The percentage of workingage West Virginians with a disability, 16.4 percent, is the highest in the country. But in 2012, West Virginia rejected President Obama out of hand. Mitt Romney won all of West Virginia’s 55 counties, 41 of them with more than 60 percent of the vote. Nineteen out of 20 West Virginians, 94 percent, are white, a level topped only by Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire and Idaho.

The last time I wrote about research into the possible genetic underpinnings of partisan affiliation, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, raised an interesting question: “Will work of this sort really add to our understanding of politics?” His answer: “My own guess is, not much.” Bartels elaborated: “My argument is not that genetic explanations of political attitudes and behavior are infeasible (though they are sure to be extremely difficult to achieve) or illegitimate (though it is easy to imagine them being harnessed to unsavory political ends). It is simply that the real scientific payoff does not look worth the effort.”

I have long been an admirer of Bartels’s work, but in this case I think he is overlooking the potential productivity of this line of research.

The study of the heritability of attitudes, partisan inclinations and ideology is a nascent subfield in political science. It has the potential to provide insight into a host of crucial matters, including the roots of hostility between the contemporary right and left, and into how political parties alter their stands on issues in both practical and rhetorical terms.

To argue that a proclivity to adhere to one belief system over another may be to some degree heritable does not suggest that either the electorate or the political system is immutable or static. The constant emergence and re-emergence of issues in new forms – race, war and contraception in the 1960s, for example – forces coalitions to shift, politicians to adjust and voting patterns to change. In contrast to the dominance of economics in other eras (and sometimes in ours), the contemporary debate over gay marriage, new reproductive technologies, single parenthood and gender roles touches directly on our most deeply held feelings about tradition, religion and authority. It is these matters on which, Ludeke and others contend, voters have opinions that may have a component that is biologically underpinned.

The relative stability of the oscillation in American politics between dominant left and right coalitions is reflected in the outcome of the 19 presidential elections since 1940: Nine Republican victories; 10 for Democrats. In those races, the winner received less than 53 percent of the vote in 10 elections. This equilibrium suggests that political opinion may be less volatile, and more firmly grounded, than is sometimes suspected.

Dustin Tingley, a professor of government at Harvard, argues that “phenomena perennially hard to explain in standard political science become clearer when human interactions are understood in light of natural selection and evolutionary psychology.”