MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson’s classic article “Macropartisanship” extended the study of voting behavior from static analyses of American elections to the dynamics of partisanship between elections. This launched new frontiers of research, such as studying the effects of
presidential approval and economic indices on aggregate party identification. However, the Macropartisanship literature made an important oversight: Changes in partisanship between elections are usually from one partisan group to identification as an independent, or vice