38 The nature of American politics
Table 2.3 Voter turnout: presidential elections
1848–72 75.1%
1876–96 78.5%
1900–16 64.8%
1920–28 51.7%
1932–44 59.1%
1948–60 60.3%
1964–76 58.2%
1980–92 52.7%
1996–2004 53.6%
electorate in this respect. The number and frequency of elections is greater
in America than in any comparable country, and ordinary people cannot be
expected to be in a continuous political ferment. When they do feel strongly
about any issue or candidate they have more opportunity than anywhere in
the world to make their views known.
In recent decades voters have been increasingly ready to change sides from
one party to another, and it has been estimated that as many as 40 per cent of
the electorate consider themselves to be independents rather than firm sup-
porters of either of the parties. One of the most important manifestations of
this decline in close party identification is to be found in the phenomenon of
‘split-ticket’ voting. At each election the electorate is confronted by a ballot
paper, or a voting machine, which allows the voter to cast ballots for a number
of candidates for different offices at federal, state and local level. Each of the
major parties, and some minor ones, will have candidates for all or some of
these offices on the ballot. The voter may simply vote for all the Republican
candidates, or all the Democrats; this is voting ‘the straight ticket’, and usu-
ally it is much simpler to do, requiring only a single mark on the ballot paper
or the operation of a single lever on the machine. The voter is also free to
‘split the ticket’; that is, to vote for one or more Republicans for some offices,
and for Democrats for the others – or indeed, where three or more parties
appear on the ballot, to spread votes across all of them, voting for individual
candidates, regardless of party. At the federal level voters can discriminate
between candidates for the presidency, the Senate and the House of Repre-
sentatives, voting Republican for two of these offices and Democrat for the
third, or any combination they wish.
The complexity of the ballot paper and the trouble involved in making
the necessary discrimination between candidates might suggest that split-
ticket voting would be relatively rare. Not so! Campbell and Miller found
that in 1952 as many as one-third of the voters split the ticket, and in 1956
two-fifths of the electorate did so. The potential importance of this practice
at the federal level was illustrated by the vote in 1952, when nearly 40 million
Americans voted for the Republican candidate for the presidency, Dwight