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This paper presents state-level estimates of the 2016 presidential election using data from the ABC News/ Washington Post tracking poll and multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP). While previous implementations of MRP for election forecasting have relied on data from prior elections to establish poststratification targets for the composition of the electorate, in this paper we estimate both turnout and vote preference from the same preelection poll. Through Bayesian estimation we are also able to capture uncertainty in both estimated turnout and vote preferences. This approach correctly predicts 50 of 51 contests, showing greater accuracy than comparison models that rely on the 2012 Current Population Survey Voting and Registration Supplement for turnout. While the model does not perfectly estimate turnout as a share of the voting age population, popular vote shares, or vote margins in each state, it is more accurate than predictions published by polling aggregators or other published MRP estimators. The paper also reports how vote preferences changed over the course of the 18-day tracking period, compares subgroup-level estimates of turnout and vote preferences with the 2016 CPS Survey and National Election Pool exit poll, and summarizes the accuracy of the approach applied to the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 elections. The paper concludes by discussing how researchers can make use of this method as an alternative approach to survey weighting and likely voter modeling as well as in forecasting future elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the processes of electoral consolidation around incumbents, as well as around opposition candidates, in Russian presidential elections. On the basis of a comparative analysis of the parliamentary and presidential campaigns over six electoral cycles, the author identifies shifts in the turnout and voting patterns for candidates in presidential elections in comparison to the previous State Duma elections. His research shows that almost all viable candidates in presidential elections rely on the electorate of a certain party—usually the one that nominates the candidate (the only important exception to this rule was the vote for P. Grudinin in the 2018 election). The study also shows that an increase in turnout in presidential elections plays into the hands of the incumbent (except for B. Yeltsin in 1996), although in some cases it can boost support for a strong opposition candidate (G. Zyuganov in 1996) or an entirely new candidate (M. Prokhorov in 2012). Having compared voting patterns between parliamentary and presidential elections, the author comes to the conclusion that an incumbent is usually able to win over ambivalent voters and, depending on the political context, voters from various party clusters; for example, supporters of A Just Russia, LDPR, liberal parties, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (at the level of certain regions). Opposition candidates possess much more limited opportunities for this kind of consolidation or lack them altogether. The author interprets these trends as a manifestation of strategic voting based on voters' rational choice in favor of the incumbent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalists and political pundits have characterized the 2016 presidential campaign as one featuring unusually high levels of political involvement among the mass public. This article subjects such claims to more systematic assessment, by comparing levels of political involvement in the 2016 presidential election campaign to those of previous election cycles. Through analyses of turnout statistics, survey questions by the Pew Research Center and the American National Election Studies measuring political interest, and Nielsen audience estimates of television viewing, the article finds that the public's interest and engagement in the fall of 2016 were actually quite similar to those of other recent elections. (It was during the primaries that political involvement in 2016 stood out more.) Acknowledging that aggregate analyses may obscure countervailing subgroup changes, the article examines subgroups that figured prominently in accounts of the 2016 campaign or were thought to have been particularly energized by Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012: men without a college education, African Americans, and young people. Those analyses turn up limited evidence for differential political interest trends. African Americans' campaign interest and turnout did drop compared to 2008 and 2012. But in the opposite direction of the prevailing narrative, young people showed relatively high political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, political observers were quick to assert that Barack Obama won the African American vote because he was Black, and more generally, that African Americans were motivated by race above all other considerations. As this racial reductionist stereotype has the potential to trivialize African Americans' voting behavior and diminish the significance of the election of Barack Obama, this research examined how much support exists for the stereotype. We also examined whether a racial double standard motivates the application of this stereotype, and if so, the degree to which it is grounded in a broader antipathy toward Blacks. Several experiments embedded in two large national public opinion surveys show that there is indeed a racial double standard in the application of the racial reductionist stereotype; moreover, the attribution is connected to racial resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper addresses why a moderate presidential candidate would select an extreme running mate, as was the case in the 2012 US presidential election. To address this question, we designed a one-dimensional policy game in which a moderate challenger uses their vice-presidential candidate as a policy tool to alter the median voter participating in the election. Our main conclusion is that the median voter is altered through a mobilization effect, by increasing own party turnout through the convincing of the more extreme segment of a party to participate in the election, rather than altering the voter’s decision to vote for a particular candidate. This decision function only has a marginal effect on independent voters. Our conclusion is in line with recent empirical advances in the literature and our paper aims to more formally ground these advancements in theory. We developed a set of comparative statics to apply the theory of running mate selection more broadly, germane beyond the case of the 2012 presidential election used to frame this topic. Our model also determines the optimal difference between the platforms of a challenger and their vice-presidential candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last twenty years, there has been a tremendous amount written on “negativity” in political campaigns. Yet, there is a conceptual disconnect between the definition of negativity used by researchers and how citizens define negativity. In this article, we show how large this disparity is and what its consequences are. Using a nationally representative online survey of 17,400 Americans and nearly 100 scholars of American politics who viewed presidential ads from the 2012 general election, we show that citizen perceptions of negativity are much stronger predictors of political participation than scholar codings of negativity. This means researchers need to give serious thought to how they operationalize negativity in their work. If we have any interest in understanding how voters are affected by campaign information that they perceive as being negative, then we must collect data consistent with the public’s understanding of negativity. Otherwise, we risk the continuation of this conceptual disconnect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional political wisdom holds that policies that make voting easier will increase turnout and ultimately benefit Democratic candidates. We challenge this assumption, questioning the ability of party strategists to predict which changes to election law will advantage them. Drawing on previous research, we theorize that voting laws affect who votes in diverse ways depending on the specific ways that they reduce the costs of participating. We assemble datasets of county-level vote returns in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections and model these outcomes as a function of early voting and registration laws, using both cross-sectional regression and difference-in-difference models. Unlike Election Day registration, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the results show that early voting generally helps Republicans. We conclude with implications for partisan manipulation of election laws. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at U.S. President Donald Trump's electoral coalition to dispel the myth that his victory in the 2016 presidential election represented a national wave which changes the course of American politics by examining state-by-state data for the 2012 and 2016 elections.

