A new look at split-ticket outcome for house and president: The comparative midpoints model

We argue that conservative districts that go Democratic for the House shoul d be likely to choose a Republican for president, while liberal districts r epresented by a Republican should be likely to opt for a Democrat for presi dent. We test these and related predictions about split-ticket voting with election data from the eight presidential elections between 1964 and 1992. We show that ideological differences in the estimated location of the distr ict's median voter explains a substantial component of the systematic varia tion in patterns of split outcomes in this period across districts, but tha t other factors (e.g., an especially popular incumbent or a particularly po or challenger, the magnitude of presidential election victory, region-speci fic realignment effects) also play a role.