by flagamuffin

What does this mean? People are not evaluating state legislators based on their performance in office. And they’re not really doing that for members of Congress, either. They’re more or less voting a party slate. That is, they make a determination of whether they like the way things are going nationally, and then vote for or against the president’s party based on that for pretty much every partisan office. And as we know from a great deal of research, people evaluate the president’s party in large part on the performance of the national economy.