Over in this comment, DAL suggests that one reason for polarization is a lack of local news leading people to vote based on party’s national reputations rather than knowledge of local candidates. If he was right, we’d expect other signs of the nationalization of races, such as an increase in out-of-state fundraising.
I checked, and that’s exactly what I found. The percentage of out-of-state funding doubled from 1998 to 2022, with an especially sharp increase starting in 2018.
And this undersells the change, because it includes only hard money (that donated directly to candidates). PACs are a larger and larger percent of campaign spending, and I expect have a larger percentage of out of state money.
This doesn’t prove lack of local news is the culprit, but it does point to the locus of ~control moving away from individual candidates and towards parties.
Very useful information. I do have to nitpick the fact that the house/senate candidate and democrat/republican bars use different scales. For example, it looks like the Democrats raised a larger share of money from in-state donors than Republicans, but the raw numbers, respectively, are 74.03% and 78.55%.
While more work than I would be interested in doing, I would think with existing online presence of newspapers, as well as national paper local coverage sections and online local news one could directly verify the claim of reduced coverage.
I do agree that over influence by national party line positions will push towards more polarization—and I would suggest poorer outcomes and policies locally. I’ve wondered why States don’t view out of state campaign funding in the same way the USA considered out of country (foreign) contributions given the diversity or subculture and economies within the 50 States. And while I suspect a lot of funding probably comes from the parties I would suspect a large amount also just comes from outside interests that operate more at the national level than locally and will likely support candidates on either side that will provide support for those outside interests regardless of overall Party position.
It does seem that we’re standing the old claim of all politics being local on its head in the 21st Century with the dominance of national party and its ability to control the local agenda and candidates. (This is more hypothesis than something I’ve establish for myself but certainly seems to fit the narrative about the current Republican party and some older grumbling from both parties in the past)
Over in this comment, DAL suggests that one reason for polarization is a lack of local news leading people to vote based on party’s national reputations rather than knowledge of local candidates. If he was right, we’d expect other signs of the nationalization of races, such as an increase in out-of-state fundraising.
I checked, and that’s exactly what I found. The percentage of out-of-state funding doubled from 1998 to 2022, with an especially sharp increase starting in 2018.
And this undersells the change, because it includes only hard money (that donated directly to candidates). PACs are a larger and larger percent of campaign spending, and I expect have a larger percentage of out of state money.
This doesn’t prove lack of local news is the culprit, but it does point to the locus of ~control moving away from individual candidates and towards parties.
Very useful information. I do have to nitpick the fact that the house/senate candidate and democrat/republican bars use different scales. For example, it looks like the Democrats raised a larger share of money from in-state donors than Republicans, but the raw numbers, respectively, are 74.03% and 78.55%.
While more work than I would be interested in doing, I would think with existing online presence of newspapers, as well as national paper local coverage sections and online local news one could directly verify the claim of reduced coverage.
I do agree that over influence by national party line positions will push towards more polarization—and I would suggest poorer outcomes and policies locally. I’ve wondered why States don’t view out of state campaign funding in the same way the USA considered out of country (foreign) contributions given the diversity or subculture and economies within the 50 States. And while I suspect a lot of funding probably comes from the parties I would suspect a large amount also just comes from outside interests that operate more at the national level than locally and will likely support candidates on either side that will provide support for those outside interests regardless of overall Party position.
It does seem that we’re standing the old claim of all politics being local on its head in the 21st Century with the dominance of national party and its ability to control the local agenda and candidates. (This is more hypothesis than something I’ve establish for myself but certainly seems to fit the narrative about the current Republican party and some older grumbling from both parties in the past)