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    The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections
    The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections
    The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections
    Ebook52 pages37 minutes

    The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections

    By Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien

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    About this ebook

    Do voters cast ballots for the candidates whose positions best match their own? Or does the race for president come down to who runs the most effective campaign? In their book, The Timeline of Presidential Elections, published in 2012, Erikson and Wlezien documented how both factors come into play. Having amassed data from national polls covering presidential elections from 1952 to 2008, they could track how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. But they wanted to know whether Barak Obama’s historic 2012 campaign would follow the same pattern.
     
    This e-book both presents the central arguments from Timeline and updates the statistical analysis to include data from 2012.  The authors also use the 2012 presidential campaign as a test of the empirical patterns they found in the previous fifteen elections.  They show that Obama’s campaign conforms to their projections, and they confirm that it is through campaigns that voters are made aware of--or not made aware of--fundamental factors like candidates’ policy positions that determine which ticket will get their votes. In other words, fundamentals matter, but only because of campaigns. The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections will be useful in courses on the election process.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateFeb 26, 2014
    ISBN9780226184173
    The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections

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      Book preview

      The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections - Robert S. Erikson

      The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections

      Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien

      The University of Chicago Press

      Chicago and London

      The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections is adapted and expanded from portions of The Timeline of Presidential Elections by Robert S. Erikson and Christopher Wlezien.

      © 2012, 2014 by The University of Chicago

      All rights reserved

      Chicago Shorts edition 2014

      ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18417-3

      Contents

      Introduction

      The Campaign Timeline and Electoral Preferences

      The Polls

      Poll Dynamics

      Fundamentals of the Campaign

      The Sources of Change

      The Individual Level

      The Timeline of Presidential Elections and the 2012 Campaign

      Notes

      References

      Introduction

      Who will win the 2016 presidential election? As of this writing in early 2013, Hillary Clinton leads all Republican contenders when matched in trial-heat polls. With someone other than Hillary on the Democratic ticket (e.g., Biden), some Republican candidates (e.g., Christie) are quite competitive. But are these early polls very informative? That is, are they useful bellwethers?

      History tells us that trial-heat polls are essentially useless before the actual year of the election, even in those election cycles when the eventual major party nominees are widely anticipated in advance. Further indicators such as the president’s approval rating or even economic conditions do little better when applied before the actual election year. To predict the winner of the 2016 presidential election, we must await the events of 2016.

      Looking even farther ahead, we can consider the situation on the eve of the next election. Historically, when the election is only days away, the anticipated electoral outcome is clear, with trial-heat polls revealing the likely winner or (in rare instances) a true toss-up, as in 1960 or 2000. We can contrast this near certainty to the state of affairs near the beginning of the election year. At that early vantage point, the emerging electoral outlook is quite hazy, with polls and other potential electoral indicators offering little basis, statistically-speaking, for making a prediction. But how does the electoral terrain shift from A (January) to B (November)?

      Based on the history of presidential polls, we track the shift from fuzzy forecast to confident prediction. And we try to identify the variables that account for this change over the campaign timeline and when it occurs. These are the goals of the current e-book and its predecessor, The Timeline of Presidential Elections: How Campaigns Do (and Do Not) Matter.

      Because Timeline was published in advance of the 2012 election, it did not incorporate data from the 2012 campaign. It did analyze polls and other data measured during the fifteen presidential campaigns, 1952–2008. In this e-book, we present the central arguments of Timeline, while updating the statistical analysis to include 2012 data. In one sense, what we do here is exploit the 2012 campaign as an out-of-sample test of the empirical regularities reported in Timeline based on the previous fifteen elections.

      Writing Timeline taught us quite a lot. We found that polls from the beginning of the election year reveal almost nothing about the final vote. Preferences start to come into focus

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