Presidential campaigns narrow the battleground to an ever-smaller group of potentially pivotal states—where they spend most of their time and money in the race to 270 electoral votes. How do presidential campaigns envision and select their paths to victory? And how much do these decisions matter? Daron Shaw takes us inside the presidential campaigns from 1952 to 2020, with data and analysis from the campaigns themselves. He finds that calcified partisanship and campaign finance liberalization have moved us into a micro-targeted era, with a smaller group of mutually agreed battleground states. But resource allocation decisions can still make enough of a difference to tip the balance in several recent elections–and maybe 2024 as well.
Guest: Daron Shaw, University of Texas
Study: Battleground
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: How the campaigns battle for electoral college victory this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.
Presidential campaigns narrow the battleground to an ever smaller group of potentially pivotal states where they spend most of their time and money in the race to 270 electoral votes. But sometimes, like in 2016, at least one campaign is surprised by which states make the difference. How do presidential campaigns envision and select their paths to victory and how much do these decisions matter? This week I talked to Daron Shaw of the University of Texas about his new Oxford book with Scott Althaus and Costas Panagopoulos, Battleground: Electoral College Strategies, Execution, and Impact in the Modern Era.
Daron takes us inside the presidential campaigns from 1952 to 2020 with data and analysis from the campaigns themselves. He finds that calcified partisanship and campaign finance liberalization have moved us into a microtargeted era with a smaller group of mutually agreed battleground states. But resource allocation decisions still make enough of a difference to tip the balance in several recent elections. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So what are the key findings and takeaways from Battleground?
Daron Shaw: Well, I think probably the largest is theoretical, and that is that if you look over the entirety of what we refer to as the modern presidential campaign era, which we date from really the advent of television as a dominant mechanism for communication. So 1952 through 2020, our argument theoretically is that there are three distinct eras over this time period, and they’re defined.
The first era runs from ’52 through ’72, which is an era that we talk about, internally referred to as sort of the Wild West. There is no campaign finance regulation of consequence. We’re not saying there’s no regulation, but certainly nothing like the era that you get which follows it, right? So you see in some instances significant discrepancies, most obvious would be Nixon versus McGovern in 1972, between one side’s campaign spending on television and another side’s. You see significant discrepancies in the allocation of candidate appearances or visits, not only between the presidential candidates, but between the vice presidential candidates.
So that’s era one. And our expectations, which come to be borne out in the data analysis are that, well, that seemed to us to be an era where there might be potential for greater effects because you can get significant discrepancies. There’s less consistent information available to the campaigns about which states they ought to target or which media markets they ought of target. Okay?
The second era runs from ’76 all the way through 2000, and that’s, we called it the zero-sum era. And the reason for that is that campaign finance, the Federal Election Campaign Finance Act of ’71, which is amended in ’74, defines that area with public spending options for the presidential candidates. And basically every major party presidential candidate takes the public funds for the general election. So in the period we’re covering, and it’s important to remember, we’re focusing on kind of the traditional Labor Day through election day campaign, the candidates take those public funds and that limits really the opportunity to significantly outspend or be outspent.
This doesn’t really affect appearances, but transportation technology and the advent of polling, meaning strategic information, equalizes a little bit. Both sides kind of have their best minds, their best data available. And so our thought was, okay, this is an era in which to the extent that there are discrepancies in resources, there really are going to be a function of the campaign’s different intelligence. We’re going to be in Ohio, they’re going to be in Florida, but if we’re in Ohio, we can’t be in Florida because we only have $72 million to spend.
So our expectation was that this was an era in which we weren’t sure you were going to find significant effects. And frankly, Matt, you know this literature pretty well. This is a time, the end of this era is when you start getting really significant political science research focusing on campaign effects, presidential campaign effects. So the work by Ken Goldstein and Paul Freedman, the work by even Shanto Iyengar and Stephen Ansolabehere doing their experimental research, and the preliminary stuff by Don Green and Alan Gerber is all kind of at the end of this era.
Then you get to what we call the microtargeting era. And this is an era in which, okay, you’re back to the Wild West in terms of funding. You get campaigns like the Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012 which have close to a billion dollars available for campaigning, significantly more than the McCain or the Romney campaigns. On the other hand, you have a polarized electorate. And I probably should have mentioned in these earlier two eras, the assumption was is that party preferences are strong, they’re compelling, but they’re not quite as entrenched, not quite as intractable as they are in this most recent era. So we’re a little ambivalent, right? The amount of information available to target specific voters is off the charts. The money with which to message them is off the charts. But they’re probably less perceptive and the number of available targets may be limited.
