Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access published online on March 23, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly, doi:10.1093/poq/nfp010
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Campaign Dynamics in Battleground and Nonbattleground States
Address correspondence to Costas Panagopoulos; e-mail: costas{at}post.harvard.edu.
Strategic considerations rooted in the Electoral College system of presidential elections compel presidential campaigns to allocate resources disproportionately to competitive states. In contemporary campaigns, this results in a situation in which many voters are entirely unexposed to campaign activities over the duration of the campaign. The implications of lopsided communications that relegate voters in uncompetitive states to bystander status in presidential campaigns are potentially significant and merit greater scrutiny. In this study, I analyze how the dynamics of voter preferences in uncompetitive states compare to those in battleground states. Using data from the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey, I find that the preferences of voters in battleground states are more variable but more stable than their counterparts in nonbattleground states. As expected, I also find stronger evidence of campaign effects in battleground states.
COSTAS PANAGOPOULOS is with Department of Political Science, Fordham University, 441 E. Fordham Rd., Faber 667, Bronx, NY 10458, USA. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Midwest Political Science Association Annual Meeting. The author is grateful to Robert Erikson, Christopher Wlezien, Barbara Burrell, Joseph Bafumi, and to the editors and anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.