Campaign Dynamics Research Articles

“Technology Is a Commodity”: The Internet in the 2008 United States Presidential Election

The role of the Internet as a tool for participation and organization has been considered the most important innovation in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and one of the key strategic factors in Barack Obama's conquest of the Democratic nomination and the White House. This article analyzes e-campaigning in the 2008 election through data drawn from qualitative interviews with 31 consultants and operatives who were involved in the presidential race. Rather than adopting a technocentric perspective, our interviewees acknowledge that several contextual factors enhance or hinder the effectiveness of online tools, such as the message of the campaign, the candidate's personality, and his or her ability to generate enthusiasm in the electorate, together with the campaign's strategic prioritization of grassroots electioneering. Technology is seen more as an efficient channel of preexisting motivations and loyalties than as a driver of these attitudes. Moreover, while the Web has often been characterized as presenting campaigns with a dilemma between top-down hierarchy and bottom-up spontaneity, Internet professionals and operatives argue that contemporary e-campaigning tools can help achieve both goals and breed a hybrid organizing model that reconciles control and empowerment through the skillful use of individual data. These findings have important implications regarding the strategic and organizational dynamics of contemporary campaigns and the role of citizen participation within them.

Survival on a shoestring: the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) revisited

This article provides a reappraisal of the history of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) based on source-based research. Even if the case may appear marginal, it provides useful insights into the dynamics of terrorist campaigns and especially into the survival of small terrorist groups. It highlights the importance of examining the attitudes among the potential supporting communities beyond one of support or rejection of terrorism and suggests that even passive support can help a group significantly. Furthermore, the case provides further evidence for the observation that the role of ideology as a motivation for participation in terrorist campaigns should not be overstated.

VODYS: An Agent-Based Model for Exploring Campaign Dynamics

The literature on campaigns has considered a number of factors that affect whether and how someone votes, including demographics, campaign strategies, and social milieu. Understanding the dynamics of campaigns, however, is complicated by the fact that researchers cannot observe much of what happens during an election cycle. Typically, studies rely on voter recollections of conversations, contacts, and media exposure. In addition, because data are collected at discrete points in time, most models of voter turnout cannot capture the dynamic nature of an individual’s interactions during a campaign cycle. Agent-based models offer a way to overcome these data limitations by allowing us to model the dynamics of voter turnout over the course of many weeks as individuals move back and forth between home and work environments, interacting with neighbors and colleagues. In this article, the authors present an agent-based model of campaign dynamics, VODYS, and conduct three simulations to demonstrate the utility of agent-based models for exploring the effects of contact and context on political behavior.

Gradual and Sudden Shifts in Political Perceptions: Impressions of Negativity in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Campaign

How do citizens’ perceptions of a political campaign change over the course of the campaign? To find out, we probed the dynamics of the perceived difference in the negativity of the Bush and Gore campaigns in the 2000 U.S. presidential election. The analysis revealed a major turning point in these perceptions shortly after the first campaign debate; beyond that major one-time shift, the tone of what the candidates said during the campaign had no significant effect on the public’s impressions of the tone of the campaign. These results are interesting in and of themselves, and the analysis that produced them holds out considerable promise for future research on the dynamics of election campaigns.

Timeless Strategy Meets New Medium: Going Negative on Congressional Campaign Web Sites, 2002–2006

In a few short years, the World Wide Web has become a standard part of candidates' campaign tool kits. Virtually all candidates have their own sites, and voters, journalists, and activists visit the sites with increasing frequency. In this article, we study what candidates do on these sites—in terms of the information they present—by exploring one of the most enduring and widely debated campaign strategies: “going negative.” Comparing data from over 700 congressional candidate Web sites, over three election cycles (2002, 2004, and 2006), with television advertising data, we show that candidates go negative with similar likelihoods across these media. We also find that while similar dynamics drive negativity on the Web and in television advertising, there are some notable differences. These differences likely stem, in part, from the truncated sample available with television data (i.e., many candidates do not produce ads). Our results have implications for understanding negative campaigning and for the ways in which scholars can study campaign dynamics.

