Estimating Vote Choice: A New Look at the Generic Congressional Ballot

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Voters typically pay little attention to the campaign for the House of Representatives in their district. This has complicated efforts to tap public opinion about these races because seemingly modest changes in the order or wording of questions can produce dramatically different responses (Box-Steffensmeier, Jacobson, and Grant 2000; Gow and Eubank 1984; Mann 1978; Mann and Wolfinger 1980; Wright 1993). 1 Incumbency causes particular problems. It has been shown that placing too much emphasis on candidate names can bias estimates of vote choice in favor of in cumbents because these incumbents are so much better known than their challengers. Voters recognize the incumbent’s name and seize on it, ignoring th e partisan considerations that play a larger role in the voting booth (Box- Steffensmeier, Jacobson, and Grant 2000). This evidence is compelling, but it a pplies to only a fraction of congressional election surveys. Most surveys can not include candidate names at all because adding the names requires identifying a respondent’s congressional district before the interview. Instead, surveys that sample more than one district typically use a variant of the “generic congressi onal ballot.” As the name would suggest, the generic ballot ignores the speci fics of each race by referring only to party labels. Gallup asks the question this wa y: “If the elections for Congress were being held today, which party’s candidate would you vote for in your congressional district—the Democratic Party’s candidate or the Republican Party’s candidate?” (Gallup Poll 2000). 2