So conceptually, I think it’s an important part of understanding our project to understand where we’re coming from with these three eras. It wasn’t just that we thought, “We got 18 elections, let’s do six, six, and six.” We thought long and hard about this, and one of the, and Matt, of course you know this as someone teaches American government, one of the criticisms of studies of the presidency is the classic N-of-1. Okay, let’s study the Eisenhower administration or the Johnson administration. And we thought there’s a little bit of that to the study of presidential campaigns.
And to be clear, there’s some fantastic kind of cross-time studies. James Campbell does some great stuff. Lynn Vavreck’s book, The Message Matters, talks about the same era, basically ’52 all the way through 2004. So it has been done, but nobody had gathered data systematically to kind of explore what these strategies look like and at the back end, what kind of effects do they have across this vast scope of elections.
Matt Grossmann: So talk about that data trove a little bit. From 1952 to 2020, what were you able to get for almost every campaign and what’s most new about what you’re adding here?
Daron Shaw: Funny thing, Matt, I think the newest stuff is the oldest stuff. What we found, and credit goes to Scott Althaus in Illinois, Scott actually found that there were records from the Federal Communications Commission on all of the radio and television expenditures of the Eisenhower and Stevenson campaigns in the ’52 and ’56 campaigns.
I can’t recall exactly how Scott came across this, but basically it was brought to his attention maybe by one of his research assistants that these data existed through National Archives. And so while I was doing some of my research as a younger professor on the 2000 and 2004 campaigns, which at that point were the most recent, I was talking, communicating with Scott about some of this information he was getting from the FCC, and it occurred to us that we could probably track the stuff I was tracking in real time in 2000 and 2004. We could probably do that, and we wanted to go back as far as we could.
As a research strategy, the tough thing was is that we were coming in from the ends. I was coming from the modern era working back, and Scott was moving from the most distant data point forward. And so what we ended up doing was going to these absolutely fabulous presidential libraries and university holdings of the papers of candidates and key consultants who had been usually in losing campaigns. So I went to the Carter Library and the Reagan and the Nixon Libraries. Scott had gone to the Kennedy Libraries. I was here at the University of Texas at the Johnson Library looking for these data. And some were easier, some were harder to find this information.
The Nixon Libraries ended up being a treasure trove, but through papers of people that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. So for instance, the key guy at the Nixon Libraries was Jeb Magruder. The Magruder papers were unbelievably detailed, and oftentimes the Magruder papers would include memos that had been sent by the pollsters or the TV ad people working for the campaign. The Kennedy campaign was an incredible source of information about the Stevenson campaigns because they basically pulled all the Stevenson data in their effort to prepare their own media strategy.
So we’re really keying on what were the strategies, what were the targeted states? What did they call them, how dynamic were these? What were the basis upon which they decided that certain states would be targeted and other states would not be targeted? We wanted to stay away from basically sampling on the dependent variable. We didn’t want to use media expenditures as our method for determining where their priority states were. We wanted to actually get a memo that said, “Here are the targeted states.” And sometimes we were very fortunate.
In the case of the Reagan administration, they had a nice document called Campaign Plan ’80. So when people ask us, “Well, how do you know what Reagan’s campaign plan was?” We’d say, “Well, you could reference Campaign Plan ’80.” Other times it was trickier. You’d go through these memos and people would talk about a strategy, but you’d have to figure out is that actually a strategy or are you just some person writing a memo to the campaign? And there were a number of instances like that.
So it was fun to go back and actually see what these early campaign plans had done, how they developed the plans, the data they were relied on. A lot of it was historical county-level information, and then some contemporaneous polling. That was kind of the lion’s share.
What we found early on, we kind of thought there’s a conventional wisdom that presidential campaigns bought nationally, that is their television advertising was largely national buys until the late 60s or early 1970s. And you think about Joe McGinniss’s book, The Selling of the President, and works like that, we found that that’s actually not true. Even going back to certainly the Eisenhower administration, spot buys were an incredibly large portion of their strategic plan. It wasn’t just national buys.
Another issue that came up was actually trying to reconstruct media markets historically, which was not easy, in which we are still doing, but in the book we present state-level data. We did not go back past the 1980s reconstructing these markets because we didn’t have confidence in the boundaries and some of the cost estimates and things like that.
