Volume 10, Issue 4

No abstract available.

During every election campaign, political journalists make claims and offer interpretations that political scientists who study public opinion, campaigns, and elections know to be inaccurate. In this article, I discuss a number of misconceptions that frequently appear in media discussions of electoral polarization. Chief among these are the confusion between polarization and party sorting, along with the tendency to attribute any changes in voter behavior to changes in the voters, rather than to changes in the candidates who are running and the nature of their campaigns. Also important is the widespread confusion – much of it due to incomplete political science research this time – about independents. A significant part of what journalists get wrong no doubt reflects the unrepresentative political contexts in which they live and work.

This paper analyzes variation in presidential outcomes across the American states from 1972 through 2012. The findings show that differences in cultural policy preferences across the states are more important than economic preferences for explaining state outcomes in 2012. This result fits a long-term trend of the growing importance of cultural issues – absolutely and relative to economic issues – for sorting the states, which has had the effect of rotating the “party cleavage” line that divides the Democratic and Republican parties in presidential elections.

This article examines the influences on the 2012 presidential election that led to the closely decided re-election of Barack Obama. Partisan parity, ideological polarization, a hyper-competitive campaign, and approval ratings for the incumbent, plus pre-convention preference polls that were evenly split, were strong signs that the 2012 presidential election would be close. The economic record of the Obama presidency, however, favored the election of Republican challenger Mitt Romney. On the other hand, President Obama had the advantages of a first party-term incumbent, and this first party-term advantage was the major reason for President Obama’s reelection. As a first party-term president, fewer voters blamed President Obama for the nation’s economic problems than blamed his predecessor. Of the 12 first party-term incumbent presidents to seek reelection since 1900, 11 won and only one lost. The election of a new presidential party is tantamount to electing a president to an 8-year term.

This essay explores the scope of President Obama’s re-election victory in 2012 by comparing it to previous presidential elections in American history. Three conclusions are drawn. First, Obama’s margin of victory in 2012 is modest by historical standards, though Obama did make history by becoming the first re-elected President to lose both Electoral College votes and popular vote share between his first and second election. Next, despite some claims that challenger Mitt Romney squandered an easy opportunity to win, the historical record of incumbents seeking a second term suggests that the advantage always lay with President Obama. Finally, the 2012 election marked a further step in a changing pattern of presidential elections in which national margins of victory tend to be much smaller, state landslides are more numerous, and swings from one party to another between consecutive presidential elections are minimized.

This article analyzes the evolution of voter preferences in the 2012 presidential election cycle. It also examines the influence of specific events, in order to help explain the dynamics we observe over the course of the campaign. I find considerable evidence of campaign-event effects on aggregate voter preferences in 2012, reinforcing the notion that events help to shape campaign dynamics.

Political scientists have generally been skeptical that presidential campaigns have a significant effect on the final outcome of a presidential election. But 2012, this article argues, was an exception. By all the indicators that political scientists traditionally look to, 2012 had long shaped up to be a very close election. That Mitt Romney lost was due largely to the remarkably inept quality of his campaign, which largely avoided any serious discussion of the issues, even when such discussion would have worked to his advantage.

Record amounts of money went to purchase television advertising during the 2012 election cycle, resulting in unprecedented volumes of advertising. This increase was due in part to the ease with which outside groups, such as super PACs, were able to raise and spend advertising dollars in the current, post-Citizens United, regulatory regime. Advertising in 2012 was also extremely negative, especially at the presidential level, and frequently evoked the emotion of anger. Yet whether 2012 marks the high point for spending on advertising – and whether the negativity will abate in the next presidential election – remain open questions.

This paper compares the levels of ad spending from outside groups and traditional party organizations across seven federal election cycles. The data show clearly that outside groups advertised at historic levels in 2012. Such intense efforts send two important signals to students of American campaign finance. The first involves a crisis in the system of limited donations to candidates and party committees moving forward. The second resurrects an old debate in political science about whether parties or candidates should be the center of our electoral process. The paper concludes with a consideration of possible reforms that might help restore parties and candidates to the center of issue debates in competitive federal elections.

This essay compares interest group activity in the 2012 federal elections with the previous two cycles. We examine the role of interest groups in financing campaign activities and influencing voters. Coming in the wake of the Citizens United case and other court decisions that relaxed campaign finance restrictions, the 2012 election marked an explosion of outside spending by organized interests, particularly independent expenditure advertising. While outside spending may not have produced the outcomes some expected in 2012, it blurs the distinction between candidates and outside groups and may be shifting the balance of power in campaigns away from candidates and toward organized interests. We conclude with a series of predictions about the nature of interest group activity in future election cycles.

The growth of political spending by outside groups reflects the demise of a campaign finance system that was designed during an era when candidates largely controlled their electoral destinies. The original 1974 law assumed a candidate-centered framework in which political parties mattered less as sources of electoral support. Since the 1980s, partisan polarization and intense competition for control of government has pushed the candidate-centered framework to its limits. Partisans have strong incentives to organize collectively through party organizations and party allied groups to maximize opportunities for taking control government. The campaign finance system, however, is unsuited to the emergent party system because of its unwieldy restrictions on political parties and excessively low contribution limits, which have declined in value due to inflation. The current system induces a highly inefficient redistribution of regulated funds from incumbent officeholders to parties, and the escalating use of unrestricted funds by Super PACs and other weakly transparent campaign groups, which have strong legal protections in the wake of judicial decisions such as Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission .

This article examines a number of potential concerns about unlimited donations to, and independent expenditures by, Super PACs. More specifically, how have Super PACs and other independent organizations acted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United ? What effects did they have during the 2012 electoral season? What implications might their activities have for the conduct of American democracy going forward?

Recent presidential nominating contests are effectively over sometime during the first half of the election year, well before the official nominations are bestowed at the party conventions. Yet some candidates become the presumptive nominee as early as February, while others do not obtain this moniker until May or June. This article takes a preliminary look at the dates candidates became the presumptive nominees and their general election fates.

The so-called “red/blue paradox” is that rich individuals are more likely to vote Republican but rich states are more likely to support the Democrats. Previous research argued that this seeming paradox could be explained by comparing rich and poor voters within each state – the difference in the Republican vote share between rich and poor voters was much larger in low-income, conservative, middle-American states like Mississippi than in high-income, liberal, coastal states like Connecticut. We use exit poll and other survey data to assess whether this was still the case for the 2012 Presidential election. Based on this preliminary analysis, we find that, while the red/blue paradox is still strong, the explanation offered by Gelman et al. no longer appears to hold. We explore several empirical patterns from this election and suggest possible avenues for resolving the questions posed by the new data.

This essay examines the Roberts Court and its relationship to the Obama administration. It begins by analyzing the ways in which the Court has been structured by electoral politics over the past 40 years, arguing that the Court’s more conservative, divided, and polarized decision-making reflects the politics of the post-1968 electoral regime. It concludes by considering the impact of President Obama’s 2012 reelection, contending that there is little indication that Obama aspires to restructure the courts fundamentally or to push major new constitutional initiatives. Although Obama will undoubtedly have an opportunity to fill at least one seat on the Court in the coming years, he is unlikely to alter its ideological balance, leaving Justice Kennedy as the swing justice. Thus, while liberals can expect isolated judicial victories, Obama’s reelection does not portend an imminent shift in Court decision-making. Only time will tell, however, whether it will have longer-term consequences for American constitutional development.