The implications of the mismatch problem are dramatic, as it leaves very little space for local accountability or representation. How state legislators perform in office may have a small effect on whether they get to stay in office, but, for the most part, their re-election chances will be determined by the popularity of the president. There is little reason to believe that officials who were elected because, say, the president of the same party conducted a successful war will accurately represent voter preferences on state issues. State legislatures are the workhorses of policy-making in this country, producing our contract and tort law, marriage policy, much of our criminal law, and lots more. But the content and effects of that policy don't have much effect on state elections.

This would not matter so much if there were other effective ways to ensure officials were held accountable. But there aren't. The primary electorate, which you might imagine produces accountability in states dominated by one party, is largely uninformed about the ideology of candidates or their performance (and there are no on-ballot heuristics like party labels to help them.) Some citizens "vote with their feet" and leave jurisdictions that are governed in ways they find abhorrent. This creates some accountability, but, because people have all sorts of reasons, social and economic, to continue living in a jurisdiction even if the government is performing poorly, state and local elections are still very important.

But why don't they work? We might expect out-of-power parties (Massachusetts Republicans, Idaho Democrats) to try to re-brand themselves at the state level, creating competition on state issues. But state laws and party rules make it hard for them to do so. For instance, voters cannot register in one party for national elections and another for state elections, meaning that the primary electorate and candidate base for state parties are composed of people who agree on national issues but not necessarily on state issues. This makes re-branding hard, if not impossible.

Even if some degree of re-branding occurred, voters would have to be able to differentiate state parties from their national parents. But it turns out that voters often don't know which party is in power in state elections and have difficulty figuring out whether state and national officials are responsible for policy changes. This makes it difficult to create running tallies on state issues (and one-party domination makes it harder still, as voters in a state like Idaho have no actual experience being governed by a Democratic legislature). Because we don't know much about state parties, we just rely on national party labels when voting.

Regardless of the reason, it's pretty clear that many elected officials do not face much pressure at the ballot box. What's needed are tools for creating locally-specific heuristics for voters. Previous "solutions" like non-partisan elections remove information rather than adding it, making things worse, not better.