Well, that settles that.

Salena Zito enlightens us all with a made up election narrative that is conveniently similar to her preferred outcome and worldview her excellent understanding of partisanship and the American voter in a lovely piece called "Americans Will Vote Their Interests, Not Their Party."

Despite the contradictory evidence offered by the last 50 years of political science research, I think I'll go with Selena's explanation here. She seems more credible given the amount of research she did (i.e., talking to two people in Independence, MO).