






































 ó 


Disappearing Democrats: 
Rethinking Partisanship Within Pennsylvania's Electorate 

Berwood Yost 
Franklin and Marshall College 

Pennsylvania has more registered Democrats than Republicans, yet Repub­
licans cOlltrol most 0/ the slalewide elecled offices and oath ella/llbers uf lhe biute 
legislature. How is it possible that the Democrats' registration advantage does 
not lead to more Democratic electoral success? Using a random survey ofPeT1n­
sylvania voters and comparative questions on party orientation and party regis­
tration, this article finds that many of the state's voters identify with a political 
party that is different from the party in which they are actually registered. Party 
identification is important because it is a better predictor of voting behavior 
than is party registration. The article finds that more registered Democrats in 
Pennsylvania ident~fy with the Republican Party than vice versa, making the 
Democrats'registration advantage an advantage i11 name only. 

Conducting surveys of Pennsylvania's electorate requires a researcher 
to ask a question of political partisanship different from the self-identifi­
cation measures used in the University of Michigan voting studies. The 
Michigan measure captures psychological identification,1 but it does not 
provide an accurate accounting of Democrats, Republicans, and inde­
pendents when compared with Pennsylvania's voter registration list. 
Producing a set of registration figures that accurately reflects regIstra­
tion is important in Pennsylvania. Unlike a national survey, the state's 
.voter registration figures are readily available for all to see, meaning that 
reporters who cover politics and politicians and who read the polls in­
variably ask about the partisan distribution measured by political sur­
veys. In statewide surveys, they quickly discount polls that do not pro­
vide a mirror image of the state's partisan distribution. Pollsters who 
have released polls in hotly contested election campaigns have been criti­
cized when their sample's partisan distribution did not approximate the 
state's known voter registration distribution. As a result of this criticism, 
the Keystone Poll measures actual party registration to ensure a partisan 
distribution of respondents that 111.atches the state's known registration 
figures. 2 Using a two-part question, the Keystone Poll has repeatedly 
obtained samples of registered voters that approximate within expected 
error ranges the state's actual registration figures. 

Recent developments in Pennsylvania politics call this approach into 
question. Since the 1950s, Pennsylvania has been considered a competi­
tive two-party state, but in the 1990s the state became dominated by Re-

77 



publican officeholders. In 1998, registered Democrats outnumbered reg­
istered Republicans statewide by 445,000 voters, including a 500,000 voter 
registration margin in Philadelphia and a 300,000 voter registration mar­
gin in Allegheny County.3 Yet, Governor Torn Ridge was a Republican. 
Both of the state's two u.s. senators and two of its three row officers were 
Republicans. In the state legislature, Republicans held 103 of 203 seats in 
the House and 30 of 50 seats in the Senate. In the 1998 election cycle, 
Republican candidates for both the House and Senate collected more to­
tal votes than did Democrats.4 Thus, measuring actual voter registration 
may no longer provide an accurate picture of the state's electorate. 

How can the Democratic Party have such a decisive voter registration 
edge, yet manifest such weak electoral performance? Conversely, how 
can Republicans win so many elections when they trail so significantly 
in the number of registered voters? Some political analysts attribute the 
Democratic losses to lower voter turnout among Democrats. A greater 
percentage of Republicans than Democrats go to the polls, they say, erod­
ing the Democrats' numerical superiority. Other analysts theorize that a 
group of IIReagan Democrats," conservative on issues such as welfare 
spending and abortion limits, cross party lines to vote Republican. An­
other explanation is that the state Democratic Party suffers from greater 
heterogeneity among it registrants than does the state Republican Party, 
making Democrats less likely to maintain party unity, a trend that has 
been observed nationally (Mayer, 1996). An unspoken assumption un­
derlies these explanations: that voters faithful to the Democratic Party 
exist in greater numbers, sprawling across the Commonwealth like a 
sleeping tiger. Given the right Democratic candidate and the right is­
sues, this line of thinking goes, Democratic voters will awake, voting 
with the full strength of their numbers, and deliver victory to their party. 
But is this widely held assumption true? Are Democrats still the majority 
party in the state, as the voter registration rolls indicate'? 

