Some of the same commentators who have stressed the delegates' emotional commitment to the elective principle also have offered an alternative explanation for the decline of the appointed bench, arguing that most states mindlessly imitated New York's 1846 decision to elect judges. But if conventions had treated the policies of other states as conclusive, the debates would have been substantially shorter. While there is no doubt that New York helped legitimate the elective system, its change did not carry overpowering weight. The New York convention, for that matter, also cited the Mississippi experience. . . But there are many reasons to doubt that the move to an elected judiciary was chiefly a partisan reform .
Partisan patterns are simply impossible to detect.
Kentucky's Whigs had held the governorship and both houses of the legislature for years when the state switched to an elective judiciary, and Vermont's Whigs were no less dominant when the state began to elect inferior-court judges in 1850. Many states in which neither party was dominant enacted the elective system, but other such states retained the appointive method. Even inside the states that switched to the elective system, partisan alignments are sometimes hard to define. Results do not always match intentions, but if partisan Democrats expected the elective system to give them control of the judiciary, they must have been disappointed. Views about the ideal judge did not distinguish supporters of the elective judiciary from their opponents.