Presidential Candidate Preference Research Articles

Racial Bias and U.S. Presidential Candidate Preference

Abstract Much research has suggested that Republican candidates in U.S. presidential elections benefit from voter bias against non-White groups. The present study supplements this research by including in the analysis bias against Whites. Estimates from the American National Election Studies 2020 Time Series Study indicated that a nontrivial percentage of the U.S. population has a bias that disfavors Whites, with this bias more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans. Further analyses estimated the extent to which the type of voter racial bias that favors Republican presidential candidates offsets the type of voter racial bias that favors Democratic presidential candidates. Estimates for the 2020 U.S. presidential election indicated that the two-party vote share for Donald Trump was higher among voters who rated Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians/Asian-Americans equal to each other on 0-to-100 feeling thermometers than among the full population of two-party voters, suggesting that Donald Trump was disadvantaged on net by the electorate including racially biased voters. These results call into question research that has used an unrepresentative set of racial attitudes to suggest that, in recent U.S. presidential elections, only Republican candidates have benefitted from racial bias among the electorate.

Androgyny and the 2020 US Presidential Election: The Benefits of a “Balanced” Ticket?

Data gathered from 667 respondents during the 2020 U S presidential election showed that, in contrast to previous studies of presidential leadership, the Ideal President was viewed as androgynous (i.e., balanced in masculine and feminine traits) rather than masculine. None of the four (President and Vice-President) major party candidates fit the ideal profile perfectly. Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Kamala Harris were perceived as higher on masculinity than femininity, whereas Joe Biden was perceived as higher in femininity than masculinity. Compared to the White male candidates, Harris, a woman of color, was most notably perceived as the opposite of her running mate Biden in both masculinity and femininity. Male and female respondents perceived the Ideal President differently, men as higher in masculinity than femininity and women as higher in femininity than masculinity. Respondents’ presidential candidate preferences were related to their descriptions of the Ideal President: Trump supporters perceived the Ideal President as higher in masculinity than femininity, whereas Biden supporters perceived the Ideal President as balanced in masculinity and femininity. The Democratic ticket as a whole represented a balanced team, with one candidate higher on femininity and the other higher on masculinity; in essence, an androgynous ticket. In contrast, the Republican ticket as a whole represented a decidedly masculine team. That the Democratic ticket clearly won the election (both the popular vote and the electoral college vote) with an androgynous ticket raises the question of whether the relationship between gender and leader stereotypes has shifted towards a more level playing field for female vis-à-vis male candidates for leader roles.

Testing and unpacking the effects of digital fake news: on presidential candidate evaluations and voter support

There is growing worldwide concern that the rampant spread of digital fake news (DFN) via new media technologies is detrimentally impacting Democratic elections. However, the actual influence of this recent Internet phenomenon on electoral decisions has not been directly examined. Accordingly, this study tested the effects of attention to DFN on readers’ Presidential candidate preferences via an experimental web-survey administered to a cross-sectional American sample (N = 552). Results showed no main effect of exposure to DFN on participants’ candidate evaluations or vote choice. However, the perceived believability of DFN about the Democratic candidate negatively mediated evaluations of that candidate—especially amongst far-right ideologues. These results suggest that DFN may at worst reinforce the partisan dispositions of mostly politically conservative Internet users, but does not cause or induce conversions in these dispositions. Overall, this study contributes novel experimental evidence, indicating that the potential electoral impact of DFN, although concerning, is strongly conditional on a reciprocal interaction between message receptibility and a pre-existing right-wing ideological orientation. The said impact is, therefore, likely narrow in scope.

The Politics of Beauty: The Effects of Partisan Bias on Physical Attractiveness

Does politics cause people to be perceived as more or less attractive? As a type of social identity, party identifiers often exhibit in-group bias, positively evaluating members of their own party and, especially under conditions of competition, negatively evaluating out-party members. The current experiment tests whether political in-party and out-party status affects perceptions of the physical attractiveness of target persons. In a nationally representative internet sample of U.S. adults during the 2012 presidential election, we presented participants with photos of individuals and varied information about their presidential candidate preference. Results indicate that partisans, regardless of gender, rate target individuals as less attractive if they hold a dissimilar candidate preference. Female partisans, however, were more likely to rate target persons as more physically attractive when they held a similar candidate preference whereas no such effect was found for male partisans.

