Presidential Primaries Research Articles

Differing Uses of YouTube During the 2008 U.S. Presidential Primary Election

In this uses and effects study, we explored YouTube use during the 2008 U.S. presidential primaries. Survey results suggested that traditional news sources (i.e., network television) were the source of content most often accessed on YouTube for political information. Participants used YouTube predominantly for habitual entertainment and information-seeking purposes. But there was a strong relationship between political surveillance motivation and watching news, political ads, direct-to-camera videos, and campaign ads, suggesting YouTube could be a significant medium in future elections.

Looking Beyond the Voting Constituency: A Study of Campaign Donation Solicitations in the 2008 Presidential Primary and General Election

In order to overcome collective action problems inherent in campaign fundraising, political campaigns solicit donors through material, solidary, and ideological appeals. Over the course of the campaign, the percentage of donors motivated by these different types of incentives are roughly equal; however, no previous study has differentiated between those who donate during primary elections and those donating during general elections. This study of campaign fundraising solicitations sent out via e-mail during the 2008 presidential campaign by the two major-party candidates finds evidence that the campaigns recognize a difference between the primary election financial constituencies and the general election financial constituencies and that campaigns target the types of appeals that they send to potential donors accordingly.

Situational Gamblers: Prospect Theory and the Commonalities of Presidential Campaign Management

In this article, prospect theory helps shed light on an underdeveloped topic in political science: the management strategies of presidential campaigns. In particular, prospect theory is used to understand critical decisions made by the campaigns of Edward Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush during three critical junctures of the 1980 presidential primary season. Prospect theory's central finding—that individuals are risk averse when facing gains and risk acceptant when facing losses—provides a systematic and empirically grounded explanation for seemingly puzzling decisions made by each campaign. In a broad sense, this essay begins the process of developing a general perspective on presidential campaign management.

What Do We Want in a Presidential Primary - An Election Law Perspective

Although the 2008 presidential primaries were in many ways a resounding success in terms of turnout, attention, and sheer excitement, many noted the pressing need for reform. States were rushing to hold their primaries sooner than ever, giving rise to "Super-Duper Tuesday," where twenty-four states had their primaries on the same day. The Democratic nominee at one point looked like it might be decided by the votes of so-called "Superdelegates"-party regulars beholden to no one. As the Democratic nomination contest wore on, Rush Limbaugh, in "Operation Chaos," encouraged his "dittoheads" to raid the party primaries of the Democrats, tilting the vote against Obama, the presumptive nominee. And there were continued grumblings about the disproportionate influence Iowa and New Hampshire had on the whole process. Fortunately, reform is in the air. The Democratic National Committee's "Commission for Change" has released its proposals for altering how the Democrats run their primaries. It is unclear how, if at all, the Republicans will follow suit. But how are we to evaluate such proposals? What do we want in a presidential primary? My Article, borrowing from the vital field of election law, proposes a set of values by which we should evaluate the presidential primaries. By investigating the various players in the nomination process-voters, parties, and the state-I isolate three major sets of "constitutional values" that are implicated in the presidential primary system: (1) the right of voters to an effective and meaningful vote, (2) the interests of the political parties in their autonomy and ideological purity (as well as in electoral victory), and (3) the concern of state and federal governments that the nomination process be legitimate, competitive, and produce a candidate who is capable of governing. Finally, I propose a master value-that of "deliberation"-that both explains and unifies the various competing values at play in the primaries. And I analyze the two major proposals for reforming the primaries, a national primary and a series of regional primaries, as well as the recommendations of the Democratic National Committee, in light of the goal of achieving "deliberative primaries." Last question-and I'm not sure if you even have a sense or if it's even appropriate to speculate-but do you think the new rules will favor a certain type of candidate? Does it favor a candidate who surges early like in the old Iowa and New Hampshire model, or a candidate who is strong regionally, or a candidate with wide but not deep support across the whole country? Rules do matter ....

