COLUMBIA — In an era of increasing polarization, at least some South Carolina voters are still willing to cross party lines in some down-ballot political races, a new study found.
A working paper by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Shiro Kuriwaki, "Party Loyalty on the Long Ballot," sought to test how often voters defect from their national party allegiance when it comes to state and local office elections.
To find out, Kuriwaki analyzed all of the ballots cast in South Carolina from the past five major elections since 2010. He chose to focus on the Palmetto State due to the availability of centralized ballot data here. The study looked at the full set of choices made on over 6.6 million general election ballots.
What he discovered was that about 20 to 38 percent of voters choose candidates from different parties for some less high-profile positions than the presidential or gubernatorial races, with split-ticket voting increasing when there was a higher number of contested races on the ballot.
That range increases to 34 percent to 65 percent when he removed voters who select the straight-ticket party option at the top of the ballot, a choice that's available in South Carolina and only a handful of other states.
When voters do split their tickets, Kuriwaki found that it tends to be to vote for an incumbent candidate in a down-ballot race. The offices with the highest level of ticket-splitting in South Carolina were sheriff and county council.
"The picture of the electorate that emerges from these analyses is one that votes largely along party lines, but still with important variations across offices and candidate’s incumbency," Kuriwaki writes.
College of Charleston political science professor Gibbs Knotts said the study could indicate that at least a portion of the electorate remains open to crossing the aisle, despite increasing levels of polarization in modern politics.
"They're not so locked in, they're not so polarized that they would never consider a candidate from a party different than their presidential pick or their preference," Knotts said. "If people were really so into their own political camp, we probably would have seen the ticket-splitting a lot smaller than we actually did."
Kuriwaki notes that the finding could go against some conventional predictions.
One might expect, for example, that straight-ticket voting would be equally high for all offices given the nationalization trend of politics. Or voters might be even more likely to take party cues for down-ballot races when they may have less information about individual candidates.
Instead, Kuriwaki said the results suggest "after an accumulation of campaign outreach, media coverage and information acquired through everyday observation, a considerable number of voters deviate from a pure straight ticket vote systematically, not arbitrarily."