The Public Values of Political Preference

One of the traditionally central characteristics of public administration is its political neutrality. This article examines the connections between public service values and political preferences including party affiliation (Republican/Democrat), ideology (conservative/liberal), and presidential candidate preference (Romney/Obama). The study reports the results of a national survey (n = 1541) that elicits citizen expectations of government and party affiliation, ideological preference, and presidential candidate preference. Using regression analysis and multidimensional scaling, the article explores the empirical connections between public values and political preferences—and the ways in which the value structures of people with different political preferences differ in fundamental ways.

Evaluating the Impact of Vice Presidential Selection on Voter Choice

One holder of the office of vice president, John Nance Garner (1868-1967), reputedly said that [t]he vice-presidency ain't worth a pitcher of warm piss. (1) However, as one heartbeat away from the presidency, in the modern red phone era, the importance of the vice president has generally been thought to have grown. And, certainly in 2008, there was almost as much hullabaloo about the Republican vice presidential pick as there was about John McCain himself, with a long period of time in which media and blogosphere coverage of Sarah Palin was at a fever pitch. There have been only a few attempts to determine the effect of vice presidential selection on presidential vote totals (see Adkison 1982; Romero 2001; Wattenberg 1995; Wattenberg and Grofman 1993). As voters now must take the president and the vice president as a package deal, it would seem that sometimes voters would be unhappy with the package, preferring the presidential candidate of the Republicans (Democrats) to that of the Democrats (Republicans), but having the reverse preferences for vice president. Or, voters might have strong preferences for one party's president over the other's, but no preferences vis-a-vis the vice presidency, or vice versa. Adkison (1982) examines both aggregate and individual-level data on candidate preferences, but not systematically and only for a limited time period. Romero (2001) attempts to reconcile aggregate-level analysis indicating that vice presidential candidates offer little to the ticket in terms of home state or regional advantages with some individual-level analyses of voting propensities that suggest vice presidential candidates can have a nontrivial impact on vote choice. He concludes that the individual-level analysis overstates the impact of vice presidential preferences on vote choice, after controlling for rationalization of the vote. Most similar to this current study are Wattenberg and Grofman (1993) and Wattenberg (1995). Our study improves on these earlier attempts by extending the data into four additional elections (all in a time period in which the office of the vice presidency has been widely considered to be increasing in importance and prominence) and by examining all possible preference pairings with respect to presidential and vice presidential thermometer ratings. We, too, find limited vice presidential effects, but we would emphasize that the effects we find are nontrivial in magnitude. Using data from the National Election Study, (2) we look at the likelihood of voting for the Republican presidential ticket among nine categories of voters, whom we label DD, DN, DR, ND, NN, NR, RD, RN, RR, with the first letter indicating which party's presidential candidate is preferred, and the second letters indicating which party's vice presidential candidate is preferred (with N indicating no preference reported, or a tie). We hypothesize that presidential preferences should, on balance, be more important than vice presidential preferences, but we also expect that vice presidential candidate preference should matter. In particular, we expect to observe a generally lexicographic ordering among these nine preferences--that is, the likelihood of indicating a vote preference for the Republican presidential ticket should increase monotonically as we move from DD to RR. As shown in Table 1, this expectation is confirmed when we look at data averaged over the period 1968-2008, and, as shown in Figure 1, it is generally true for each of the individual presidential election years as well. Indeed, on average, those with fully consistent preferences vote consistently with such preferences between 96% (for the DDs) and 98% (for the RRs) of the time, and voters with no preference for either president or vice president (NN voters) behave, on average, rather like coin flips, with a 50% chance of voting Republican. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] There are several different ways to parse the information contained in Table 1 and Figure 1 in terms of developing measures of the impact of vice presidential preferences on voter choices. …

The Poll Results Hypothesis

This empirical study seeks to broaden the interpretation of the rational voter model so as to reflect the potential impact of the results of polls of likely voters’ Presidential candidate preferences on the expected benefits of voting and hence on the voter participation rate. This study introduces the poll results hypothesis: in any given state, given the existence of the Electoral College, the greater the lead of a principal Presidential candidate over his/her closest rival as revealed in polls of likely voters, the lower, for at least some portion of prospective voters, the expected gross benefits of voting in that state and hence the lower the aggregate voter participation rate in that state. In a cross-section study of the 50 states during the 2004 general election, it is found, after allowing for a variety of other factors, that the greater the lead (as revealed in polls of likely voters) of either of the principal Presidential candidates over the other in any given state, the lower the voter turnout rate in that state.