The campaign dynamics of economic voting

This paper considers the relationship between election campaigns and the impact of economic evaluations on vote choice. The motivation is the standard expectation that the campaign generally serves to amplify the significance of economic considerations in the voter's calculus—to focus his/her attention on this “fundamental” element of the electoral decision. Drawing on survey data from ten national elections across four countries (Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) and applying both parametric and semi-parametric statistical techniques, the paper finds no support for this proposition. The paper reflects on the significance of this conclusion for work on political learning during election campaigns, the literature on economic voting, and the study of electoral behaviour more generally.

Polls and Elections: Preelection Poll Accuracy in the 2008 General Elections

Voters in the 2008 presidential election decidedly endorsed Democrat Barack Obama over his Republican opponent John McCain in the first-ever contest between two sitting U.S. senators. Amid growing economic turmoil and frustration with the war in Iraq and with two-term incumbent Republican president George W. Bush, Obama bested McCain at the polls by nearly 10 million votes. The historic election attracted 61.6% of the eligible electorate to the polls on election day--the highest turnout since 1968--and produced the first African American president of the United States (McDonald 2009). Obama ultimately captured 52.9% of the popular vote, while McCain received 45.7%. The Democratic nominee carried 28 states plus the District of Columbia and prevailed in Nebraska's Second Congressional District to garner 365 electoral votes; McCain earned 173 electoral votes from victories in 22 states. (1) The 2008 election was the first election in 56 years that did not include an incumbent president or vice president. Both parties held spirited primaries that attracted a broad range of candidates, but the Democratic primary race that pitted former first lady and U.S. senator Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner, against Barack Obama was especially vivacious. The 17-month contest remained close throughout, and Obama did not secure enough delegates to clinch the nomination until June 3, 2008. Despite noteworthy preelection polling setbacks during the primaries (most pollsters predicted an Obama victory in New Hampshire, for example, but Clinton won) (Liss 2008), the final national preelection polls in the general election unanimously projected a Democratic victory. Estimates of Obama's margin over McCain were among the most precise on record. In this essay, I analyze national and subnational preelection polls conducted in the 2008 cycle to present an in-depth evaluation of poll accuracy. Preelection Poll Volume and Poll Aggregation in 2008 The number of preelection polls conducted during a typical presidential election cycle has grown substantially over the past few decades. Michael Traugott reports that the explosion in polls started in the 1980s and that the occurrence of the standard trial heat items in polls increased about 900% between 1984 and 2000 (2005, 644). The overall volume of preelection polling conducted during the 2008 cycle remained high. Based on national samples reported on Pollster.com, 221 non-overlapping presidential trial heats were conducted between Labor Day (September 1) and election day 2008, substantially more than in 2004 (although fewer than in the 2000 cycle). (2) Several polling organizations conducted daily tracking polls in 2008; Gallup and Rasmussen tracked preferences daily for at least six months leading up to the November election. In addition, DailyKos, George Washington University Battleground, Hotline, and Zogby provided daily tracking estimates during the fall campaign, and two additional organizations, IBD/TIPP and ABC News/Washington Post, reported daily tracking poll data toward the end of the campaign. A total of 975 trial heat items in statewide polls fielded between Labor Day and election day probed presidential preferences in 2008, while 394 trial heats reported statewide preferences for U.S. Senate candidates and 110 for gubernatorial candidates over the same duration. One of the main developments in terms of preelection polling in 2008 was the emergence of online poll aggregators. Web sites such as FiveThirtyEight.com, Pollster.com, the Princeton Election Consortium, and RealClearPolitics.com collected, analyzed, and graphed an unprecedented amount of state and national polling data and helped voters interpret and assess campaign dynamics by providing singular, statistical measures that captured all of the available information daily. Poll aggregators used different mathematical models to contextualize polling information and to refine the predictive capabilities of available polling data (Harmanci 2008). …

Districts and Candidates in U.S. House Elections

Recent research on U.S. House elections focuses on the partisanship of districts as an explanation for weak competition, deemphasizing candidate and campaign variables like incumbency and spending. This literature focuses attention on the marginal effects of important explanatory variables, yet overall competitiveness is also driven by the underlying distributions of those variables. Campaign spending in particular has become strongly bimodal, far outpacing any polarization in district partisanship. This study uses counterfactual analysis to consider changes in both marginal effects and distributions simultaneously. When both are factored in, it becomes clear that candidates and campaigns are more important today, not less, while district partisanship is only modestly more significant. The polarization of districts is better at explaining the decline in competition over time, but this decline itself is quite modest. The variance around the downward trend is more significant, and is explained more readily with campaign dynamics than with district polarization. The drivers of competition in House elections continue to be highly personal, meaning reforms to increase competition should focus more on campaign finance than on ameliorative redistricting.

