Bellwether States

IN AMERICAN POLITICS, a bellwether state has exhibited a historical tendency to duplicate in smaller scale the political behavior of the nation at large. Bellwether states are more likely to be discussed in terms of presidential or congressional elections than specific issues such as abortion or gun control, where it can be reasonably assumed that in all states there are supporters of both sides of the debate. There is no formal definition of a bellwether. The term implies that the behavior of the state indicates or even influences the behavior of the nation, and so there is always debate about which states this is true of, and which states merely shift in response to the shift of the nation.

The best-known bellwether is Missouri, which not only demonstrates classic bellwether behavior, but also has a history that invites and supports various theories to explain the effect, something that cannot be said of Nevada, for instance, which has voted in accordance [Page 63]with the national outcome of presidential elections nearly as long. Missouri has one miss since 1904, while Nevada has had one miss since 1912. In 1956, Adlai Stevenson won Missouri by a minuscule minority, while Dwight Eisenhower carried most of the nation by a landslide; but in every presidential election since then, the state's popular vote has mirrored that of the nation almost perfectly, with a difference of less than two percent.

The state has become well known enough as a bellwether that national attention is brought on what might otherwise be considered simple state issues: the national media have covered Missouri ballot measures pertaining to issues of nationwide concern (such as same-sex marriage in 2004 and stem-cell research in 2006). The Democrats' ascension to power in the Senate in the 2006 elections depended in part on the Missouri race between incumbent Republican Jim Talent and Democrat challenger Claire McCaskill, a fact brought up repeatedly in coverage of McCaskill's victory.

The mean center of the American population is in Missouri, though that has only been true since 1980. For most of Missouri's bellwether tenure, it has been located in Illinois or Indiana without lending them any special prognosticative powers. A slave state that opposed secession, and the subject of a prolonged pre-Civil War fight over slavery, the state now borders the plains, the midwest, and the south. The oddest thing, though, may be Missouri's appearance on the “blue and red” county map that became popular in the aftermath of the 2000 and 2004 elections: in its distribution of blue and red counties, Missouri very much mirrors the country, with blue coasts sandwiching a red middle.

Some states with apparently bellwether-like tendencies may simply be subject to intrastate tensions that play out in relation to the national tensions. Nevada's state politics are greatly affected by a north/south conflict as a result of Las Vegas's disproportionate growth and wealth, which colors issues that might otherwise be affected by national concerns. In Tennessee, which since 1928 has erred only on the Kennedy/Nixon battle of 1960, the cultural divide is between western and middle Tennessee, and east Tennessee, where the Republicans held power even before the southern strategy of the 1970s.

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