Mini Symposium: Race and the 2008 Presidential Election

The Barack Obama poster was an iconic image of Obama's political campaign (Figure 1). A stencil portrait of Obama in red, white and blue had the words hope, change, or progress under the image of Obama. It was created and distributed widely on posters, digital images, and other campaign paraphernalia during the 2008 election season. The image became one of the most widely recognized symbols of Obama's campaign message, spawning many variations. The poster echoed Martin Luther King's historic fight for civil rights for African Americans. While Martin Luther King fought for voting rights for African Americans, Obama fought to become the nation's political leader. Not only was hope and change the message of the Obama campaign, but the candidate himself represented America's changing demographic face. On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama became the president-elect and the first African American president of the United States. The same year (2008) Latinos constituted over 15 percent of America's population, African Americans 13 percent, and Asian Americans 5 percent. Combined, these groups represented over one-third of the population. White non- Hispanics accounted for just 65 percent of the population, down from 85 percent in 1960. Projections by the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that by 2050 white non-Hispanics will account for only 50 percent of America's population, with Latinos 30 percent. Of the nation's children in 2050, a majority (62 percent) are expected to be of a minority ethnicity, up from 44 percent today. Diversity is a theme that will grow in importance in the coming decades. A decade earlier, Rodney Hero (1999), in Faces of Inequality: Social Diversity in American Politics, wrote of an unstoppable demographic force of race/ethnicity reshaping American politics. In reviewing the book, Jennifer Hochchild (Princeton) stated, Academics are finally relearning what politicians (and V. O. Key) have known all along-that the racial and ethnic composition of a state is crucial for determining the political structure and policy outcomes within that state. Five decades earlier, V. O. Key (1949) defined Southern Politics by race. Key examined the underlying forces that structured politics in Southern states, putting black disenfranchisement at the center. But the widespread explicit racism that Key documented is uncommon today. The election of Barack Obama as the first African American president is evidence for many that the equality dreamed of during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movements has been, in some part, achieved. Yet scholars of race and politics continue to highlight the importance of race and ethnicity in modern social, economic, and political inequality. There is some evidence that Obama's race was a significant disadvantage in the 2008 election. Despite his clear electoral victory over John McCain, some argue that Obama's winning margin was much smaller than expected given the state of the economy and historically low approval rating of the incumbent president (Lewis-Beck and Tien 2008, 2009). The question of race was ever present in the 2008 presidential election. However, there is considerable resistance from scholars and political pundits to the idea that there was racist voting in 2008. This mini symposium challenges that assumption with a variety of empirical analyses of white voters, drawing on both aggregate-level and individual-level data. The articles also explore the 2008 elections in terms of mobilization of minority voters and the growing influence of Latino voters. It concludes by exploring the spillover effects of increased minority turnout on a critical issue election (same-sex marriage). Drawing on a variety of advanced statistical methods and theoretical lenses, the articles shed new light on our understanding of diversity in American democracy-as white, black, Latino, and Asian Americans seek representation. Drawing on papers originally presented at a Shambaugh conference at the University of Iowa in 2008, this mini symposium begins by examining white voting patterns nationally in the presidential primaries and general election using aggregate data. …

Intermedia Agenda-Setting and Political Activism: MoveOn.org and the 2008 Presidential Election

This study tested for intermedia agenda-setting effects among explicitly partisan news media coverage and political activist group, citizen activist, and official campaign advertisements on YouTube—all in support of the same candidate. The setting for this investigation was the political activist organization MoveOn.org's “Obama in 30 Seconds” online ad contest, which was held during the 2008 U.S. presidential election primaries. The data provided evidence of first- and second-level agenda-setting relationships. Partial correlations revealed that the citizen activist issue agenda, as articulated in the contest ads, was most strongly related to the partisan media coverage, rather than to the issue priorities of the official Obama or MoveOn.org ads on YouTube. These results extend the intermedia agenda-setting framework to political activist communication efforts and consumer-generated content.

Barack Versus Hillary: Race, Gender, and Political Cartoon Imagery of the 2008 Presidential Primaries

This study examines the representations of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in political cartoon imagery during the 2008 presidential primaries, with specific attention toward portrayals of race and gender themes. An analysis of primary campaign— and election-related cartoons from 57 American cartoonists found Hillary Clinton was featured in more political cartoons than was Barack Obama, but they were often featured together in some competitive representation. Cartoon imagery of Obama identified weaknesses of his campaign but oftentimes portrayed the issue of race in favorable images. Cartoon imagery of Clinton focused on gender-related themes of her emotions and appearance but also went beyond gender themes to highlight her determination to remain in the race. When both candidates were featured, or portrayed along with Republican nominee John McCain, contrasts of race and gender were prominent in political cartoon imagery.

