The Bizarre Red-Blue Politics Of Election Consolidation

Moving local odd-year elections to even years in November would DOUBLE voter turnout and result in other important democratic benefits

[For this article, DemocracySOS welcomes back Alan Durning as a guest contributor. Alan is founder and executive director of Sightline Institute, which is an independent, nonprofit think tank providing leading original analysis on housing, democracy, forests, and energy policy in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, British Columbia, and beyond. This piece is excerpted from his longer article linked here.]

One political reform that has become increasingly popular is known as “election consolidation.” With that reform, local elections get rescheduled away from odd-years to even-years, so they occur at the same time with national and state elections (often referred to as “on-cycle elections”). Researchers have found that local voter turnout generally doubles when elections move from off-cycle to on-cycle contests. That’s a remarkable finding, considering that get-out-the-vote and registration drives are lucky if they boost participation by a percentage point or two.

Among voters, election consolidation is uncontroversial, since it boosts turnout more than any other change scholars have studied. But for the Democratic and Republican parties and conservative and liberal leaders, their opinions have been all over the map, often depending on which political party is in power.

For example, in a 2012 state legislative hearing, the lead proponent of a bill to consolidate local elections in November of even-numbered years said:

This bill would do one thing and one thing only. It would make Election Day uniform throughout the state…[it] ought to be a non-controversial topic. …This bill saves money. It increases voter turnout. …If we believe in representative democracy…we should support this bill.

Was the speaker progressive or conservative? A Republican or a Democrat?

What about the champion of a similar bill in a different state who said this in 2015?

“There is one major contributing factor to low voter turnout—the timing of elections—that could be addressed with a relatively simple policy change.”

And how about the legislative sponsor of a 2023 bill in yet another state who proposed to move “every single type of election in the state…to our regular even-year elections” because “doubling turnout—that’s all for the good”?

Bizarre-Partisanship and role reversals

The first speaker was the Arizona conservative Clint Bolick, co-founder of the libertarian Institute for Justice. The second quote is from the liberal interest group California Common Cause. The third is from Montana GOP state representative Mike Hopkins.

Is election consolidation a rare example of a reform where the left and right could work together?

Maybe. But to date, it’s been more bizarre-partisan than bipartisan. In these states and others, proponents and opponents recite the same arguments for and against election consolidation. Indeed, if you go online and watch hearings on these bills (as I have done for five states) or comb through media coverage from a half dozen other states, you’ll learn that the scripts are almost verbatim – but the parties trade positions.

“It’s better to have 60 percent of the people rather than 30 or 40 percent of the people choosing,” Kansas Republican state senator Damon Thayer said in 2020 as he argued for consolidated elections and against unified Democratic opposition. Three years later, a phalanx of Republican opponents in New York argued against Democratic efforts toward election consolidation. Sounding like a Kansas Republican, the lead Democratic Senator in New York said, “You have 20 or so percent of voters deciding the outcome for the entire jurisdiction. Why are you so afraid of 50, 60, 70 percent of voters determining who should hold these local positions?”

If you watch enough of these hearings, you’ll experience a singular combination of déjà vu and whiplash. Almost every state election consolidation proposal in living memory has split legislators along party lines. In red states, Republicans vote yea and Democrats vote nay. In blue states, vice versa.

In California in 2015, Democrats considered a bill for election consolidation (SB 415). One innovation, included to avoid legal troubles with state constitutional guarantees of local control for certain cities, was a trigger provision that allowed cities to run their elections off-cycle if they could keep voter participation within 25 percentage points of what they achieved in on-cycle state elections. This bill passed. All but one Republican in the legislature voted no, and all but two Democrats voted yes or, in five cases, abstained.

Three years later, in 2018, Arizona’s GOP-controlled legislature returned to the question of election consolidation after the state supreme court invalidated parts of its 2012 law for overstepping local authority. Hoping to render the court order moot, the legislature imported the California trigger provision into Arizona House Bill 2604 (2018)—literally copied from the California Democrats’ law. It passed without the support of a single Democrat in either house of the legislature and without the opposition of a single Republican.

The pattern repeats over and over: in recent years in red Idaho and Montana and in Kansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Republicans have favored election consolidation and Democrats have opposed it; in blue New York and Washington, the polarization is inverted.

Election consolidation has been a political head scratcher – perhaps alone among reform proposals, it follows this weird red-blue pattern from state to state, with support coming mostly from Republicans in red and Democrats in blue states.

Impacts of odd-year, off-cycle elections

As policy, of course, election consolidation is not puzzling at all. This is the best-kept secret of democracy upgrades: as previously mentioned, election consolidation boosts turnout more than any other reform, often doubling participation in local elections. It also improves government accountability, electing officials who more faithfully reflect local sentiment. It brings out a more representative electorate, especially by age and race. In fact, off-cycle elections are often so dominated by older voters that they are practically gerontocratic. It also saves public money. And it’s wildly popular; its poll numbers would make any political consultant salivate, and virtually every public vote on consolidated elections passes by a huge margin.

