Des Moines Register
10-28-07
Hard choices lie ahead and a wild ride
Carol Hunter
The democratic folklore of the American voter conjures up a studious creature who, in years gone by, read newspaper accounts of the campaign, watched debates on TV and carefully considered the issues of the day.
Today, the image morphs into a voter whose diligent preparation might include visiting campaign Web sites and comparing candidates' stances using online issue grids.
Nearly 50 years ago, publication of the seminal book "The American Voter" began unmasking the realities behind the myth, finding only a weak link between issues and voter choice. In general elections, party identification is the overriding predictor of voter choice, today's electoral researchers agree. Next comes incumbency. Trailing them is a tangle of factors including electability, issues stances, personality and likability.
Once at a caucus site, obviously, party isn't a factor. And this year, neither is incumbency - it's the first presidential election since 1952 without an incumbent president or vice president on the ballot.
With the two main predictors of voter behavior off the table, what's most likely to motivate Iowans' eventual decisions? A perfect storm of factors unlike any other election cycle makes the races this year extremely volatile and hard to handicap:
Big fields of credible candidates. The high number of "firsts" (first woman, black and Latino with reasonable shots at winning, first Mormon running in a long time).
And a nominating calendar compressed like never before, jammed against the holidays.
So fasten your seat belts. The Republicans will caucus on Jan. 3, and the
Democrats will likely do so, too. That means just nine days between Christmas and voting.
David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama, thinks a lot of caucusgoers won't get serious about locking in choices until they wake up on Dec. 26.
Votes could shift and consolidate rapidly. All the candidates will be in Iowa.
"Everyone will be there at the New Year's Eve parties. If I had to guess, this thing won't really settle in until very late."
When issues matter

Issues-based voting is, quite simply, harder. Voters have to be aware of an issue and have an opinion about it, care enough about it to make it a priority in voting and accurately understand the candidates' positions and whose views are closest to their own.
But for all the academic research downplaying the role of issues in voter choices, it's also true that issues matter more in high-information elections, such as presidential races, than in low-information races, such as state legislative races, when voters don't know much about the candidates.
And the Iowa caucuses are high-information campaigns on steroids.
Veteran Republican pollster Jan Van Lohuizen is working for the Romney campaign and has a client list including the White House. Political scientists are usually right that voters are more instinctual than issues-oriented, he said, but that's not what he sees in Iowa and New Hampshire.
"They evaluate their issues," he said. "They watch the debates more than others do. They tend to think they have a responsibility to the rest of the voters of the
U.S. that they have to figure these guys out."
When American voters do focus on issues, the economy tends to trump all others, said Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for
Women and Politics at Iowa State University . Voters are influenced either by their sense of the national economy or their personal finances.
While issues such as the Iraq war, immigration and health care have dominated the campaigns so far, "The economy I guarantee will be an issue when 2008 rolls around," Bystrom said.
Social issues such as abortion and gay marriage also drive a certain percentage of voters, she said. While the numbers of these "values voters" are relatively small, they can make the difference in a tight election if they turn out in big numbers.
And finally, once every generation or so in America, foreign policy and war will come into play. Arguably, the war helped George W. Bush in 2004, but it could hurt Republicans up and down the ticket in 2008.
Interestingly, there are signs that the bloc of values voters who propelled Bush's victories in 2000 and 2004 is placing less emphasis on issues such as abortion and gay marriage this time around. They haven't lost their passion for them. But this year, they're weighing candidates' stances on two other issues they care deeply about: the war and immigration.

Their dilemmas mirror those of other issues-oriented voters. "It's hard to trade off a candidate's position on Palestine with their position on ethanol production," said David Redlawsk, a political science professor at the University of Iowa.
But if Iowa caucus-goers are more issues-oriented than other voters, Bystrom adds a counter-intuitive thought: They also may be more driven by personality, because, unlike other Americans, they enjoy extraordinary access to the candidates.
After national pundits derided Hillary Clinton's cackle of a laugh, an acquaintance of Bystrom's saw Clinton at a campaign event, heard her laugh and thought it was warm and infectious. "How many people have a chance to meet Hillary
Clinton and hear her laugh?" Bystrom asked.
The first factors
All the firsts in these campaigns force political scientists to rely on studied hunches as they weigh how sex, race, ethnicity and religion will play out.
In lower-level races, women win as often as men in similar circumstances:
Female incumbents win as often as male incumbents; female challengers win as often as male challengers, said Kathleen Dolan of the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, who wrote the book "Voting for Women: How the Public Evaluates
Women Candidates."
Yet it's possible that stereotyping about women's roles, even subconsciously, still will influence voting for a woman for the nation's top job.
It's hard to get at the effects of sex and race in voting because respondents frequently give "socially desirable" answers to pollsters, but then vote differently on Election Day, Dolan said.
Little research exists on the pull of sex versus race. Bystrom's sense of it:
"There's more concern about Hillary Clinton's gender than Barack Obama's race," but she added, "I think American voters can get over it."
The races present so many cross-cutting factors that voters are sifting loyalties.
Redlawsk mentioned that his wife is a member of a group dedicated to electing progressive women. Most in her group are supporting Clinton, but it's hard to argue she's the most progressive candidate.
Decisions, too, may be affected by the differences in how the caucuses operate.
Republicans cast a secret ballot. Democrats don't. They've got to publicly stand in a corner for a candidate. If they've always thought, "It's time we elected a woman or black or Latino," will they feel more pressure or less to hold fast to that belief in a public setting?

The calendar crunch
Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, points out that the 2004 caucuses were three and a half weeks after Christmas. If the Jan. 3 date holds, the post-
Christmas frenzy of campaign activity and media coverage will be packed into about a third of that.
"This compressed time frame will affect this election in ways we don't understand," he said.
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR CAROL HUNTER can be reached at (515) 284-8020 or chunter@dmreg.com.