Abstract
Every presidential election offers interesting questions for analysis, but some elections are more puzzling than others. The election of 2004 involves two linked and countervailing puzzles. The first is: How did President George W. Bush manage to win at all, avoiding the fates of George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter? The other is: Why didn’t he win by a more substantial margin than in his first election, as all reelected presidents since Eisenhower were able to do? On the one hand, in the wake of September 11, the president had approval ratings around 90% and the threat of terrorism remained a substantial concern through Election Day. This would seem to afford Bush an overwhelming advantage. On the other hand, the public’s views of the state of the economy and of the course of the war in Iraq were negative. We think that the juxtaposition of these questions will help to explain the outcome of the election and of the pattern of the results. Moreover, by unpacking our explanation of the vote into three policy-related issue components—economic retrospective evaluations, domestic policy views, and foreign policy views—we examine the way these preferences contributed to the electorate’s voting decisions.
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Notes
The exit poll data were taken from www.msnbc.msn.com; downloaded 1/3/06. The poll had four formats, but all four measured questions about partisanship.
We note that even though the EMR/MI poll indicated moral values was a major issue for voters, only 2% of the NES sample chose cultural or moral issues as most important.
We also examined models that included interactions between the various specific independent measures and whether the respondent cited the appropriate category of issue as the most important problem (e.g., interacted the national economic evaluation measure with citation of the economy as the most important problem). Consistently, these interactions added collinearity on the right-hand-side and virtually no additional explanatory power of the left-hand-side (typically the complex of interactions not being a statistically significant addition). These findings (available upon request) are consistent with the general conclusion that salience eludes measurement (that is, few go so far as to conclude that considering an issue to be paramount adds no additional effect of that problem on the vote, compared to those who believe the issue not important).
Further, there are no mediated evaluations posed for issues along this dimension.
The question had three responses: very important, important, and not important. Most people rated each goal as “important,” so for the purposes of these analyses we only use the response “very important” as indicative of viewing the goal as important. However, coding both “very important” and “important” as important generates the same substantive results.
The pro-Bush group reported voting for him by 99% to 1, while the pro-Kerry group supported him by 98% to 2.
Powell, Michael, 2004. “Bush Gains When That Issue Comes Up.” Washington Post, October 14, A04. Viewed on December 30, 2005 at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30913-2004Oct13.html
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An earlier version of this paper was prepared for the Conference on “The Wartime Election of 2004,” at the Ohio State University, January 12–15, 2006.
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Abramson, P.R., Aldrich, J.H., Rickershauser, J. et al. Fear in the Voting Booth: The 2004 Presidential Election. Polit Behav 29, 197–220 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-006-9018-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-006-9018-1