Campaigns See More Tug-Of-War Than Knockout Punches

Presidential campaigns are more like a tug-of-war than a boxing match. Instead of a knockout blow, the two parties come to a relative stalemate trying to move a stable electorate.

That was one of the observations of John Sides, a political science professor at George Washington University, and Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at UCLA. The two are authors of “The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election” and speakers at the Clinton School of Public Service Wednesday (Sept 10).

For their study, 45,000 voters were questioned in December 2011 and then followed throughout the course of the campaign. President Obama started out with 47% support, while Mitt Romney started with 44.8% as a hypothetical candidate prior to his nomination. In the final popular vote, Obama had 51% support while Romney had 47.2%.

Very few Obama voters switched their allegiance to Romney or vice versa, but when the undecideds and those voting for third party candidates are counted, about 12.6% of the electorate was moving around. That means the electorate is stable but not static, they said.

The two professors said that Obama entered the election with an advantage because the economy was improving, even though it wasn’t that strong. Improvement, not performance, is the key. President Reagan was elected in 1984 even though the unemployment rate was more than 7%. That wasn’t great, but it was better than it had been.

The professors said primaries such as the 2012 Republican contest are marked by discovery-scrutiny-decline cycles where lesser-known candidates suddenly catch fire, surge to the front amidst a flurry of news stories, and then fall back to earth as the news media ask tougher questions and uncover negative facts about the candidates. Most of the Republican field went through this cycle except Romney, who started out as the front-runner.

That suggests that the way to win a long primary is to start with broad-based support, so Republicans in 2016 might choose a consensus candidate to oppose the presumed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

What will be the deciding factors in 2016?

Obama’s low approval numbers will pull Clinton down, Sikes said. Naturally, the state of the economy will be important.

But the most important factor will be the “time for a change” tendency of the American electorate to choose whichever party has not occupied the Oval Office after a two-term president. For that reason, Clinton, or whoever the Democratic nominee is, will face a disadvantage, Sides said.