The Same Voter Can Make Two Very Different Decisions on the Same Ballot
by Brandon Burley and The Redemption Project
National elections increasingly revolve around party identity. Local races can still turn on something more personal: reputation, familiarity, performance and whether voters believe they actually know the person asking for the job.
On Aug. 6, voters in DeKalb County, Tennessee, were handed an interesting political exercise.
At one level, they were participating in state and federal primaries, including the race for governor.
Farther down the ballot, the choices changed.
For county mayor, the field included Republican Patrick Ray, Democrat Beth Pafford and independent Brandon Bates.
For sheriff, voters had a Republican and an independent.
County Commission races included combinations of Republicans, Democrats and independents.
Municipal races in places such as Smithville and Liberty included candidates without party labels attached at all.
Same voter.
Same trip to the polls.
Very different decisions.
That distinction is easy to miss when we talk about Tennessee politics almost entirely in terms of red counties and blue counties.
A voter may think about the president through party, ideology and national issues.
Then move down the ballot and ask something completely different:
Do I trust this person to do this job?
Party is a powerful shortcut
There is no reason to romanticize local politics as somehow free of partisanship.
It is not.
In fact, new research gives us a remarkably clear picture of how powerful party identity remains.
A study published in the American Political Science Review examined individual ballots from the 2020 election covering more than 50 million voters and more than 5,700 contested down-ballot races.
In partisan state and local contests, national partisanship explained more than 80% of the variation in voting within those races.
But something changed when the party label disappeared.
For local nonpartisan offices and local ballot measures, national partisanship explained less than 10% of the variation.
That is a remarkable difference.
It does not mean ideology disappears when someone votes for mayor, sheriff, school board or a local referendum.
It means party becomes less useful as a shortcut when the ballot forces the voter to look for other information.
And that is where local politics becomes different.
At the top of the ballot, most of us do not know the applicant
Think about how people evaluate a presidential candidate.
Very few voters have met the person.
Fewer know them.
Almost nobody has watched them perform the actual job up close.
Instead, voters rely on intermediaries.
Party.
Television.
Social media.
Campaign advertising.
National news.
Ideology.
Endorsements.
Those signals help people make sense of an enormous political system filled with people they will probably never encounter personally.
Local politics can work differently.
A county commissioner might own the business down the road.
A school-board candidate may have children in the district.
A sheriff may have spent 20 years in the department.
The mayoral candidate may have served on the County Commission.
Voters may know their families, reputations, careers or histories.
That does not make the decision automatically better.
Familiarity can produce favoritism just as easily as accountability.
But it changes the information available to the voter.
At the top of the ballot, party can become the résumé. Locally, the voter may already know the applicant.
Smaller communities can make candidates harder to abstract
Political-science research has found evidence for that difference.
A study of voters in 30 suburban communities found that residents of smaller communities were more engaged in local politics and more likely to know candidates personally. Candidate likeability, issues and partisanship all mattered, but their importance changed with the size and character of the community.
That makes intuitive sense.
Political disagreement changes when the person asking for your vote is no longer just an image on a screen.
You may know how they treated customers.
Whether they returned phone calls.
Whether they showed up.
Whether they handled another public position competently.
Whether the campaign promises match the person you have watched for years.
National politics encourages voters to categorize.
Local politics sometimes gives them enough information to individualize.
That can produce a strange sentence that makes perfect sense inside a community:
I would never vote for that party nationally, but I know her, and she does a good job.
Political consultants may hate that sentence.
Democracy should probably pay more attention to it.
Relationships carry political information
The social network around a voter matters too.
Researchers Matthew Pietryka and Donald DeBats found evidence that voting behavior in state and local elections is influenced not only by a person’s individual characteristics but also by the social networks surrounding them.
People who were more socially connected to political elites were more likely to participate, and proximity to political networks could affect vote choice as well. Their work included historical data and a modern municipal-election replication.
That does not mean rural Tennessee voters simply vote for their friends.
It means political information travels through people.
Family.
Coworkers.
Neighbors.
Church communities.
Professional relationships.
Civic organizations.
Someone does not have to personally know a candidate to know someone who does.
In smaller communities, reputation can travel a long way without ever becoming a television commercial.