Retrospective Voting in Presidential Primaries

Though retrospectiveperformance evaluations are now widely appreciated as a major influence on voting in general elections, their influence in presidentialprimaries has rarely been noticed. U sing exit polls conducted by major media organizations over the last nine election cycles, this article shows that retrospective voting is an important, indeed dominant, factor in two types of situations: when an incumbent president is running for reelection, and when an incumbent vice president is seeking to become his party's next presidential candidate. Thisfinding, inturn, helps explain two significant institutional features of the contemporary presidential nomination process: why most recent presidents have been renominated without much difficulty, and why the vice presidency has become such a good launching pad for presidential candidacies. How do voters make reasonably intelligent voting decisions, given that most of them are not terribly interested in politics, follow it only intermittently, and therefore do not have a great deal of information about the candidates and their issue positions? Political scientists have developed a number of answers to this question, but perhaps the most commonly invoked is the notion of retrospective voting. According to this theory, voters are less concerned with a candidate's or party's promises about future policy than with their past performance in office, particularly their success or failure in achieving such hard, tangible outcomes as peace and prosperity. Whereas information about campaign promises is costly to acquire and difficult to evaluate, most citizens develop relatively solid perceptions about the performance of an incumbent officeholder or administration simply by going about their normal lives and paying a minimal amount of attention to the news. The body of scholarly work bearing out the general theory of retrospective voting is, by now, quite large. The two most influential statements are V. O. Key's The Responsible

Cracked and Shattered Ceilings: Gender, Race, Religion, Age, and the Ideal Candidate

Image as a transaction between what candidates say and do and the way voters compare that behavior with their personal vision of what candidates should be or do stimulates at least four critical questions important to political communication. First, what qualities or attributes do voters believe are important for a presidential candidate to possess—what are the dimensions of the “ideal” presidential candidate? Second, do these views change with time and with candidates, or are they fairly consistent across elections? Third, were the unique candidate demographics (religion, race, gender, and age) apparent in the 2008 New Hampshire primary important to voters? Finally, do the evaluative dimensions of “idealness” differ in relationship to the gender, age, or party affiliation of those who attend political rallies? Answers are determined from results of a survey of citizens attending political rallies in New Hampshire during the 1988 through 2008 presidential primaries.

The Disappearing God gap?: religion in the 2008 presidential election

1. Introduction 2. Religion and Presidential Campaigns in Perspective 3. Religion and the Political Landscape in 2008 4. Religion and the 2008 Presidential Primaries 5. Religion and the Summer Interlude 6. Religion and the Fall Campaign 7. Religion and Election Day: Voter Mobilization in 2008 8. Religion and Election Day: Voting Patterns 9. The God Gap Revisited TABLES REFERENCES INDEX

Social Media and Politics: Theoretical and Methodological Considerations in Designing a Study of Political Engagement

Web 2.0 has become the buzz word describing a plethora of social media available on the internet, includingblogs, photo and file sharing systems (e.g., Flickr, SlideShare, YouTube), and social networking sites (e.g., Friendster, MySpace, SecondLife). Although these media are largely designed for personal presentation, political speech and action sometime emerge, such as in postings protesting government actions on YouTube, creation of candidate headquarters in SecondLife, and utilization of still image and video functionalities on mobile phones during demonstrations and police confrontations. Last year, as candidates began preparing for the U.S. Presidential Primaries, CNN coined the term YouTube-ification of Politics to describe this development. From a perspective ascribing importance to everyday settings as venues for political expression, these Internet-based social media have become both the tools for and sites of politics. The question, however, is how such manifestations of political life can be empirically investigated within a social science theoretical framework.

A critical discourse analysis of the debates between Republicans and Democrats over the continuation of war in Iraq

This paper is intended to show how a single reality, that is the continuation of war in Iraq by the American troops, is presented and viewed by the two major American political parties’ (Republican and Democratic) candidates of the US presidential primaries of 2008. In this study, van Dijk’s (2004) framework adopted from Politics, ideology and discourse is used to detect discursive structures within the transcripts of the candidates’ speeches and discover the ideologies underlying them. The macro strategies of 'positive self-representation' and 'negative other- representation' (which are intimately tied up with 'Polarization' of in group vs. out group ideologies or US-THEM) plus the other 25 more subtle strategies have turned out to be very accurate criteria for the evaluation of attitudes, and opinions. The findings of this study can be conducive to expanding readers’ critical thinking abilities in comprehension and production of language.