This article has three objectives. First, it will quantify the differences 
that exist in the makeup of the state' 5 electorate by using two different 
measures of partisanship. Second, it will suggest which of these two mea­
sures of partisanship more accurately predicts election outcomes; Finany, 
it will identify the characteristics of voters who register with one party 
but identify with another. 

The Measurement of Partisan Identification 

Partisan identification is one of the most important and frequently 
used concepts in the study of voting behavior (Abramson and Ostrom 
1994). An earlier generation of scholars considered party identification 
worthy of study for two reasons. First, they expected party identification 
to be stable over time. Second, they expected it to act as a cue by which 

78 



voters would evaluate political events (Campbell et a1. 1964). This is not 
to say that party identification would not or could not change over time, 
but only that it would not change easily. Furthermore, not all voters were 
expected to align themselves with a party; a sufficiently large number of 
voters would never have strong party attachments, making them subject 
to short-term political forces that could affect electoral outcomes 
(Campbell et a1. 1964). Party identification was thought to be the major 
device with which most people would deCipher politics. The most stud­
ied, commonly used, and reliable measure of partisan identification was 
developed by the Survey Research Center (SRC) at the University of 
Michigan (Abramson and Ostrom 1994). The expectations for the party 
identification measure as originally designed are best summarized by its 
creators: 

The initial selection of a party may often be a response to nonpo­
litical pressures; once made, partisan choice tends to be maintained 
long after its nonpolitical sources have faded into oblivion. Cur­
rent pressures arising outside the political order continue to affect 
the evaluation process, and from time to time they may contrib­
ute to a critical margin of political victory. Yet for most of the people 
most of the time such contemporary forces turn out to be the mi­
nor terms in the decision equation. (Campbell et a1. 1964,66) 

Whether party identitication oUers such stability has been questioned 
in recent years. Researchers who doubt the stability of party attachments 
believe that a great deal of short-term variability takes place in reaction 
to short-term forces, such as consumer confidence and presidential per­
formance, that is missed because of the timing of the Michigan studies.s 

Using another long-running series of survey data collected by the Gallup 
Organization, these authors have found that partisanship is subject to 
wide swings as a result of short-term forces. Recent studies, however, 
refute this notion. Some authors have found that short-term forces do 
not have a large impact on partisanship as measured by the Michigan 
question.6 Most scholars now believe that party identification is a very 
stable concept, as originally thought, and that the instability of partisan 
identification found by some authors was the result of measurement er­
ror created by question wording? Mayer (1996, 97) summarizes current 
thinking on the subject in saying that most Americans "develop a psy­
chological tie to one of the parties in their late adolescence or early teen 
years. And once formed, party identifications tend to be remarkably stable 
over the rest of a person's life." 

As a measurement tool, the Survey Research Center's party identifi­
cation question has proven to be highly reliable, with only one-ninth of 
its variance resulting from measurement error (Shickler and Green 1997). 

79 



Although the Michigan guestion is considered a valid way to measure 
an important and stable concept, using it to measure the makeup of a 
single state's electorate has been problematic. The actual number of Re­
publican and Democratic registered voters within a state often differs 
from what is (ouflJ uy surveys using the SRC measure. According to 
Epstein (1986t this could mean that some people express a party prefer­
ence in registering to vote that they do not actually hold. It also means 
that some registered partisans adhere to their party label less strongly 
than do other registrants. Why would this happen? There are several 
situations where one would expect to obtain registration figures that dif­
fer from those found in sample surveys. Possible reasons include social 
pressures, job holding or seeking, or the desire to vote in the primary of 
a locally dominant party (Epstein 1986). The desire to vote in primary 
elections is presumed to be especially important in a state like Pennsyl­
vania, which has a closed primary system. Epstein (1986, 247) reports, 
U \:;tCltes that most strongly encourage party registration, by firm1y dos­
ing their primaries to unaffiliated voters, record not only higher party 
registration percentages but also higher percentages of party identifiers 
than surveys in states with more permissive registration procedures." 

