Straight-Ticket Voting Rises As Parties Polarize
More and more, voters are choosing candidates of the same party for the White House and Congress.
A "Polling Place" sign is displayed at a polling station in the Kentucky National Guard Readiness Center in Burlington, Kentucky, U.S., on Tuesday Nov. 4, 2014.
Photographer: Luke Sharrett/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
The center continues to collapse in Congress.
The 2014 election accelerated a trend of straight-ticket voting, the phenomenon of people voting for the same party for Congress as they did for president. With the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans growing bigger than ever, the result is a Congress sharply divided along party lines, with a shrinking bloc of centrists more open to compromise.