In his diary last week on the states whose elections are the most fun to track, Mark27 listed my native state of Delaware as a state with uninteresting elections, because the results are so predictable. It is true the Delaware has become a reliably Democratic state. It has voted Democratic in the last five presidential races. Obama's Delaware margin of victory (25.02%) fell just short of the margin he achieved in his own state of Illinois (25.12%). Locally, Democrats have won five straight races for governor and they enjoy comfortable majorities in both chambers of the General Assembly: 14-7 in the Senate and 25-16 in the House. Nevertheless, with Senators Carper and Coons and Representative Carney, 2011 is the first year of my life (and I am sixty) that Democrats occupy all three slots in Delaware's congressional delegation at the same time.
David Nir started the Swing State Project because of his interest in states whose votes could go either way, and thus would determine the outcome in a tight election. Once upon a time, Delaware was a quintessential Swing State. The state has a lousy three electoral votes, but these votes ended up in the winner's column in all but three races during the 20th Century. The exceptions were 1916, 1932 and 1948. Only Missouri had a better record of going with winners.
Besides swinging between elections, there is another type of swinginess: swinging within an election, i. e. ticket-splitting. Using this metric, Delaware recorded one of the most amazing results in American electoral history. The year was 1972 and a 29-year old first-term county councilman burst onto the national stage by winning a Senate race against one of Delaware's most popular politicians ever. His name was Joe Biden. The victim of the upset, J. Caleb Boggs, had never lost an election in his life, serving as Representative At Large, Governor and Senator. To attain each of those offices, Boggs had defeated a Democratic incumbent. The Federal Building in Wilmington is named in his honor.
Since Richard Nixon was winning a landslide at the top of the ballot, for Biden to win, a number of people must have split their ticket. However, that is not all the ticket-splitting that occurred on that day. Behold the results of other races!
President Republican
US Senator Democrat
US Representative Republican
Governor Democrat
Lieutenant Governor Republican
State Auditor Democrat
State Treasurer Republican
Because of the reapportionment necessitated by the 1970 Decennial Census, all General Assembly seats were on the ballot. Republicans won control of the Senate by winning 11 seats to the Democrats' 10. However, Democrats captured the House by 21 seats to the Republicans' 20. Shortly thereafter, Democrats gained the Senate by enticing a couple of Republicans to switch parties. Strangely enough, the Republican Senate leader who lost his majority had gained power the previous decade using the same method.
Delaware has only three counties and in 1972, the northernmost (New Castle) contained more than two-thirds of the state's population. A Democrat was elected County Executive, but a Repulican was elected to chair the county council. Members for six districts were elected. The parties split the districts in half, each winning three.
There are many factors explaining different outcomes between elections: unpopular policy decisions by incumbents; economic climate, shifting demographics and scandal to name a few. Since an election is a snapshot in time, it is more difficult to account for different outcomes that occur on the same day, especially since Delaware used to use old-fashioned lever voting machines that made voting a straight ticket very easy.
In 1972, neither party was ideologically homogeneous, so splitting one's ticket did not necessarily mean one was inconsistent. There were a number of conservatives who voted Democratic for historical reasons. Although Delaware did not secede from the Union, as a border state slavery did exist in Delaware and after the end of Reconstruction, segregation was established. A case from Delaware was one of five that were consolidated into Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Similar to their brethren in states south of the Mason-Dixon Line, these conservatives began to drift into the Republican Party as a result of the civil rights revolution, but the drift had not yet become a flood. In the Republican Party, there was still an uneasy coalition of conservatives and those who were more moderate. The latter group were the so-called "Rockefeller Republicans. In later years, as conservative power in the party grew, many Rockefeller Republicans would become disenchanted and find a new home in the Democratic Party. One of these was Russell Peterson, the Republican incumbent Governor who lost reelection in 1972. He recently died at age 95, a proud Democrat.
Given the increasing polarization of politics, I doubt the results of 1972 are going to be repeated. When a tsunami like 2010 occurs, it flattens everything in its path.
