Retrospective Voting

RETROSPECTIVE VOTING IS voting that takes place as voters look backward in time. It is contrasted with prospective voting, which takes place as voters look forward in time. Retrospective voting is encouraged by incumbents who want to highlight their accomplishments, and also by challengers who want to focus on the incumbents' missteps. One of the leading exponents of retrospective voting was Ronald Reagan. When he ran for president as a Republican in 1980, challenging Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, he asked the question in the only presidential debate with Carter, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” In this mode, he was both asking voters to vote their pocketbooks, and encouraging them to practice retrospective voting. Carter, meanwhile, wanted voters to overlook the economic recession that had fallen on the country in the past year and, instead, encouraged them to vote prospectively by reminding them of the possibility of a right-wing revival under Reagan, and by painting Reagan as a warmonger.

Four years later, Reagan remained in retrospective mode. In a debate with Democrat Walter F. Mondale (who had been Carter's vice president), Reagan once again asked the question, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” He was asking voters to focus once more on their pocketbooks and to contrast the very low inflation of 1982–84 with the double-digit inflation of 1979–80. Mondale urged both prospective voting (as he subtly called attention to the 73-year-old president's declining agility) and retrospective voting (as he campaigned against the huge deficit spending Reagan supported).

Regardless of how politicians campaign, political scientists use public opinion research to find out what voters are looking at in determining their vote choice. Many political scientists believe that economic performance is key and that elections can be predicted on the basis of economic performance in the period leading up to the election. Implicit in this is the idea that voters are paying attention retrospectively. This has led to the development of economic-based voting models that look only at key economic indicators and do not consider such usually central ideas to voters, such as party identification, public opinion, and war. Despite their mechanical nature, these models have correctly projected 12 of the last 15 presidential elections through 2004.

One key challenge to the supremacy of retrospective voting was the 2000 presidential campaign of Al Gore. Many believed that Gore should have focused his campaign on the peace and prosperity of the eight years he had served as vice president under President Bill Clinton. Under the framework of retrospective voting, the economic voting models predicted a comfortable landslide win by Gore. However, Gore seemed to ignore the prosperity of the previous eight years and instead [Page 719]focused his campaign on the future, an obvious appeal to prospective voters. Some believe that Gore refused to campaign on the Clinton record because of the acrimonious tarring of Clinton that had occurred during his administration as a result of a series of personal scandals, which had not touched Gore.

Thus, while lambasting Clinton did not drive him from office, Republicans can claim victory because their agitation kept Gore from campaigning (and according to conventional political science, being elected) on the Clinton-Gore record. The challenge to the operation of the retrospective voting models comes not only from Gore's failure to campaign according to their script, but voters' seeming inability to pick up the economic cues anyway (although Gore won the popular vote very narrowly.)

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