Local information can weaken the national pull
There is another piece of the system that matters: local news.
Daniel Moskowitz, a political scientist who studied the nationalization of U.S. elections, found that voters with better access to television news about their own state knew more about their governors and senators and were more likely to evaluate those officials separately from national partisan politics.
Access to that local political information increased split-ticket voting by roughly 2 to 3 percentage points in Senate races and 4 to 5 points in gubernatorial contests.
Those are state races, not county elections.
But the mechanism matters.
When voters know less about the person running down the ballot, party becomes an efficient substitute for information.
When voters know more, they have something else to evaluate.
Information gives the candidate a chance to become more than the letter beside the name.
That helps explain why the decline of local journalism is not simply a media-business story.
It can change political behavior.
When the local newspaper disappears, the voter still has political information.
It just increasingly comes from Washington.
Local government may also feel more tangible
There is another difference between Washington and home.
People often view their local institutions more positively than national ones.
After the 2024 election, Pew Research Center found that 69% of registered voters said elections in their own communities had been administered very well.
Only 43% said the same about elections across the country. Pew has found similar local-versus-national gaps across multiple election cycles and on other measures of public conditions.
That does not prove people choose local candidates because they trust local government.
But it points toward another important distinction.
National politics is often experienced through abstraction.
The economy.
Immigration.
Democracy.
Foreign policy.
The Supreme Court.
Local politics can become concrete very quickly.
Roads.
Schools.
Property assessments.
Police and emergency services.
Zoning.
The courthouse.
The issues may be smaller geographically.
They are not necessarily smaller to the person living with the consequences.
But local politics is becoming nationalized too
There is an important warning in all of this.
The wall between local and national politics is not secure.
Tennessee ballots increasingly include partisan labels in local contests, and the DeKalb County ballot itself shows how deeply Republican, Democratic and independent identification can extend into county government.
The larger ballot study shows the same thing nationally: when local contests are partisan, national party identity becomes an extraordinarily strong predictor of the vote.
So the argument is not that local voters are somehow above national tribalism.
They are not.
The argument is narrower.
The closer politics gets to the voter, the more opportunities there are for other information to compete with the party label.
Reputation can compete.
Performance can compete.
Personal knowledge can compete.
Local issues can compete.
A strong local news system can compete.
Sometimes party still wins.
But it is no longer the only thing in the room.
That may be why local campaigns still look different
Watch how successful local candidates often campaign.
They knock on doors.
They attend festivals.
They show up at football games.
They shake hands after church.
They sit through civic-club meetings.
They answer questions in diners, parking lots and grocery stores.
None of those activities is sophisticated political technology.
That is precisely the point.
The campaign is trying to collapse the distance between applicant and voter.
National candidates need voters to identify with them.
Local candidates often need voters to recognize them.
Those are not quite the same task.
Stop treating every vote as the same decision
When analysts look at election returns, it is tempting to treat a voter as a fixed political unit.
Republican voter.
Democratic voter.
Independent voter.
Conservative.
Liberal.
Moderate.
Those labels are useful.
They are not the whole person.
The same Tennessean can vote based on national ideology for president, competence for sheriff, personal familiarity for county commissioner and a completely different calculation on a school referendum.
That is not necessarily inconsistency.
It may be evidence that the voter understands those jobs differently.
A president is not a sheriff.
A governor is not a school-board member.
A senator is not a mayor.
Perhaps we should stop being surprised when voters use different standards to hire them.
National politics asks people to choose between large coalitions competing over the direction of the country.
Local politics can ask something more immediate.
Who will do the work?
Who understands this place?
Who has earned trust?
Who will answer when something goes wrong?
Party can help answer those questions.
Sometimes it overwhelms them.
But the closer an office gets to home, the harder it becomes to pretend politics exists only in red and blue.
Distance makes politics ideological. Familiarity can make it personal.
And somewhere between those two is the voter we keep trying to understand.
I am a retired detective and criminal justice / government educator based in Tennessee. I am a commentary writer for Tennessee Lookout and a weekly columnist with Knox TN Today. My work examines public policy, public safety systems and civic responsibility. My reporting and commentary have also appeared in Governing, The Arizona Capitol Times, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Police1, among other state and regional outlets.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|