomb’s vetoes of a landlord-tenant bill and a local health rules bill. But it’s rare that a supermajority in the state legislature and a governor of the same party are not on the same page.
We can also evaluate one-party dominance through the presence of state government triplexes. A triplex occurs when a state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state are all the same party. Since 2017, 14 states have gone from divided party control of these three state executives to a triplex, five for Republicans and nine for Democrats.
To top things off, let’s look at the combination of trifectas and triplexes within a state. This is where one-party dominance becomes most evident. Thirty-nine (39) states have both a trifecta and triplex of the same party, 22 of them Republican and 17 of them Democrat. Many of the most populous states fall into this category. A majority of the U.S. population, therefore, experiences one-party control of their state’s government.
Partisan Affiliation of Registered Voters
Examining who voters are affiliated with can make evaluating one-party dominance a little bit tricky. First, you have to account for voter turnout. Take Florida, my home state, for example. Despite Republicans only becoming more numerous than Democrats for the first time in the state’s history in 2021, Democrats have had significant trouble in getting their voters out to the polls for many years, a large contributor to a definitively Republican state legislature and a Republican winning streak in governor’s races that is two decades long.
Second, some states have sizable proportions of independent/non-party voters. In October 2022, nine states showed a plurality of these voters. In the cases of Alaska, Massachusetts, and especially Arkansas, independents made up over 58% of the electorate. However, many independents vote consistently for one major party or the other, even when independent candidates are on the ballot.
Third, not every state tracks their voters’ party affiliations. As of October 2022, 31 states have this information. That means that the presence of one-party dominance in terms of voters’ party affiliation cannot be fully evaluated for 19 states. And for some states where voters’ party is tracked, some have only done this more recently. So, we’ll do the best we can with what is available.
For this exercise, I first took Ballotpedia’s data on voters’ party ID from December 2000 to June 2021. Then I calculated the percentages of Democratic, Republican, and independent/non-party voters. (I excluded third parties because there are relatively few of them and I’m really just trying to compare Democrats and Republicans, with potential increases or decreases of independents for added context). Then, I finally took the states that had noticeably lopsided divides — an admittedly somewhat arbitrary distinction — toward either Democrats or Republicans in 2021 voter registration. This left me with 16 states.
Here are quick descriptions of a couple of columns that may be confusing as to what they mean.
- The column “Diff. Within a Year” means that is the percentage point difference between “DEM %” and “REP %” for that year. The higher the number, the more lopsided the state is/was toward one party that year. A negative percentage means that Republicans had the greater number and a positive percentage means that Democrats had the greater number. (The positive and negative don’t have any inherent value here; they are just there to distinguish whether Democrats or Republicans had the advantage.)
- The column “Diff. Change Between REP and DEM” indicates how many percentage points higher the gap between Republicans and Democrats was from the earlier year (usually 2000) to 2021. So, if Republicans had a 5 percentage point advantage in 2000 and then opened it up to a 10 percentage point advantage in 2021, the “Diff. Change Between REP and DEM” would be “5.00%” in favor of Republicans. Which of the parties the change favored is listed and color-coded (red for Republican, blue for Democrat).
First up are the nine states with a Democratic-dominant electorate.
In these nine states, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by between 14.08 and 30.82 percentage points, when accounting for independents, in 2021. These gaps exist even in the cases of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, where independents make up a plurality of the electorate. Democrats widened the gap between them and Republicans in six of these states, and four of those were by 10.00 percentage points or more.
Now let’s look at the seven states with a Republican-dominant electorate.
In these seven states, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by between 18.66 and 53.94 percentage points, when accounting for independents, in 2021. Notably, Oklahoma was 19.53 percentage points in favor of Democrats in 2000 and then swung to almost that same amount in favor of Republicans in 2021. Republicans widened between them and Democrats in each of these states, and six of those were by 10.00 percentage points or more.
Is One-Party Dominance Only Going to Keep Growing?
As predictable as some data may be, making broad prognostications about politics can be tricky. It may be obvious to say that Alabama is going to stay deep red or that Maryland is going to stay deep blue for the foreseeable future. There is a lot of evidence that one-party dominance has grown, but whether it will continue to increase is a little bit harder to predict and depends on context.
Much of what I described in this article might suggest that more and more states are going to be definitively Republican or Democratic, but there is also data bucking the trend.
- Since 2017, five states saw their triplexes shift to divided control and three states saw their triplex flip from one major party to the other (not counting potential changes from the November 2023 elections that were just held).
- Arizona and Georgia voted Democrat for president for the first time since 1996 and 1992, respectively, though that isn’t necessarily a trend.
- There have been 76 changes in trifecta status since 2010, though 23 of those came from 2010.
For all we know, we may soon experience another voter realignment. If you ask some political observers across the political spectrum, we are already seeing one. We won’t know until some time down the road, multiple elections from now, when we can observe whether a trend is happening.
What is certain is that a lot of elections around the country are seeing a lack of competition between the two major parties. Competitive races aren’t dead, but there are a lot of them that are basically done deals as to which party they will favor. The lack of competition has and will continue to pose problems for electoral accountability and voters’ political efficacy.
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- This information was gleaned from studying presidential electoral maps for 2000 to 2020 from The American Presidency Project website. The full archive can be found here.
- This information was gleaned from studying presidential electoral maps for 1980 to 2000 from The American Presidency Project website. The full archive can be found here.
- This information was gleaned from studying presidential electoral maps for 1960 to 1980 from The American Presidency Project website. The full archive can be found here.
