Presidential Campaigns and Democracy

Abstract

Every 4 years presidential candidates devote months and hundreds of millions of dollars campaigning for the highest office in the land. Some question whether these presidential campaigns actually make a difference in election outcomes. In 2000, the Bush and Gore campaigns provided a golden opportunity to empirically assess campaign effects because both candidates focused their campaigns on a set of "battleground" states. Data from the 2000 National Election Survey indicate that those who lived in battleground states had significantly more issue knowledge and issue salience than citizens from other states. Because the Electoral College, with its winner-take-all rules, encourages candidates to concentrate on battleground states, the results suggest that the Electoral College may have a pernicious effect on representative democracy.