Has anyone noticed that we have a record number of party-switchers on the two major party tickets? Republican nominee Donald Trump was of course a registered Democrat for many years and a supporter of many Democratic candidates. His and his family's support of Brooklyn Democrats Abraham Beame (elected mayor 1973) and Hugh Carey (elected governor 1974) were critical to the young Trump's move of the family business from Brooklyn and Queens to Manhattan.

Vice presidential nominee Mike Pence's Democratic roots were of a different sort; he was from an Irish Catholic family and grew up, he says, as a fan of John F. Kennedy.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was, famously, a "Goldwater girl" in 1964, when the election was held just days after her 17th birthday. Vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine was never, so far as I know, a Republican, but his wife Anne Holton Kaine is the daughter of Linwood Holton, a mountain Republican elected governor of Virginia in 1989 and who at 92 attended the Democrats' national convention in Philadelphia.

Have there ever been as many party-switchers on national tickets? Ronald Reagan was, of course, a Democrat from his first vote for Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 to his emceeing an appearance for Harry Truman at Hollywood Bowl in 1948. And if you go back in time to the partisan turbulence of the mid-19th century, you inevitably run into party switchers, like Abraham Lincoln's two vice presidents, Hannibal Hamlin and Andrew Johnson, who were both Democrats. But there have not been very many in between.

Donald Trump's party switching has been, by his own admission, driven by his business interests. But the party-switching courses of Hillary Clinton, Mike Pence and Anne Holton Kaine have been followed by large swathes of the electorate.