The article looks at the attitudes and voting behavior of Hispanic Americans in the Southern states during the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections, particularly in Virginia where a pan-ethnic Latino group consciousness that emphasized shared in-group characteristics has emerged.

Socioemotional selectivity theory posits that individuals invest more selectively in goals and activities that are emotionally meaningful as they age and time horizons gradually shrink. We extend socioemotional selectivity theory to the domain of voting in elections. We use data from the 2012 American National Election Study to test the hypothesis that older voters would place greater emphasis on emotional reactions to the candidates in their presidential voting, relative to younger voters. The empirical evidence suggests support for this contention, implying socioemotional selectivity extends to voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney included fierce dialogue about women and issues typically connected to them. The inflammatory comments that conservative radio-show host Rush Limbaugh made about female law student Sandra Fluke and the Affordable Health Care Act's (ACA) requirements that all workplaces cover contraceptives were central topics in the news. The controversy literally followed Romney in the form of “Pillamina,” a human-sized costume designed to look like a pack of birth control pills that shadowed the candidate's summer swing state tour. While “Pillamina” was the work of Planned Parenthood's Action Fund, the Obama campaign also took aim at Romney on this issue, running a television commercial featuring “Dawn and Alex,” two women talking about how out of touch Romney is with women's health issues. The Romney campaign's attempts to counter these attacks and shift the focus of conversation were largely thwarted, as questionable comments from Republican Senate candidates Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock brought the issue of abortion to the forefront. Both of these statements added fuel to the narrative that Republicans are out of touch with women's needs. And Romney himself contributed to the problem, as his notorious “binders full of women” debate response broadened the scope of the issue from reproductive rights to more general issues about gender equality. Altogether, these Republican comments and positions opened the door for Democrats on the campaign trail to attack the party, and a popular conclusion is that this “War on Women” narrative hurt the Republican Party and played an integral part in Obama's victory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To be elected President of the United States, a candidate must create a story that both resonates with and persuades the electorate. Gardner suggested that "leaders achieve their effectiveness chiefly through the stories they relate" and that there are three types of leadership stories: Ordinary, Innovative and Visionary. The differences between the 2012 and 2016 U.S. Presidential elections are extreme. As the 2016 election was one of unusual and unexpected moments as compared with the more tame and typical election in 2012, this study compared the stories of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump with those of the 2012 election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. Results from the 2012 election found that Romney's story fit into the category of Ordinary leader, while Obama's story was one attributed to an Innovative leader. T tests found large and significant differences between candidate preference and story credibility and whether the stories motivated the respondents to vote. However, for the 2016 election, both candidates had innovative stories, and this may explain how one candidate won the popular vote, while the other received the majority of electoral votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We conducted a field experiment to study social influences on partisan political participation. We sent letters to 92,000 contributors during the 2012 presidential election campaign. We randomized features of the letters and measured the effects of these variations on the recipients' subsequent contributions. We find that making an individual's contributions more visible to her neighbors increases the contributions of supporters of the local majority party and decreases those of supporters of the minority party. Individuals contribute more when they perceive higher average contributions from own-party supporters in their area and contribute less if there is a higher share of own-party contributors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what degree do early presidential primary debates aid party-loyalist decision making? And does this effect diminish as the debate season progresses? This study utilizes a unique, daily data set and time-series regression to chart the effect of 13 pre-primary debates on party-loyalist enthusiasm in the 2012 Republican nomination contest-as measured by Facebook activity-along with news coverage and Google search volume. Though the debates did lead to new partisan expressions of candidate support, these expressions declined sharply as the pre-primary debate season dragged on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that holding conflicted attitudes (ambivalence) about political decisions may lead people to act as ideal citizens. One example of this normatively ideal behavior is seen in research linking ambivalence to information seeking. To expand on this line of inquiry, this study examines the over-time relationship between ambivalence and information seeking. We use three-wave panel data collected during the 2012 election to determine whether over-time relationships exist between these variables and test the causal direction of these relationships. We find that use of counterattitudinal information increases ambivalence, which leads people to seek out more counterattitudinal information. We also find that use of pro-attitudinal media decreases levels of ambivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large-scale experiment during the 2010 U.S. Congressional Election demonstrated a positive effect of an online get-out-the-vote message on real world voting behavior. Here, we report results from a replication of the experiment conducted during the U.S. Presidential Election in 2012. In spite of the fact that get-out-the-vote messages typically yield smaller effects during high-stakes elections due to saturation of mobilization efforts