Campaigns, Presidential

FOR MOST OF the 1800s through the mid-1900s, presidential campaigns were largely party-centric affairs in which candidates rarely campaigned actively for the office. Broad coalitions of state and local party organizations worked at the grassroots level to mobilize voters in support of the party's nominee. Party-centric campaigns [Page 88]gradually gave way to candidate-centric campaigns as a result of two broad trends. First, local party organizations decayed throughout much of the country, making it more difficult to use party frameworks to communicate with, and mobilize, voters. Second, the emergence of technologies such as radio, television, and computers enabled candidates to campaign for votes outside of traditional party organizational frameworks. Modern presidential campaigns feature the candidate with political parties playing supporting roles, especially the labor-intensive voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Today, candidates actively seek the office, building a campaign organization and raising funds; choosing the issues, policy positions, and priorities of the campaign; using advertising and the media to appeal to supporters; and standing as the personification of their political party in the election.

There are various views on presidential campaigns. Journalists focus on the day-to-day action and events of campaigns, generally attributing success or failure to candidate strategies, personalities, speeches, or gaffes. Most political scientists view campaigns as spectacles with minimal effects on election outcomes, attributing success or failure mainly to the stable, underlying factors that influence most voters' decisions even before the nominees are confirmed at the national party conventions. The reality is somewhere between the journalistic and scholarly views. Campaigns matter for their effectiveness in reinforcing and activating the latent preferences of voters predisposed to supporting the candidate of a political party, and in persuading those who are ambivalent about the parties and candidates.

First, campaigns try to unify, energize, and mobilize partisan supporters to vote for their party's candidate on Election Day. Presidential campaigns communicate information and images that reinforce the partisan and ideological predispositions of voters, reminding supporters why they should prefer a Democratic or Republican candidate. Candidates usually emphasize themes and issues that are important to their party constituencies, such as Republican candidates emphasizing tax cuts and Democratic candidates emphasizing government programs such as Social Security. These appeals seek to make the policy preferences of voters and groups aligned with the major parties relevant to voting decisions. They also seek to persuade voters of the congruence between a candidate and their own interests and policy preferences.

Campaign effects relate to how and why people vote at the individual level. People with greater interest in politics tend to have better developed cognitive schema for interpreting new political information, pay more attention to campaign information, and retain more information in memory. Such people tend to form relatively stable beliefs and attitudes about politics, and they tend to prefer candidates and political parties that are compatible with their political beliefs. These predispositions emerge and stabilize through socialization and life experiences occurring prior to a political campaign. Thus, most voters have developed political beliefs and attitudes that predispose them to favor one of the major political parties. Further, such voters tend to be highly selective in their attention to, and processing of, new political information—paying attention to and giving more inferential weight to information that is consistent with their beliefs, while ignoring or discounting information that is dissonant. Thus, voters who affiliate with, or lean toward a political party are more likely to pay attention to and accept campaign information that is favorable to the candidate of their preferred political party. Since most voters identify with, or lean toward, one of the major political parties, the main effect of a presidential campaign is to reinforce and activate the existing political beliefs and preferences of these voters.

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