Videomalaise or Virtuous Circle?

Some scholars argue that exposure to news media has a negative effect on public trust in government, while others maintain that the relationship between media exposure and political trust is positive and reciprocal. The current study departs from most research in this area by focusing on how both news source and individual characteristics of news consumers moderate the influence of news exposure on political trust. Employing several panel studies from a survey specifically designed to investigate media use and campaign dynamics during the 2000 presidential election, the current study makes several novel contributions to the literature. Specifically, the author finds that the influence of news media on political trust—positive or negative—is dependent on both the news source (i.e., newspaper or television) and individuals’ existing level of political trust. Those with low levels of political trust do not become more or less trusting following news exposure regardless of the news source. However, those with higher levels of political trust become more trusting following exposure to newspapers and less trusting following exposure to television news.

The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004 (review)

Reviewed by: The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004 William Crotty The Race to 270: The Electoral College and the Campaign Strategies of 2000 and 2004. By Daron R. Shaw. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006; pp 216. $50.00 cloth; $20.00 paper. Daron R. Shaw's study of the presidential campaigns of 2000 and 2004 has two purposes. The first purpose is to assess the impact of the Electoral College on candidates' decision making, while arguing the importance of the campaign period in general in moving small but ultimately significant segments of the electorate to one side or the other. Second, it is also meant to combine the expertise and skills of both the political scientist and the practitioner (because Shaw served as an advisor to both Bush-Cheney campaigns) in teasing out the impact of various strategies in shaping an election's outcome. Shaw makes a strong, and I would say welcome, argument for the relevance of campaigns in affecting voter decision making and ultimately deciding the outcomes of elections. In this context, the study helps question the notion of largely predetermined results based on partisan affiliations. Put in other terms, it serves to make the case that "politics is important." The point is not new. V. O. Key Jr. passionately advanced the cause, but it bears repeating as a response to drier, more formalistic analyses that predominate in the field of political science. Shaw's approach is parsimonious; the focus is primarily restricted to television advertising and candidate appearances. At the same time, the dynamics of campaigns are much more inclusive, with party and grassroots organizing, message definition, voter contacts, fundraising, and personal styles, media coverage, in-house decision making and strategizing, ideological perspectives, and so on. The study can be seen as a partial if important and [End Page 157] creative effort to isolate the operations and impact of a specialized set of campaign dynamics. Shaw critiques the relevant academic research and, in particular, the writings directing attention away from the campaign and therefore directly or indirectly arguing its "minimalist" importance in shaping contests. The review of the literature and the availability and quality of data sources used in the study is persuasive. Not surprisingly, the book may make its greatest contribution in assessing the adaptation of campaign thinking (Karl Rove being the principal arbitrator) to maximize Electoral College advantages (as an example, party versus ideology favoring Bush-Cheney in assessing resource allocations at the state level). Based on such calculations, the states could be rank-ordered in relation to winnability (safe, battlegrounded, lost) for targeting financial allocations and candidate appearances, and for determining the nature of the strategy to be pursued. There were alternative strategies, too: offensive, attack in weak support and battleground states; defensive, campaign in states leaning to Bush and a handful of those favoring the opponent; or "high-risk," a singularly intense focus on the battleground states needed to prevail in the Electoral College. Of particular interest to me were the factors weighed to decide a state's importance and consequently the kind of campaign to be conducted there. These included voting histories, poll numbers, party organizational development and leadership support, strength and competitiveness of lower-level races, issue potential (issue positions were tailored to each state's outlook and values), and native son roots. Likewise, media markets were identified in relation both to the campaign's master plan and to cost-effectiveness in reaching the undecided and swing voters. In allocating resources to media markets across states, importance was placed on the state profile (core, leaning, or battleground) and competitiveness ("states where the race was clear and where TV advertising was relatively inexpensive tended to get more commercials and more visits"), and the strategic allocations favored in one campaign (2000) were closely correlated with its successor (2004) (73). Not surprisingly, "battleground states were inundated with both TV ads and visits from candidates," and despite intensive programming, "presidential and vice presidential appearances … varied much more with the movements of the opposition than the campaign's own Electoral College plan" (73). The Electoral College framework provides the boundaries within which each party's campaign...

