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★ Chapter 4 The Stable Context of the Campaign EVERY ELECTION IS diVerent but also part of a political past. No election can be understood purely by its own campaign or even by the general conditions of its particular election year. There is a continuity to electoral politics that is missed by examining elections as discrete or unique events. Although political observers tend to focus on what is new to each election, much remains the same. There is continuity in the political parties, the electorate and its beliefs , many of the issues, and often one or both of the presidential candidates. The continuity of electoral politics allows many voters to decide quite early on who they will vote for, and this places limits on the potential eVects of the campaign. With a substantial portion of the electorate set in their choice of candidate and essentially out of play for the campaign, possible campaign eVects are restricted to aVecting the choices of the subset of potential voters undecided or uncertain about their votes. With portions of the electorate committed early on to the Democratic and Republican candidates, the campaign can be said to be played out within a stable context. The stability of the majority of the electorate is suggested in the aggregate by the historical parameters of the vote. In elections over the last half century, no matter how well a major-party presidential candidate has done in a campaign, he has not received more than 62 percent of the two-party national vote. Conversely, after even the worst campaign in this period by a major-party candidate, Democrat or Republican, the candidate still received at least 38 percent of the two-party national vote. Presidential election results are quite definitely bounded, between 38 and 62 percent of the national two-party vote.1 The pre-campaign poll numbers paint much the same picture. In the fifteen elections from 1948 to 2004, every major-party presidential candidate has had the support of at least 32 percent of respondents in the Gallup poll conducted in July of the election year. The leading candidate in the July poll, moreover, has held at least 46 percent of the two-party vote on election day. Thus, both the election and pre-campaign poll figures suggest that the stable context of the campaign probably constitutes at least 32 and 38 percent of the electorate on either side and apparently at least 46 percent of the electorate on the frontrunner ’s side. This amounts to approximately three-quarters of the electorate voting for the major-party candidates.2 By this accounting, the vote choice of about a quarter of the electorate would appear to be left open to possible in- fluence by the campaign. This estimate of the parameters of possible campaign eVects is supported by self-reports of when voters decided their votes during the election year. As the figures presented in table 1.2 demonstrated, typically nearly two-thirds of the electorate indicate that they decided who they would vote for before or during the political parties’nominating conventions in the summer of the election year. Some additional voters may have eVectively decided how they would vote but may have wanted to appear more open to additional information. Still others indicated that they decided immediately after the conventions but before the general election campaign got under way. In short, a large majority of voters regularly make up their minds how they will vote before the general election campaign starts. But why? Why do so many voters decide how they will vote before the campaign, before the candidates have a chance to make their cases for why voters should vote for them? What is the basis for this stable context in which the campaign takes place? Easy Decisions Can Be Early Decisions There are several reasons why many voters know how they will vote before the general campaign begins. What links these reasons together is that these earlydeciding voters have enough information of diVerent sorts on diVerent dimensions of the choice to make them quite confident about their decisions. Before the campaign begins, they know all they need to know (or at least think that they do). For these voters, they can make an early decision because it is an easy decision. Since The American Voter (A. Campbell et al. 1960), the landmark study of voting behavior, considerations that might aVect the vote choice have been categorized as either long-term or short-term...

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