By dramatically expanding participation, election consolidation also gives elected leaders greater legitimacy and a stronger mandate. In doing so, it may even lay the foundation for increased trust in local government—a rare bright spot in the bleak landscape of declining confidence in public institutions. Still, election consolidation is the ugly duckling of electoral reforms; it’s rarely mentioned in the raging, furious, nationally polarized partisan debates over election integrity, voter fraud and voter suppression.

Accidents of history

A number of research studies have revealed that there is no relationship between when local elections take place and the familiar pattern of red, purple, and blue states. In seven states, including deep-red Arkansas and Kentucky, purple Nevada, and deep-blue Hawai’i and Oregon, the law requires on-cycle local elections in every city. In 18 states, including red Alaska, Texas, and Wyoming, purple Florida and Michigan, and blue Delaware, Maryland, and Minnesota, state law lets cities decide when to hold local elections. And 25 states require all cities to hold their elections off-cycle, including red states such as Idaho, Kansas, and Montana; purple states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; and blue states such as New Mexico, New York, and Washington.

This crazy quilt is an artifact of history. It’s a sign of the relative state-by-state influence of the Progressive movement more than a century ago, but it does not remotely resemble current politics. What, then, explains today’s bizarre-partisanship? Why do Democrats and Republicans swap scripts on the self-same bills depending on what state they are in?

The reflexive response is: partisan self-interest. Consolidating elections must help Republicans in red states and Democrats in blue states. That explanation may be right, in which case we can expect steadily more red and blue states to consolidate their local elections. But that’s not the only (or even the best) explanation for the available evidence.

A surprising alternative hypothesis is that this bizarre-partisanship is a byproduct of other dynamics. If this hypothesis is correct, it follows that not only polarized partisan action but also bipartisan action for election consolidation is possible. The happy result of this reasoning is that election consolidation has a bright future, with prospects for progress in many states.

Support on both the right and left

Support for election consolidation among the public is a mile wide. It’s not a mystery why:  ordinary voters prefer fewer, better elections. They would rather fill out one ballot per year, even if it’s long, than three or five ballots. The United States is an outlier among its peer countries around the globe. Voters in the state of Washington, for example, face four election days in a typical year, while in neighboring British Columbia, Canada, voters usually have one.

In 2008 Democrats, Republicans, and independents all separately favored synchronized elections by roughly two to one in an academic survey with an enormous sample; the 2020 version of the same survey showed the same ratio of support, as did several more recent polls, including a 2024 Secure Elections Project survey which found 80 percent support among Republicans and conservative-minded independents in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

These polls line up with actual elections too; virtually every public vote (21 of 22 in the past decade) to move local elections to November of even years has passed overwhelmingly.

Election consolidation is supported by influential organizations on both the right and the left. The libertarian-minded Koch family’s advocacy network Americans for Prosperity writes, “Benefits of one election in November: increase in voter turnout, more citizens engaged on local issues, increased accountability on local officials, reduced cost for local taxpayers.” The Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute picks up the theme: “Placing elections at obscure times does not promote democracy—it inhibits it.” The American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation supports it as does the urban conservatives of the Manhattan Institute, which has even drafted a model policy.

On the left, the Brookings Institution supports on-cycle elections. So does the next-generation left-of-center think tank New America. Progressive advocacy organizations that support on-cycle voting include many state and local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, California Common Cause, and the League of Women Voters. Other progressive state-based nonprofits, such as MassINC and Policy for Progress in Massachusetts and More Equitable Democracy and the Northwest Progressive Institute in Washington, also energetically advocate for election consolidation.

While Republicans in red states and Democrats in blue states seem to be pursuing their own partisan self-interest in supporting election consolidation in their own states, the best studies suggest that election consolidation does little for liberals or conservatives. In March 2024 Justin de Benedictis-Kessner of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Christopher Warshaw of George Washington University released an impressive best-in-class study that applies sophisticated statistical techniques to a new database on local elections they had assembled. Their data covers almost 18,000 individual city-council-seat elections across the entire United States over three decades.

It also draws in vast quantities of other information about candidates’ ideology, partisan affiliation, race and ethnicity, and more. Their analysis looks closely at hundreds of cities before and after election consolidation, and the findings are unequivocal: “Moving local elections on-cycle significantly increases overall voter turnout and the participation of younger and less wealthy voters. But it has negligible effects on the partisan composition of the electorate or the partisan and ideological outcome of elections.”