Disagreement, Ambivalence, and Engagement: The Political Consequences of Heterogeneous Networks

Individuals with similar political orientations may find themselves in dissimilar social and political surroundings, with important consequences for the flow of political information among citizens. Analyses of data from the post‐election survey of the 1900 National Election Study show that some individuals reside within extensive networks of political discussion and communication, whereas others are politically isolated. With respect to presidential candidate preference in 1900, some citizens in networks were surrounded by discussants who agreed with their preference, others by discussants who held ambiguous and undetermined preferences, and still others by discussants who held politically divergent preferences. These preference distributions have various implications for the formation of political opinion and for levels of political engagement and turnout.

Political Sophistication and Economic Voting in the American Electorate: A Theory of Heterogeneous Attribution

This article presents a theory of heterogeneous attribution, in which an individual's ability to make causal associations depends on his level of political sophistication. Specifically, we maintain that political sophistication dramatically influences the relative importance of personal and national economic judgments in shaping presidential candidate preference. Pocketbook voting, we argue, should be common only among relatively voters, who are able to make the associative linkage between changes in their personal financial status and governmental policy. Additionally, we hypothesize that evaluations should be most influential for less voters. Low sophisticates, we argue, will tend to assume that the national economy is entirely in the President's hands (and vote accordingly), whereas more voters understand that the economy is affected by many actors and conditions that are largely beyond the President's control. Testing our theory using data from 1992, 1996, and 1998, we find strong support for our hypotheses. T here is little doubt that changing economic conditions profoundly influence voters' electoral decisions. Since the work of Kramer (1971), a large body of research has accumulated indicating that electoral results at both the state and national levels are driven at least partly by economic fluctuations (Tufte 1975; Hibbs, Rivers, and Vasilatos 1982; Chappell and Keech 1988). There is, however, less consensus on how individual voters, many of whom only the fuzziest of notions about many aspects of politics and government, (Markus 1988, 137), evaluate the economic information they receive and connect it to the political world. Do voters assess political candidates based on their personal economic well being (the pocketbook voting hypothesis), or on the perceived health of the national economy (the sociotropic voting hypothesis)? The answer depends centrally on how voters attribute causal responsibility for changes in both personal and national economic conditions, a process that, we argue, is strongly influenced by the voter's level of political sophistication. In this research, we explicitly incorporate political sophistication into the model of economic voting. For years, researchers have debated the degree of sophistication that voters bring to bear when making politically relevant evaluations (Suzuki 1991; Mackuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1992). At the macro-level, the debate has hinged largely on the difference between voter evaluations based on retrospective assessments and those guided by more sophisticated prospective economic forecasts. This dichotomy is typified by Mackuen, Erikson, and Stimson's (1992) distinction between retrospective voters, or cognitive peasants, and prospective voters, or cognitive bankers. Micro-level theorists have also noted the importance of

Late-deciding voters in presidential elections

This article examines the behavior of voters who decide on their presidential candidate preferences within the final two weeks of the presidential campaigns. Relying on data from American National Election Studies (ANES) for elections, between 1972 and 1988, we demonstrate that late deciders are different from other voters in a variety of respects. They are less involved politically and far less predictable in their behavior than other voters. More significantly, we find that the candidate preferences of late deciders are not determined by the conventional political forces that motivate other voters. Rather, the choices that late deciders make appear to be nearly random in character. The implications of these findings for the analysis of electorates are discussed.