State political culture and support for Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries

Though ideologically similar, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appealed to different types of voters in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and demographically the candidates’ support varied considerably. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, we find that state political culture played an outsized role in determining which candidate emerged victorious in a particular state. When the size of demographic groups in the 2008 Democratic primaries are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state political characteristics and Daniel Elazar's state political culture typology, political culture proves to be an important determinant of the level of support given to Obama in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are more likely to have given Obama a greater share of the primary vote and states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were less likely to support Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

The Primary Purpose of Presidential Primaries

The Primary Purpose of Presidential Primaries

Primary politics: how presidential candidates have shaped the modern nominating system

The 2008 presidential primaries produced more drama than many general election campaigns. John McCain overcame the near-implosion of his campaign to capture the Republican nomination by March, despite a strong challenge from quotable pastor-turned-governor Mike Huckabee. Hillary Clinton entered the Democratic race as the heavy favorite, only to fall to a first-term senator from Illinois in a battle that lasted into July. Democratic delegations from Florida and Michigan were unseated and reseated; superdelegates took to the airwaves; and millions of Americans heard of the robot rule for the first time. In Primary Politics , political insider Elaine Kamarck explains how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today. Her focus is the largely untold story of how presidential candidates since the early 1970s have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change. She describes how candidates have sought to manipulate the sequencing of primaries to their advantage and how Iowa and New Hampshire came to dominate the system. She analyzes the rules that are used to translate votes into delegates, paying special attention to the Democrats' twenty-year fight over proportional representation. Kamarck illustrates how candidates have used the resulting delegate counts to create momentum, and she discusses the significance of the modern nominating convention. Drawing on meticulous research, interviews with key figures in both parties, and years of experience, this book explores one of the most important questions in American politics --how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years.

Priming Bush and Iraq in 2008: A Survey Experiment

Using a question-order experiment, half the respondents in a national RDD (random digit dial) likely voter survey taken just prior to the 2008 Presidential Primary election were primed to think about President Bush and the war in Iraq before making their candidate choice. Results show that the priming had a significant effect on their candidate choice, and that priming individuals to think about the war significantly aided the candidacy of eventual Democratic nominee Barack Obama, more than doubling his support, and hurt then Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani, cutting his support almost in half.

Long Lines at Polling Stations? Observations from an Election Day Field Study

This pilot study represents the first systematic attempt to determine how common lines are on Election Day, at what times of day lines are most likely to form, what are the bottlenecks in the voting process, and how long it takes an average citizen to cast his or her ballot. This study highlights the importance of evaluating polling station operations as a three-step process: arrival, check-in, and casting a ballot. We collected data during the 2008 presidential primary election in California, measuring the efficiency of the operational components of 30 polling stations across three counties. We found statistically significant, and meaningful, variation in the service rates of poll workers and voting technology. Our findings should better help election officials make critical decisions about the allocation of critical resources.

Web 2.0 and Politics: The 2008 U.S. Presidential Election and an E-Politics Research Agenda

The Internet was a major factor in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and has become an important tool for political communication and persuasion. Yet, information systems research is generally silent on the role of the Internet in politics. In this paper, we argue that IS is positioned to enhance understanding of the influence of the Internet on politics, and, more specifically, the process of election campaigning using Internet-based technologies such as Web 2.0. In this paper, we discuss how these technologies can change the nature of competition in politics and replace or complement traditional media. Our empirical study on how Web 2.0 technologies were used by the candidates leading up to the 2008 U.S. presidential primaries sheds light on how these technologies influenced candidate performance. Finally, we outline a research agenda highlighting where IS can contribute to the academic discourse on e-politics.

The Reconfiguration of E-Campaign Practices in Korea

The dominance of the US model of electioneering in many countries worldwide seems less obvious when it comes to e-campaigning and its consequent influence on electoral results. This article details present e-campaign practices in South Korea, probably the most wired (and wireless) country in the world. By examining a case study of the 2007 presidential primaries of the Grand National Party (GNP), the largest opposition party in the South Korean National Assembly, this article explores how the online political climate of the country has evolved since the 16th presidential election held in 2002, the result of which was widely regarded as an ‘Internet victory’. Based on the outcomes from webometrics, the study discusses the extent to which the candidates’ applications of their campaign websites shape and are shaped by offline political dynamics and their overall campaign strategies.

“Not Ready to Make Nice”

This article is based on a political survey of 600 members of the United Steelworkers (USW) in three battleground states (Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania) and focus group interviews with USW local leadership and activist members. The focus of the research is on assessing union member perceptions of the three top candidates from the 2008 presidential primaries (Hillary Clinton, Barrack Obama, and John McCain) and how these perceptions were influenced by race, class, and gender. The survey provided data on how respondents voted during the primary and on their issue positions, with particular attention to the issues they deemed most important in determining their vote. Respondents were also asked about other factors that influenced their vote, including their own demographic profile, union and work backgrounds, and their perspective on personal characteristics of the candidates. Analysis of the survey data and focus group interviews revealed that while race and gender did influence voting behavior, class identity also mattered greatly as union members demonstrated a strong preference for a partisan, working-class advocate.