Analysis shows DFL legislative candidates suffer more from ‘ballot roll-off’ in presidential years

As if getting voters to the polls isn’t hard enough, now anxious politicos have to make sure those voters keep filling in their ballots once they get past the top of the ticket.

An analysis of legislative battleground states — including Minnesota — by a Democratic-aligned organization worries that something it calls “down-ballot roll-off” could be the difference between winning control of legislative bodies in purple states or losing them.

While what some call ballot fatigue comes into play with all voters, regardless of party preferences, the study by Sister District Project concludes that Democrats suffer more when voters leave races blank.

“The difference in roll-off between the two parties is stark,” the group’s analysis stated. “Across 10 battleground states over eight years, contested down-ballot Democrats experienced ballot roll-off 80% of the time compared to only 37% for their Republican counterparts.

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“If Democrats could just convince people who are already voting for Democrats to keep voting all the way down the tickets, Dems could gain majorities of state legislative chambers all over the country,” it concluded. Sister Project co-founder Gaby Goldstein cited a Minnesota race in one op-ed on roll-off.

In 2020, she wrote, Joe Biden received 110,297 more votes than DFL candidates in contested legislative races while GOP candidates received 42,000 more votes in the same races. The analysis asserted that 95,300 voters cast votes for president but not state Senate races. In the two closest races — Senate District 26 in southeastern Minnesota and Senate District 34 in the northwest metro suburbs — 2,620 voters made a choice for president but not the state Senate. The DFL candidates lost by just more than 900 votes each.

So who are these voters? The project polled and conducted focus groups in five battleground states, not including Minnesota, and found some patterns.

“Compared to down-ballot voters, roll-off voters are more likely to be: women; those who identify with a racial/ethnic category other than white; under the age of 45; those without a college degree, and ideologically moderate,” the study concluded. These voters also worry that they don’t know enough about the candidates and fear making a wrong decision.

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These groups “are more likely than their counterparts to misidentify the role and influence of state governments, to feel like their votes don’t matter in state elections, say they don’t know enough to vote, and say they follow political news less,” the study stated. “These same groups of voters are also more likely to roll off in state legislative races.”

So what to do about it? The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the arm of the Democratic National Committee that focuses on state legislative campaigns that has targeted the Minnesota House and the single Minnesota Senate race this year, is using the threat of losses due to ballot roll-off to raise money for state campaigns.

This election could have “an eerily similar trajectory to the 2020 election outcomes — when Democrats narrowly won the White House and took full control of Congress, yet lost more than 100 Democratic legislative seats and two chamber majorities in the states,” wrote DLCC president Heather Williams last week. But the fundraising effort also points to a perennial political truth — far more attention and far more money is devoted to high-profile national and statewide campaigns, leaving state legislative races bereft. Democrats have been playing from behind since the GOP concentrated on legislative races, especially in redistricting years.

One GOP operative didn’t necessarily dispute the Sister District Project data but wondered if a targeted effort could be effective.

“If you’re the type of voter who votes for top of the ticket and walks away, I suspect a highly inside-the-bubble push like this is unlikely to get on your radar,” said Andrew Wagner, who is directing GOP House campaigns.

It was once common in many states to allow what was called straight-ticket voting, by which a voter could check one box at the top of the ballot and their votes would flow to all candidates running under that label. States have been ending that process over the last two decades, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Now, just seven states allow it, and Minnesota isn’t among them.

Most voters now are permitted to hop-scotch down the ballot in November — voting for Democrats in some races and Republicans in others or for neither. Todd Rapp, a public affairs consultant and political analyst who is the president and CEO of Rapp Strategies, said voting trends have moved away from ticket-splitting. But he said that trend could be affected by anti-Trump sentiments this election.

“I think the pure anti-Trump vote is high this year, just as the anti-Clinton vote was high in 2016,” Rapp wrote in response to questions about the Sister District Project research. “If you are so focused on voting against a presidential candidate, you might just be focused on that one decision, and the advertising certainly reinforces that through negative presidential ads.

“Trump is ahead of Harris in the percentage of people who feel strongly unfavorable about him, and who would feel angry if he/she is elected. Those aren’t huge margins in those questions, but I get the threat that the research is exposing.”

Rapp said he looked at ballot fatigue while helping on some local school district referendums and saw significant drop off in rural districts in 2016 and 2020, both presidential election years.

“Every district seemed to have drop-off of at least double digits, and one hit 37% drop-off,” Rapp said.

And because there are different demographics between those who continue to vote down ballot and don’t, the effect can change results.

“Looking at the election results in those districts and analyzing voter file data, it is pretty clear that the higher the drop-off, the more likely that referendum voters skew older and therefore less likely to support the ballot question,” Rapp wrote.

“I believe it is highly likely that roll-off, or whatever you want to call it, is a bit more troublesome to Democrats than Republicans,” he wrote. “And, since Dems spend so much money on get-out-the-vote and ground game strategies, I can see why they want to keep those less likely voters on the ballot for as long as possible.”

Eric Ostermeier has been a research fellow at the Humphrey School since 2006. He founded the nonpartisan news site Smart Politics and curates the Minnesota Historical Election Archive. He said that while drop-off is a common election phenomenon, whether it helps or hurts which party is harder to determine.

“This analysis presumes they are losing Democratic voters down the ballot as opposed to voters inordinately voting for the Democratic presidential nominee and then splitting their ticket in the state legislative races for a Republican nominee while, at the same time, a GOP voter for president might not vote in the state legislative race, thus producing fewer votes for the lower office overall,” Ostermeier wrote in response to a question about the study.

“To capture the partisan roll-off is difficult to do, even in an era of less split-ticket voting,” he wrote. “But we know in the not-too-distant-past there has been clear split-ticket voting in Minnesota. For example, on the federal level, 7th (Congressional District) voters backed the Republican nominee and then reelected Collin Peterson. Did the GOP count that as a split-ticket vote, or a roll-off?”

Editor’s Note: Peter Callaghan wrote this story for MinnPost.com. Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost. 

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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