Campaign Dynamics in Battleground and Nonbattleground States

Strategic considerations rooted in the Electoral College sys- tem of presidential elections compel presidential campaigns to allocate resources disproportionately to competitive states. In contemporary cam- paigns, this results in a situation in which many voters are entirely un- exposed to activities over the duration of the campaign. The implications of lopsided communications that relegate voters in uncom- petitive states to bystander status in presidential campaigns are potentially significant and merit greater scrutiny. In this study, I analyze how the dy- namics of voter preferences in uncompetitive states compare to those in battleground states. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Elec- tion Survey, I find that the preferences of voters in battleground states are more variable but more stable than their counterparts in nonbattleground states. As expected, I also find stronger evidence of effects in battleground states. Survey researchers routinely probe Americans' presidential vote intentions well in advance of Election Day (Crespi 1988). Scholars have mined these data extensively to investigate the effects of events on dynamics (Gelman and King 1993; Holbrook 1996; Campbell 2000; Johnston, Hagen, and Jamieson 2004), but evidence of substantial movement in voter preferences that can be attributed to the presidential is rare. In their analyses of pres- idential elections between 1944 and 2000, for example, Wlezien and Erikson (2002, p. 978) show that the maximum range of preference variation over the fall campaign, after taking sampling error into account, is about six percentage points on average. Still, the authors conclude that, campaign events, broadly defined, do have meaningful effects, and that, (r)eal change in preferences remains and at least some meaningful portion carries over to Election Day.

Presidential Campaign Dynamics and the Ebb and Flow of Talk as a Moderator: Media Exposure, Knowledge, and Political Discussion

Presidential Campaign Dynamics and the Ebb and Flow of Talk as a Moderator: Media Exposure, Knowledge, and Political Discussion

The Aggregate Dynamics of Campaigns

AbstractDaily interactions between partisan elites, the media, and citizens are the driving dynamic of election campaigns and the central determinant of their outcomes. Accordingly, we develop a theory of campaign dynamics that departs from previous top-down models of campaign effects in its emphasis on the reciprocal campaign interactions between these actors. We examine these interactions with daily data on campaign expenditures, media coverage, and voter support in the 2000 presidential campaign. We find that partisan elites, the media, and citizens each played critical and interdependent roles in creating the dynamics of the campaign and producing the closest election in decades. We also find that the Gore campaign was hindered by its delayed responsiveness to the Bush campaign and its unwillingness to reinforce positive media coverage of Gore with increased campaign expenditures.

Can October Surprise? A Natural Experiment Assessing Late Campaign Effects

One consequence of the proliferation of vote-by-mail (VBM) in certain areas of the United States is the opportunity for voters to cast ballots weeks before Election Day. Understanding the ensuing effects of VBM on late campaign information loss has important implications for both the study of campaign dynamics and public policy debates on the expansion of convenience voting. Unfortunately, the self-selection of voters into VBM makes it difficult to casually identify the effect of VBM on election outcomes. We overcome this identification problem by exploiting a natural experiment, in which some precincts are assigned to be VBM-only based on an arbitrary threshold of the number of registered voters. We assess the effects of VBM on candidate performance in the 2008 California presidential primary via a regression discontinuity design. We show that VBM both increases the probability of selecting candidates who withdrew from the race in the interval after the distribution of ballots but before Election Day and affects the relative performance of candidates remaining in the race. Thus, we find evidence of late campaign information loss, pointing to the influence of campaign events and momentum in American politics, as well as the unintended consequences of convenience voting.

Modeling Campaign Dynamics on the Web in the 2008 National Annenberg Election Study

In 2000 and 2004, the National Annenberg Election Study (NAES) was an exclusively telephone‐based rolling cross‐section survey. For 2008, the fieldwork strategy is more diverse. This paper outlines the reasoning behind the transition and describes the new structure. Because of declining telephone response rates and diminished coverage of households by landlines, some of the sample has been moved to the web. This also enables the study to leverage the statistical power of its sample through panel re‐interviews, thanks to the high panel retention rate of the web supplier, Knowledge Networks (KN). Each wave will be released as a rolling cross‐section of households in the KN panel, with further provision for replenishment of the sample. Altogether, five waves will be released between October 2006 and January 2009.