So all that stuff came in. But I guess the main thing is, I guess, is we were really interested in reconstructing the plans they had and then getting information, comprehensive information on all of the television advertising expenditures at the level of the state and when possible at the level of the media market. And then the same with appearances.
And I want to emphasize, at no point are we claiming that’s the sum total of the campaign. Neither then nor now. And we try to make this pretty clear, it’s a marker. It’s a marker. These are valuable resources, certainly the candidate’s time and their money. And there’s an argument about whether some of these things are complementary or compensatory, right? I mean, if you don’t do that, maybe you do this or maybe you’re just interested in this collection of states. But these are the only real markers of the campaign that we are using, and we want to be kind of clear about that as a limit of the study, especially in the more modern era.
Matt Grossmann: So you, of course, wrote a previous book, The Race to 270, also about electoral college strategy. What is new in your thinking and what was confirmed in your previous book? And what was it like comparing campaigns that you lived through to ones you had to recreate from documents?
Daron Shaw: Yeah. I think in The Race to 270, I found fairly minor effects, pretty minor, in the order of a point or two. And that’s almost precisely what we find here. The effects are pretty small, which I think is honestly, is actually reassuring to me as a scholar. I’m kind of suspicious… Given the amount of information we have about the magnitude effects from a variety of different sources, I would’ve been really suspicious if we were finding five and six point effects based on advertising or appearance differentials.
Conversely, I would’ve been surprised if we found nothing. I think the most interesting kind of different… Well, here’s a consistency. In 2000 and 2004, we found a negative effect associated with Dick Cheney’s travel. And what we found though was that it was largely about… It wasn’t that Dick Cheney wasn’t mobilizing Republicans. He was. But he was countermobilizing as many or more Democrats as he was mobilizing. I found that’s not exceptional in this study. We did find some evidence of negative effects, which are largely about countermobilization.
In the early era, Matt, and I think this is interesting because we really went back and forth on whether this was an artifact of the data, maybe the data weren’t as precise or maybe it was a real thing. I think we landed on it was a real thing. Republican effects. The effects of Republican advertising are really attenuated compared to Democratic effects. And I think the reason for that is that over this era… Remember this is ’52 through 1972. Through this era, you’re really talking about the historical elections, which we use as the anchor point for judging how well a current campaign is doing. We use a weighted average of the last two or three election cycles to compare how you’re doing now. And Republicans ’52, ’56, less in ’60, but then ’64 hits, and then in ’68 and ’72 Republicans are working against this baseline where the Democrats are really kind of dominating. And so what you’re seeing is that in places where there’s almost zero resource allocation, the Republicans are moving up compared to historical average.
Their movement is less significant in the battleground states, and so that ends up looking like a negative effect overall. And I think it’s just because the effect is, it’s not that Republicans aren’t doing better than they did in the Roosevelt elections, it’s that the Democrats are basically contesting those states and they’re limiting Republican gains in those battleground states. So that was something that was completely different than anything had encountered in the 2000 or 2004 data. The other thing that’s interesting is I thought it was an artifact of 2000 and maybe 2004. We use a five-fold categorization in our deluxe version. So strong Democratic base, Republican base on the ends. Lean Democratic, lean Republican, and then battleground states. And one interesting question is what’s going on in the lean states? Are they sort of mini battlegrounds? What are they? And there was a tendency in 2000 and 2004 that more resources were spent in the lean Democratic states than certainly in the lean Republican, and they were almost approaching the battleground states.
I thought that was a particular characteristic of the Bush elections. I thought it was Bush being a little more aggressive in a slightly stronger position than Gore and Kerry. And Gore and Kerry responding by spending resources to defend those states. So macro forces drive that, but we found it was more consistent than I had thought. And maybe that’s again, because of this sort of… Even though we got a long time period, maybe it’s the historical nature that the lean Democratic states in the first era, a little bit in the second, but certainly in the third, they seem to be attracting a lot of attention. And interestingly, when you get to the Obama elections, it’s still the case that the lean Dem states are drawing more attention. But I think that’s because Republican desperation. So you’re talking about a Romney or a McCain targeting Virginia or Colorado or states that Obama had classified as lean Democratic.
In this cycle, I think as we sort of think about 2024, it’s the same kind of interesting dynamic. Although I thought with Biden on the ticket, it was more like the Bush 2000, 2004 elections where there were these Virginias, Minnesotans, New Hampshires that are pretty lean Democratic. But there was an interesting question when Biden was at the head of the ticket, are they going to draw resources? Is Trump going to go after him? Is Biden going to defend? And it’s just kind of curious. I’m still not entirely convinced that it’s not a little quirky, but the lean Dem states tend to draw resources more than you might expect in more than lean Republican states.
