Electoral Behavior

Many factors shape the choices a voter makes on election day. Collectively, the voters' decisions constitute the electorate's political behavior, which may vary from one election to another.

Political scientists generally agree that party identification exerts the strongest influence on the voter's choice among candidates. Although the proportion of independents is rising, most Americans still identify themselves as Democrats or Republicans. As a rule, when they step into the voting booth, they support their party's nominee for the office at stake.

Other factors, however, may outweigh party affiliation under certain circumstances. This is particularly true in primary elections, when the candidates are all of the same party and vying for a group's nomination. In such cases, the candidate's public image—looks, personality, background, grasp of the issues, inspirational qualities, and the like—may be the chief determinant.

In the television age, candidates usually run independently of the parties, making image all the more important. In such candidate-centered campaigns, especially for the presidency, the voter is unlikely to be personally acquainted with those who are running. All he or she is likely to know about the candidate comes from media coverage of the campaign or media use by the campaign through interviews, talk-show appearances, and political advertising. This information in turn helps to shape the voter's perception of the candidate's image as negative or positive.

Polling measures the public's attitude toward the candidates leading up to the election. Both major-party nominees for president usually receive a postconvention bounce in the ratings. Often a candidate's approval ratings change significantly.

In the 1992 election, for example, President George Bush was coming off of record high approval ratings for his leadership in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq. But his candidate image soon turned negative while his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton, benefited from a positive candidate image.

In part Bush was a victim of retrospective voting, another major aspect of electoral behavior. The voters looked back on Bush as vice president and then successor to the popular Ronald Reagan, and they found Bush wanting in comparison with Clinton. incumbency and previous service did more harm than good to Bush's reelection chances. Voters apparently doubted Bush's ability to handle the fragile economy.

Four years later, Clinton was consistently ahead in the polls, even though he was under investigation by an independent counsel for his role in the Arkansas Whitewater real estate deal before he became president. He was also facing an unprecedented sexual harassment trial in a civil suit brought by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee. Yet Republican challenger Robert J. Dole could not match Clinton's overall approval ratings from the American public.

To an unusually strong degree, issue voting also helped Clinton, particularly in the 1996 campaign. His stands on abortion rights, health care, child care, education, and other so-called women's issues made him especially popular with women voters. Even after his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky, a former White House intern, became public in 1998, Clinton continued to draw strong support in the polls from women.

In 2000 Texas governor George W. Bush consistently ran even with, or just ahead of, Vice President Al Gore. Polls showed that most voters viewed Bush as a more decisive leader, and they questioned Gore's trustworthiness. Once he became president, however, Bush saw his poll ratings fluctuate dramatically. An approval rating of just above 50 percent soared to as high as 90 percent in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when most voters backed his strong antiterrorism policies. By early 2003, however, after the U.S. occupation of Iraq, his overall approval rating stood at 71 percent.

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