The Vanishing Swing Voter Has Made Politics More Boring (And Tougher for Democrats)

House and Senate races were a lot more interesting back when there were plenty of swing voters.

Whether they were “pure independents”—those who consider themselves independent and do not tilt in either direction—or whether they were soft partisans aligned with one party but who didn’t need much to jump to the other side, there are just a lot fewer of those people around anymore. There was a time when there were still conservative voters in the Democratic Party, often in small-town and rural America, and across the South. And there were also liberal voters among those who identified as Republican, particularly from New England and the rest of the Northeast, across the Midwestern industrial belt, and again on the West Coast.

Some states, such as Indiana, Kansas, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Utah, Wisconsin, and Wyoming, would split their ticket more than others.

Seventy years ago, some complained that the two major political parties should be more ideologically coherent. It was as if the presence of conservatives in the Democratic Party and liberals in the Republican Party offended their sense