Split The Ticket

In modern American politics, centristically-inclined voters have an interesting problem: basically every election will be won by a candidate from one of two parties, and those candidates are chosen by each party's partisans, and as a result the candidates are more extreme than the median voter's preferences.

So e.g. if you're a center-left voter you'd prefer to have a far-left candidate to a far-right one, but you'd prefer a center-left candidate to either, and that isn't always within your option-set by the time the election rolls around.

In theory, the general election itself should pull both candidates back towards the center, but some combination of gerrymandering and fundraising and social pressure mean that doesn't always happen in practice either. What can I say? None of us truly know where the center is, but when I look at current American politics I don't think "wow there is such an oversupply of boring centerists."[^1]

Is there anything you can do about that? You can try to elect centerists in the primary, of course, but suppose that hasn't happened yet. What else?

Well, here's an idea I haven't heard talked about: what would happen if a meaningful share of voters promised to split their ticket in every election, i.e. to vote for just as many Republicans as Democrats in the election? Essentially, if the upcoming election is for President and House and Senate and Dogcatcher, the voter says "I will pull for two Democrats and two Republicans among these four, everybody please do your best."

This theoretically would create intra-party competition to move to the center: the Democratic Senate candidate is no longer competing just against the Republican Senate candidate but also against the Democratic House candidate, and if I'm doing the maths vaguely right that "should" pull all the candidates from both parties towards the middle. (It's also a move that centerists are uniquely able to do: a hard-right or hard-left voter might credibly threaten not to vote, but they can't credibly threaten to vote for the opposite wing, no matter how much it sharpens the contradictions).

There's obviously several issues with this proposal.

First, I'm not sure how you could possibly convince either party that enough of you were doing this to move votes.

Second, I'm not sure how many voters there are who are genuinely hand-on-heart willing to vote for both parties, or treat their own vote instrumentally in this particular way.[^2]

Third, to the extent that you're center-left or center-right rather than truly at the center of the current political spectrum, strictly voting for equal numbers of Rs and Ds might be sacrificing some of your short-term policy preferences.

More generally, I'm not sure what the long run equilibrium of this voting style would be; part of me thinks it would drag the long-term policy equilibrium to the center as well, but this stuff is really hard to calculate.

Still, I think in theory it would be an interesting thing for people to do, and striking that nobody (to my knowledge) does it.

[^1]: eh, look, this is all complicated: there's (at least) three ways to be considered "centerist": one is to hold the median position on every topic, one is to hold an unpredictable collection of positions such that nobody can easily place you on right or left, a third is to have a moderate vibe while doing whatever it is you want ideologically.

[^2]: people are willing to vote instrumentally in MANY other ways! "Hold your nose and vote for X"; "Vote for the crook, it's important!"; "Vote for the lesser of two evils" are all instrumental views of voting that people seem to tolerate, if not enjoy.