Besides suggesting that measuring party identification is not the same 
thing as measuring party registration, the different figures resulting from 

party identification and party registration in some states raise some in­
triguing questions. If there are differences between party identification 
and party registration, do they change the state's partisan balance? Which 
measure is a better predictor of voting behavior? What are the character­
istics of voters whose party registration and party identification differ? 
The remainder of this article seeks to answer these questions. 

Methodology 

The data presented her come from a state-wide survey of 451 Penn­
sylvania voters (sampling error of ± 4.6 percent) conducted between July 
8 and 28, 1998. Respondents for the survey were selected at random us­
ing a two-stage process. First, telephone households were randomly se­
lected using a random-digit-dialing sampling method (Chummings 1979). 
Once a residential telephone number was identified, a respondent within 
each household was selected at random using the last birthday method 
of respondent selection (Salmon and Nichols 1983). 

This article focuses on responses to three survey questions. The first 
question, involving nominal party registration, asked the following: "Many 
people are registered to vote; however, many others are not. How about 
you? Are you currently registered to vote at your present address?" All 
registered voters were asked, II Are you currently registered as a Demo­
crat, a Republican, an independent, or something else?"8 

80 



Table 1 
Actual Party Orientation and Nominal Party Registration 

Actual Party Nominal Party Orientation 
Orientation Rep. Ind. / Other Dem. Total 

Republican / Lean Rep. 90% (165) 49% (22) 11%(21) 50% (208) 

True Independent 4% (8) 24% (11) 7% (14) 8(Yo (33) 

Democrat / Lean Dem. 6%(11) 27% (12) 81 % (154) 42% (177) 

Total 44% (184) 11%(45) 45% (189) 

The second question, involving actual party orientation, used the tradi­
tional Michigan formulation: "In politics, as of today, do you think of 
yourself as a Republican, a Democrat, or an independent?" Those who 
said they were either a Republican or a Democrat were then asked, 
"Would you call yourself a strong (Republican / Democrat), or a not very 
strong (Republican/Democrat)?" Those who said they were indepen­
dent were asked, "Do you think of yourself as closer to the Republican 
or Democratic Party?" The party orientation measure was recoded for 
analysis; strong, weak, and leaning partisans were grouped together to 
produce a trichotomous measure. This recoding seems reasonable be­
cause independent leaners are attitudinally and behaviorally similar to 
weak partisans and different from "pure" independents (Smith et al. 1995). 
A similar grouping strategy has been employed by others.9 

The final question measured respondents' voting tendencies in re­
cent elections. The question asked: "Thinking about the last few state 
and national elections, which best describes how you voted: straight 
Democrat, mostly Democrat, a few more Democrats than Republicans, 
about equally for both parties, a few more Republicans than Democrats, 
mostly Republican, or straight Republican?" In the tables that follow, 
responses were recoded to reflect a preference for more Democratic can­
didates, more Republican candidates, or about equal preferences. 

Findings 

The survey reveals very different pictures of the electorate depending 
upon which measure of partisanship is employed. Table 1 shows the sig­
nificant difference between nomina] party registration and actual party 
orientation. The party registration totals (bottom row) reflect the Demo­
cratic Party's nominal voter registration advantage. In contrast, the party 
orientation totals (right column) show the actual voler advanlage of the 
Republican Party. 

81 



Table 2 
Votes in Recent Elections by Actual Party Orientation 

Recent Votes 

More Democrats 

Equal 

Actual Party Orientation 
Rep. Ind. / Other Dem. 

5% (10) 

17% (34) 

14% (4) 

61 % (17) 

More Republicans 78% (158) 25% (7) 

78(10 (134) 

20% (34) 

2% (4) 

A= .60 A2 = 290.476, df = 4, p. < .001 

Ninety percent of Republicans identify with the Republican Party, 81 % 
of Democrats are oriented to the Democratic Party, and 24% of indepen­
dents are tndy independent. Conversely, a few Republicans (10%), more 
Democrats (19%) and most independents (76%) do not adhere to the po­
litical party indicated by their registration. Finding that a large number 
of independent voters do not adhere to theil- registraLion runs COU1lter tu 
expectations. If, as Epstein (1986) suggests, people register with a major 
party in order to be able to vote in primaries, one might expect registered 
independents to be least likely to adhere to a major party label and most 
committed to their independent status. This simply is not the case. 

