Presidential Elections
Presidential Elections:
• Party Primaries
– Conventions
• Polling
– Consultants
• Debates
• Advertising
– Positive and negative advertisements
– Debates over effects of attack advertisements
Running for President:
Party Primaries
• “Beauty contests” until 1968
– Voters did not decide delegates to national
convention
– Riots and chaos at 1968 Chicago Convention
convinces Democratic National Committee to
institute reforms
• Today, delegates are selected through
primary elections
Types of Primaries
• Who can vote in primaries?
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Closed primaries
Open primaries
Blanket Primaries
Run-off primaries
• How delegates are distributed
– Winner-take-all primaries
– Proportional primaries
• These primaries determine who will get the
nomination at the national convention
States in Proportion to News
Coverage of Primaries
Consultants and Polling
• Political consultants
– Devise a strategy, think up a campaign theme,
monitor the campaign’s progress, plan all media
appearances, and coach candidates for the debates
– Conduct various political polls throughout the
campaign
• Campaign polling
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Benchmark polls
Tracking and Trend Polls
Focus Groups
Push polls
Media and Political Campaigns
• Political advertising: positive vs. negative
– Positive advertising
• Seek to define yourself before your opponent does
it for you
– Negative advertising
• Does it work?
– Yes  Voters remember negative ads longer than
positive ads
» Negative ads provide information to voters
1964 – Daisy Spot
1988 – Willie Horton
2000 - Meatball
The Debates:
• 1960: First Televised Debate
• 1984: Reagan’s Age
– "I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I
am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my
opponent's youth and inexperience."
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1988 - “You’re no Jack Kennedy”
1988 - Death Penalty
1992 - Price of milk?
2000 - Gore (sighing)
Electoral College
• Presidents are not elected by the public except
indirectly. They are elected by the Electoral
College
– Each state’s number of electors equals that state’s
number of senators (2) plus its number of
representatives
• 435 (House Reps) + 100 (senators) + 3 (Washington D.C.) =
538 Electoral Votes
– Candidate who receives a majority of the electoral
votes (270) wins
– If no candidate receives 270 electoral votes, the
election is thrown to the House of Representatives
States in Proportion to Electoral
Votes
Benefits of Electoral College
• Forces a candidate to campaign nationally
– Worthless to “run up the score” at home
• Advantages both large and small states
– Large states: candidates spend more
resources in these states
– Small states: Overrepresented due to
overrepresentation in Senate
• Fraud and national recounts
• American Candidate will have problems