Another study from Boston University of more than 500 cities found much higher turnout in on-cycle cities among working-age voters and renters, somewhat more turnout among Latinos, and equal turnout among African Americans. On-cycle city electorates also included a larger share of those cities’ independent voters, while off-cycle city electorates overrepresented both partisan Democrats and Republicans, in roughly equal measure. Another study of California cities that had consolidated their elections saw not only turnout surges but also shifts in the composition of the electorate. Mainly, the electorate in city elections got much younger, with older voters’ share of the electorate shrinking by 22 points in presidential elections and 13 points in midterms.

Given that younger cohorts are more racially and ethnically diverse throughout the United States and especially in populous states such as California, it’s no surprise that on-cycle elections attracted more voters of color. In cities that switched to on-cycle elections, Latinos’ share of voters grew by 7 points in presidential years, and Asian Americans grew by 2 points; both grew half as much in midterms. Less-affluent voters showed up more in on-cycle elections, but the Black vote share was unchanged. Finally, the Democratic vote share grew by 4 points in presidential elections and 2 points in midterms. But California is a very blue state, so it doesn’t necessarily contradict the studies of other states which showed no partisan advantage to on-cycle elections.

Studies of other states like Florida, Montana and Georgia found similar patterns of a doubling of turnout, a much younger voting population and better representation of working-age voters who are somewhat more moderate politically, and marginally more Latino. Again, there was no evidence of any statistically significant effect on the partisanship or ideological leaning of voters. Some studies found that teachers unions may have disproportionate influence in off-cycle elections, but other studies found that this influence is more than overcome by the general influence of older voters who are more conservative and vote in higher numbers in odd-year elections.

In sum, politically, election consolidation appears to be a boon to neither the left nor the right. One might expect on-cycle elections to elevate the interests of working-age voters at the expense of others, but working-age voters are not politically monolithic. The net effects undoubtedly vary from place to place and time to time. But there is no solid evidence showing that election consolidation systematically skews either left or right.

The “Byproduct Hypothesis”

Based on the different streams of evidence, I have started to think that legislators are mostly taking their cues from each other. One party proposes it, so the other opposes it. If you’re for it, then I’m against it. Both sides are accustomed to their adversaries cynically gaming everything for their own electoral advantage. Republicans and Democrats oppose each other’s bills, and what they state as their reasons are mere rationalizations. That would explain the script-swapping.

As dispiriting as that hypothesis might be, it could also be a reason for optimism about the prospects for passing election consolidation in more cities and states.

If governing parties do know that election consolidation will help them or will hurt their opponents, they will presumably continue to advance it in select states. They will add to the three states and scores of cities that have consolidated elections in the past decade. Partisan proponents of synchronized elections in trifecta states are already pushing forward. Montana’s supermajority Republicans came close to passing a sweeping consolidation bill in 2023 and will try again in 2025. New York Democrats adopted consolidation for counties and towns in 2023 and are pushing to add cities in 2024.

Meanwhile, Republicans in Kentucky and Tennessee, and Democrats in Washington, all passed consolidation bills through one legislative chamber in 2024 and will try again in 2025. At present, among states that don’t allow on-cycle city elections are six Democratic-trifecta states, including Illinois and Massachusetts, and 12 Republican-trifecta states, including Georgia and Ohio. All are good candidates for the partisan road to consolidation.

But there’s also a possibility that patient and diplomatic reformers might be able to build those rarest of things in 21st-century politics: bipartisan coalitions. Such coalitions would be needed to consolidate elections in the off-cycle states that lack trifectas, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. They would also help speed and secure progress everywhere else, as bipartisan bills are more likely to pass and less likely to be reversed.

Election consolidation by the bipartisan road came to Nevada in 2019. That year the legislature took up Assembly Bill 50. As usual, proponents recited the exact same arguments as in other states. Somehow, though, legislators did not polarize, perhaps because the bill had prominent supporters from each side of the aisle. The Republican secretary of state introduced the bill, and the registrar of voters in the Democratic stronghold of Clark County (home to Las Vegas) was a vocal supporter. Some cities had already moved to on-cycle elections, so everyone knew what to expect: higher turnout, better demographic representation, more accountability of government to voters’ values, and less public spending on elections. The bill passed with the votes of every single Democrat and a majority of Republicans in each chamber.

This pattern—bizarre-partisanship-turned-bipartisanship—is worth trying to replicate. After all, legislators and advocates are already singing the same song. Why not do it together, in the same state, at the same time?

Either way, whether by the partisan or the bipartisan path, election consolidation appears to have a bright future. The proposition of having fewer, better elections is overwhelmingly popular among the public and policy thinkers of all political stripes. And even in states where legislators are divided, supporters can appeal to whoever is in power: Republicans in red states and Democrats in blue states.

Alan Durning Sightline Institute @Sightline