Regional Realignment Hits an Upstate New York Town: It's More Complicated than That.

There has been a long-term process of partisan realignment in Southern states and, more recently, in the Northeast. These trends have been described and explained by a wealth of scholarship. The pattern of sustained electoral shifts started with Presidential contests and spread over time to encompass Congressional and eventually state legislative races. The paper addresses the following question: Does such top-down regional realignment eventually impact sub-county party politics? After discussing top-down regional realignment and the numerous and diverse barriers that insulate local governments from the influence of political shifts occurring at the national and state level, I focus on the central New York town of Cazenovia, which has undergone a clear albeit limited degree of realignment. However, the nature of this sustained change in partisanship should not be understood simply as an extension of the changes in voting patterns the town has experienced in state and national elections. The reasons for the new normal in Cazenovia's Town Council party politics should include a bottom-up explanation of partisan change that supplements the top-down process posited in traditional realignment theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]