Projo Politics Blog

For the record, more than 61,000 Rhode Island voters cast a single straight-party vote for U.S. Senate candidate Sheldon Whitehouse — and every other Democrat on the ballot — rather than pick and choose their way through the field of candidates on the ballot.

More specifically, there were 61,357 straight-party votes for the Democratic ticket mingled among Whitehouse’s final 206,110 votes, 18,424 straight-party GOP votes within the 179,001 who voted for Chafee, according to the state Board of Elections.

The elections board does not have reliable records of straight-party votes in past elections, according to its executive director, Robert Kando. But the Washington blog known as The Hill reported the number of Rhode Islanders choosing the one-stroke Democratic Party option went up by 23,000 — more than 60 percent — from what it was during the last mid-term election, in 2002. (Kando said he could not verify the numbers.)

Subtracting the straight-party voters on both sides, Chafee led Whitehouse 160,577 to 144,153.

But here’s another way to look at it: the 23,000 spike in straight-party Democratic voters since the ’02 mid-term election wasn’t enough to explain away Republican Chafee’s ultimate 27,109 vote loss, according to the latest numbers available from the Board of Elections.

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