Table 1 reveals a phenomenon that can be called the misaligned voter­
those who have registered in one party but now see themselves as more 
closely attached to another. Twenty-one percent of voters are misaligned 
- on the rolls as members of a party that they no longer ~l1prort. TWlrP 
as many misaligned voters are registered as Democrats (40%) or indepen­
dents (39%) than as Republicans (22%) [A2 = 93.896, df = 2, p. < .001]. 

When respondents indicated how they had voted in recent elections, 
actual party orientation (Table 2) proved a better indicator of their choices 
as measured by the statistic lambda particularly for Democrats and 
ind~pend~nts - than did nominal party registration (Table 3).10 

From a demographic standpoint, who are the misaligned? Table 4 
summarizes the results of a discriminant function analysis used to clas­
sify misaligned voters. The goal of discriminant analysis is to predict 
membership in two or more mutually exclusive groups from a set of 
predictor variables. The utility of discriminant function analysis rests with 
its ability to accurately classify subjects into groups. This information is 
conveyed by the classification rate, which indicates the percentage of 
subjects for each analysis that are successfully assigned to the group to 
which they actually belong using the relative discriminant function. Dis­
criminant analysis identifies the variables that are most useful for pre­
dicting group membership. 

82 



Table 3 
Votes in Recent Elections by Nominal Party Orientation 

Recent Votes Actual Party Orientation 
Rep. Ind. / Other Dem. 

More Democrats 6% (10) 20'10 (10) 72% (138) 

Equal 16<10 (29) 37% (18) 24% (46) 

More Republicans 79% (143) 43% (21) 4°/c) (8) 

A= .51 A2 = 249.974, df = 4, p. < .001 

Table 4 shows that party registration and region of residence are the 
best predictors of being misaligned. Using these variables to predict 
whether a person is misaligned yields 40% fewer errors than what would 
be expected if respondents were classified by chance alone (62 real errors 
versus 104 expected errors). Variables such as age, education, political 
ideology, religion, marital status, and gender do not add any classifica­
tory power to the analysis. 

As Table 4 indicates, there are more misaligned voters in southeast­
ern Pennsylvania (Bucks, Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery counties) 
than in any other area of the state. Misalignment for all parties is higher 
there than in the rest of the state and it is not confined to one party. 

Table 4 
Results of Discriminant Function Analysis 

for Misaligned Votersll 
Nominal Party 
Registration Misaligned Not Misaligned 

H,epublican 

Democrat 

Independent 

Region of State 

Southeast 
Rest of State 

tau =.40 
Press's Q = 199.50, P < .01 

10% 

19% 

76% 

30% 
19% 

Percent of cases correctly classified == 85 

83 

90% 

81% 

24% 

70% 
81% 



Conclusions 

Clearly, these findings should be considered provisionat for they rep­
resent only a single point-in-time survey that calls for replication. The find­
ings do, however, point to some conclusions that are worth considering. 

Pirst, for some people, actual party orientation is different from nomi 
nal party registration. If replicated, this finding may have enormous im­
plications for how we observe and make sense of electoral behavior. In 
an era of near universal registration as a result of motor-voter legisla­
tion, party registration may have less relevance for making sense of po­
litical behavior. 

Second, more of the state's voters are oriented to the Republican Party 
than the voter registration rolls suggest. If state voter registration num­
bers are adjustpd to Tpf]pct political orientation, Republicans outnumber 
Democrats by a 250,000 voter margin. This is a profound difference in 
partisan alignment that by itself can explain the anomaly in Pennsylva­
nia of Republican hegemony despite Democrat registration superiority. 