The Psychological and Institutional Determinants of Early Voting

This article examines early voting, an institutional innovation whereby citizens can cast their ballots a time and location other than on election day and at the precinct place. Early voting has been proposed as way to expand the franchise, by making voting more convenient, and extend the franchise, by encouraging turnout among those segments of the population who are unable or unwilling to vote using traditional methods. The article draws on models of voter decision making that conceptualize voting as a choice reached under uncertainty. Voters vary by (a) their willingness to accept uncertainty, (b) their cognitive engagement with the campaign, and (c) their location in an institutional environment that makes early voting possible. We propose a multivariate model of early voting, contingent on a voter's prior levels of political information, level of fixed political beliefs, and political information activity. These are also interacted with the institutional context (laws and procedures that allow early voting). At the descriptive level, we find most of the expected demographic and attitudinal patterns: early voters are older, better educated, and more cognitively engaged in the campaign and in politics. Because national surveys are ill equipped to capture nuanced campaign dynamics, many of the statistically significant relationships disappear in multivariate analyses. Regardless, revealing differences emerge between midterm and presidential election years that allow us to make important inferences about the demographic and participatory characteristics of early voters.

Presidential Nominating Conventions: Past, Present and Future

Few aspects of the presidential selection process have changed as dramatically as nominating conventions have over the past half century or so. Once the epicenters of the proverbial smoke-filled rooms that all but decided presidential nominations, some argue that conventions are now mainly superficial, perfunctory and even superfluous affairs. These developments, influenced in large part by the ways in which political parties have adapted to institutional changes and growth in mass media, have essentially transformed the nature and role of conventions in modern campaigns. But conventions remain key political events that motivate and inform voters and that have the capacity to influence the dynamics of presidential campaigns. Conventions still matter and persist as useful political institutions.

Party profiles on the web: an analysis of the logfiles of non-partisan interactive political internet sites in the 2003 and 2004 election campaigns in Belgium

During recent election campaigns non-partisan party profile websites (PPWs) have become hugely popular in various countries with multiparty systems, sometimes even attracting 25 percent of all voters. On these interactive websites, PPW users respond to policy questions, and their answers are used to calculate the distance between their own preferences and party agendas, resulting in an individualized `party profile'. PPWs can be seen as one of the few innovations in election campaigning that fully exploit the internet's interactive opportunities. The analysis in this article of the log files of 2003 and 2004 Belgian PPWs demonstrate that PPW users tend to be highly educated, male and young. Party and policy preferences of late PPW users (the final days before the elections) are not more crystallized than those of early PPW users (40 days before the elections). The article concludes with speculation on what this finding might reveal about campaign dynamics.

Federalism and Front-loading

“Front-loading” primaries and caucuses—the movement of state delegate selection contests to the beginning of the nomination calendar—is problematic for the integrity of the presidential nominating system. Because it results from decentralized decision making by self-interested states, front-loading also poses a problem for federalism. Indeed, most proposed remedies for front-loading would impinge on federalism in some manner. In analyzing those remedies, one must assess their interaction with federalism both procedurally and substantively. For example, a federally imposed national primary would be harmful to federalism on both dimensions; regional primaries negotiated among states would be best for federalism procedurally but are of dubious efficacy; the national parties have an ambiguous relationship to federalism; and a change in federal campaign finance rules would seek to combine a centralized process with a decentralized result. The best solution might be to use available central levers to try to change campaign dynamics and thus the incentives for states to schedule their primaries early.

The Dynamics of Voter Decision Making Among Minor-Party Supporters: The 2000 Presidential Election in the United States

Minor party candidates are quite common in modern democratic elections, but we know relatively little about the decision-making process of minor-party supporters. An extensive panel dataset is used to examine the individual-level dynamics of Nader support in the United States during the 2000 presidential election campaign. A multinomial logit model is estimated to analyse the factors related to a Nader supporter's decision to switch support to Gore, to switch support to Bush or to remain loyal to Nader from one interview to the next. The Nader supporters most likely to switch to a major-party candidate were the most politically aware, partisans, those concerned about policy outcomes and respondents in competitive states. Nader supporters were also more likely to abandon the candidate at the ballot box rather than earlier in the campaign. These findings challenge existing expectations about campaign dynamics and appear to reflect strategic calculations on the part of Nader supporters.