from many sources, a significant increase in voting was again observed. Voting also increased significantly among the close friends of those who received the message to go to the polls, and the total effect on the friends was likely larger than the direct effect, suggesting that understanding social influence effects is potentially even more important than understanding the direct effects of messaging. These results replicate earlier work and they add to growing evidence that online social networks can be instrumental for spreading offline behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the influence of debate viewing-social media multitasking on campaign knowledge during the 2012 presidential election. Results from three waves of a national cross-sectional survey of U.S. adults conducted during and after the 2012 presidential election suggest that social networking site (SNS) use overall correlates with increased knowledge of campaign issues and facts above and beyond the use of other sources of news media. In addition, watching a debate with or without simultaneous social media engagement is better for knowledge generation than not viewing a debate at all, but the effect of debate viewing is dulled when simultaneously engaging in social media multitasking. The debate viewing-social media multitasking effect is moderated by candidate preference, with differential learning occurring largely for knowledge that is favorable to one's preferred candidate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using large Twitter datasets collected during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we examined how partisanship shapes patterns of sharing and commenting on candidate fact-check rulings. Our results indicate that partisans selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party's candidate, resulting in an ideologically narrow flow of fact checks to their followers. We also find evidence of hostile media perception in users' public accusations of bias on the part of fact-checking organizations. Additionally, Republicans showed stronger outgroup negativity and hostility toward fact checkers than Democrats. These findings help us understand 'selective sharing' as a complementary process to selective exposure, as well as identifying asymmetries between partisans in their sharing practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatially or temporally dense polling remains both difficult and expensive using existing survey methods. In response, there have been increasing efforts to approximate various survey measures using social media, but most of these approaches remain methodologically flawed. To remedy these flaws, this article combines 1,200 state-level polls during the 2012 presidential campaign with over 100 million state-located political tweets; models the polls as a function of the Twitter text using a new linear regularization feature-selection method; and shows via out-of-sample testing that when properly modeled, the Twitter-based measures track and to some degree predict opinion polls, and can be extended to unpolled states and potentially substate regions and subday timescales. An examination of the most predictive textual features reveals the topics and events associated with opinion shifts, sheds light on more general theories of partisan difference in attention and information processing, and may be of use for real-time campaign strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of our modern media environment on affective polarization. We conducted an experiment during the last month of the 2012 presidential election varying both the choice of media sources available about the major presidential candidates, and the tone of political advertisements presented to subjects. We posit that voters in a high-choice, ideologically-diverse media environment will exhibit greater affective polarization than those in a 'mainstream' ideologically neutral environment. We also hypothesize that subjects who are exposed to negative rather than positive political advertisements will show increased affective polarization. We provide causal evidence that the combination of a high-choice ideologically diverse media environment and exposure to negative political ads, significantly increases affective polarization. We also find that both overall information search and selective exposure to information are influenced by our experimental manipulations, with the greatest amount of search, and the most biased search, conducted by Romney supporters in the Negative Ads, Diverse Media condition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research documents politicians’ use of religious rhetoric and its effects on the public, but little work has investigated the considerations influencing the decision to use religious rhetoric in the first place. We theorize that politicians’ use of religious rhetoric is determined by four considerations: the alignment between the speaker’s and audience’s religiosity, the acceptability of the speaker’s denomination to the audience, the speaker’s religious history, and the speaker’s party. Using the 2012 presidential election as a test case, we pair county-level religion data with a content analysis of 264 stump speeches to examine how the religious aspects of candidate rhetoric changed depending on the religious contours of a community. The evidence provides insight into how and why candidates “narrowcast” faith. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Voter participation rates vary widely across the 50 states. We seek to identify a source of this interstate variation, focusing upon the 2000, 2004, 2008, and 2012 general elections. Of note is that the latter two general elections featured a minority (i.e., African-American) nominee for president from one of the major political parties. Within the context of the rational voter model, we hypothesize that the presence of a minority candidate atop the ticket will boost minorities' expected net benefits from voting, with the result that minority voter participation will be higher. Based on cross-sectional fixed-effects estimations, we find that states' voter participation rates were unaffected by the percent of the population that was either African-American or Hispanic for the 2000 and 2004 election cycles, while states' voter participation rates were positively related to the percent of the population that was either African-American or Hispanic for the 2008 and 2012 election cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]