Third, actual party orientation is a better predictor of voting behavior 
than is nominal party registration, although both measures perform well. 
Unless both measures are considered, large differences in correlations 
with vote choice may be overlooked. Moreover, because actual party ori­
entation is a better predictor of behavior it provides a more complete 
picture of the electorate. This conclusion strongly suggests that pollsters 
should consider using both measures when possible. 

Fourth, some intriguing geographic patterns show up in the data. In 
particular, southeastern Pennsylvania may be an area worthy of addi­
tional study since more misaligned voters appear there than anywhere 
else in the statc. Why this particular region differs from others is not 
clear. A number of demographic factors including suburbanization and 
migration may be operating here. If so, they are important to understand­
ing better the role region may play in these findings. 

Finally, the large number of independent voters not adhering to their 
registration confounds expectations. If people register with a major party 
in order to vote in primaries, as Epstein (1986) contends, then registered 
independents ought to be less likely to adhere to a major party label and 
mORt committed to being independent. Yet they are not. The disjunction 
between independents and voter registration looms as one of the more 
perplexing findings reported. Since they mostly vote for major party can­
didates, why do independent voters not register with that party? Per­
haps their voting behavior is determined in large part by the paucity of 
independent candidates running for office in Pennsylvania. 

Additional research is needed to confirm these findings and to ex­
plore further other underlying questions. Among the more tantalizing 

84 



questions are these: When and why did misaligned voters change their 
political orientation? Why have they not changed their registration to 
reflect their new orientation? Is misalignment a permanent or temporary 
condition? 

Notes 

1. The development and utility of the Michigan measure is discussed in great 
detail in Campbell et al. (1964, 67-96). 

2. The Keystone Poll is produced at Franklin and Marshall College on behalf 
of the Philadelphia Daily News, the Harrisburg Patriot News, and the Pittsburgh 
Tribune Review. The Keystone Poll is conducted four times each year among the 
state's voting age population. The pan was produced at Millersville University 
between 1991 and 2002. 

3. An registration figures are from Official Voter Registration Statistics (1998). 
4_ Tota1ing those races where two candidates werlO! running yielded the 

following results: State House, Democrats = 1,174,147 votes, Republicans = 

1,317,571 votes; State Senate, Democrats = 607,634 votes, Republicans = 705,301 
votes. Calculations by author from data published by the Pennsylvania 
Department of State. 

S. The most commonly cited source for this argument is MacKuen, Erikson, 
and Stimson (1989). 

6. See, for example, Box-Steffensmeier and Smith (1996); Green, Palmquist, and 
Schickler (1998); Green and Shickler (1993); McAllister and Wattenberg; (1995); 
Rice and Hilton (1996); and Schickler and Green (1997). 

7. Abramson and Ostrom (1994) and Green, Palmquist, and Shickler (1998) 
found that the instability attributed to partisan identification was a result of the 
wording of the Gallup question. Because of its wording, the Gallup 
macropartisanship measure is much more susceptible to changes resulting from 
short-term trends. There is a sizable literature related to the effect of question 
wording on survey response. Schuman and Presser (1996) provide an excellent 
introduction to this literature. 

S. The nominal registration item produced a partisan distribution comparable 
to that found within the state, according to registration statistics. The survey 
produced a sample with 200 Democrats (44%), 190 Republicans (42%) and 61 

independent/ other voters (14%). The actual registration figures for Pennsylvania 
put the distribution of voters at 48.6% Democrat, 42.4% Republican, and 8.9% 
other. 

9. This grouping strategy appears in Abramowitz and Saunders (1998) and 
Box-Steffensmeier and Smith (1996). 

10. Lambua (A) ~how~ the proportion by which error in predictin~ the value 
of the dependent variable is reduced by knowing the value of the independent 
variable (Weisberg, Krosnkk, and Bowen 1996, 274). 

11. Statistical significance for each analysis is measured by Press's Q statistic 
and Tau. Press's Q is a measure of the classificatory power of the discriminant 
function when compared to the results expected from chance (Hair et a1. 1992). 
Tau is a proportional reduction in error statistic that yields a :,tandardized measure 

of classificatory improvement (Klecka 1980). 

85 



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