Government policy and citizen passion: A study of issue publics in contemporary America

This article describes the findings of a program of research exploring the cognitive and behavioral consequences of passionate concern about government policy issues. American citizens vary a great deal in terms of the personal importance they attach to their attitudes on particular policy issues. Citizens whose policy attitudes are especially important to them are likely to think frequently about those attitudes, to perceive competing candidates as being relatively polarized on the issue, and to form presidential candidate preferences on the basis of those attitudes. Also, policy attitudes that citizens consider personally important are highly resistant to change and are therefore especially stable over long periods of time. The American public appears to be structured into many small issue publics, each composed of citizens who are passionately concerned about a single issue. Most Americans fall into very few issue publics, the particular ones being determined by each individual's unique self-interests, social identifications, and cherished values. The implications of these findings for the workings of democracies are discussed.

The role of attitude importance in social evaluation: a study of policy preferences, presidential candidate evaluations, and voting behavior.

According to a number of social psychological theories, attitudes toward government policies that people consider important should have substantial impact on presidential candidate preferences, and unimportant attitudes should have relatively little impact. Surprisingly, the accumulated evidence evaluating this hypothesis offers little support for it. This article reexamines the hypothesis, applying more appropriate analysis methods to data collected during the 1968, 1980, and 1984 American presidential election campaigns. The impact of policy attitudes on candidate preferences was indeed found to depend on the importance of those attitudes, just as theory suggests. The analysis also documented two mechanisms of this increased impact: People for whom a policy attitude is important perceive larger differences between competing candidates' attitudes, and important attitudes appear to be more accessible in memory than unimportant ones.

Candidate choice before the convention: The democrats in 1984

This paper analyzes prenomination presidential candidate preferences, using data from the Center for Political Studies' 1984 Continuous Monitoring Survey. Among Democratic identifiers, affective evaluations of the candidates were the strongest influence on candidate preference, but judgments concerning the candidates' nomination prospects and electability also influenced candidate preference, as did strength of party identification. The outcomes of particular primaries strongly influenced voters' opinions regarding the candidates' nomination prospects and, indirectly, their electability. Walter Mondale's decisive victory in the New York primary on April 3 apparently led to a “bandwagon effect” among Democratic voters across the nation; that is, the perception that Mondale was very likely to win the nomination produced a dramatic shift in candidate preference toward Mondale and away from Gary Hart.

College Students' Values and Presidential Preference in the 1980 Election

Rokeach (1973) proposed a model of political ideologies based on the extent to which people value freedom and equality. Socialists are defined as persons who value freedom and equality highly, capitalists place a high value on freedom but a low value on equality, communists place a low value on freedom but a high value on equality, and facists place a low value on both freedom and equality. In the United States, liberals are predicted to have the socialist value pattern and conservatives are predicted to have the capitalist value pattern. Rokeach (1973) successfully tested these predictions during the 1968 U.S. presidential election, and this study attempted to replicate these findings during the 1980 election. The subjects were 423 students (235 female, 188 male) at a Southern university. They ranged from 16 to 59 yr. of age (M = 19 8 yr.). There were 361 whites, 52 blzcks, and 10 students who did not indicate their race. These subjects completed Rokeach's Value Survey and indicated their presidential candidate preference during September or October of 1980. Eleven subjects were dropped from the study because they failed to indicate preferences for a candidate. Reagan was preferred by 175 subjects, Carter by 172 subjects, and Anderson by 65 subjects. Rankings for each of the 36 values on the Value Survey were converted to z-scores (Hays, 1967) and entered into a one-way analysis of variance, with preference for a candidate as the independent variable. Where significant Fs occurred (p < .05), Tukey B tests were used to compare individual means. If the Rokeach model is correct supporters of conservative candidates should value equalicy less than supporters of liberal candidates but no differences should exist for values placed on freedom. The results are consistent with this model. Reagan supporters (M = -.47) place less value on equality than supporters of Anderson (M = -.18) or Carter (M = M.20). Supporters of Anderson (M = .39), Carter (M = .40), and Reagan (M = .42) do not differ significantly in their valuing of freedom. Among the other 34 values, Carter's supporters value a world at peace and happiness more rhan do Reagan's supporters. Anderson's supporters value being imaginative more, but obtaining salvation less, rhan supporters of Caner and Reagan.