Matt Grossmann: So give us sort of a overall parameters of how candidates are allocating these resources of time and advertising money, and how much is going to these top tier battleground states. And I know that some of the appearances are about fundraising or free media opportunities. So how does time differ from money?
Daron Shaw: Right. The time stuff, as you might imagine, the last couple of election cycles has gotten a little funky, but not as… I thought in 2020, when I totaled these up, that the number of candidate appearances would be down dramatically. It’s actually not the case. A robust presidential campaign will basically lay out about 125 appearances, distinct appearances. I’m not treating the trip to Florida as one. I’m treating if you go there and you go to West Palm, Miami and Orlando and then you move on, those are three distinct appearances because you’re in three separate medium markets. So that’s why you get these high numbers. I’m not saying there’s 125 trips. I’m saying 125 distinct public appearances. On the vice presidential side, you tend to get in the 75 to 80 range. That number has been fairly consistent over time. There’s a little bit of fluctuation. It goes down a little bit, but it seems to be more candidate specific than it’s era specific.
On the television side, we actually did both the raw spending figures, but they were raw spending to 2020 or 2021 dollars, I think. But we did a percentage of the time. So just as a, for instance, in the modern era, so let’s look at Republican campaign spending, for instance. In the modern era, about 75% of Republican campaign spending is concentrated in the battleground states. On the Democratic side, it’s 63%. What’s interesting is that Republican campaign spending about 11% in the modern era in the lean Democratic states, states, the Democrats are spending about 30% of their money in the lean Democratic states across the era. How does that compare over time? It’s gotten more tightly allocated. So just as for instance, I mentioned that 75% of Republican ad dollars are spent in the battlegrounds. In the ’76 to 2000 era, it was about 45%.
And in the 1952 through ’72 era, it was about 57%. So you’re talking about 18 to 20 point increase in the percentage of money allocated specifically in the battlegrounds. And that’s not even taken into account, more money, more money more tightly allocated. To the extent it’s not in those places, the Democrats have a slightly more balanced across these categories spending array than Republicans do. But on the Democratic side, just because I think they’re a little more interesting in this regard, in the most distant era, in ’52 through ’72, they only spent 31% of their money in the battlegrounds. 30% in lean Republican states and 15% in lean Democratic states. So basically very little distinction between the battlegrounds versus the lean Republicans. In the ’76 through 2000 era, Democrats spent 54% of their money in the battlegrounds, 14% in lean Republican, 28% in the lean Democratic states. So again, a little more skewed to the lead Democrat, but disproportionately allocated in the battleground states.
So all told, you’re spending about seven out of ten to ad dollars in these battleground states. What do we expect in this most recent cycle? I’m not sure. It’s a little trickier because of the rise of connected television, the CTV expenditures. I would expect almost no money to be spent outside the battleground states, outside the big seven for instance. And part of that is we’re not sure those states are truly competitive. But part of it also is if you think about them, if you think about New Hampshire, if Virginia, if I’m Trump and I’m like, “Well, maybe I can steal some electoral votes here. Okay, well, I’m going to advertise in Boston to get to New Hampshire? I’m going to advertise in DC to get to Virginia?” There’s a particular wastefulness to the markets that are necessary to expand the map this time around that makes me suspicious. So it’s not just that campaigns are more disciplined. It’s kind of the nature of the targets that they had to deal with. And that’s something that you kind of see throughout.
I do think it’s clear the candidates and campaigns are more targeted than they were. It’s clear the number of battlegrounds has shrunk, but it’s also true that some of the states that you might consider adding to your list for whatever reason, have been a little problematic the last couple cycles. I mean, I mentioned Trump, but think about the Democrats. Do you want to expand the map? Well, where would you expand the map? Well, Florida, Ohio and Texas. Do I really want to… A real campaign in Florida is a 45 million proposition. So I don’t know. I mean, you and me and people like us are going to have to think about, it’s not just that, boy, this new generation is smarter and more targeted. It’s kind of this interesting dynamic between better information, better data, coupled with the fact that the fringe states have particular characteristics now. And I don’t know that they’re going to be that way moving forward, but they are right now.
Matt Grossmann: So you find small effects, but we sometimes have close elections where those small effects can matter. Some of the, I guess cases that first come to mind for me are the sort of stretch cases like in ’08 Indiana and North Carolina for Obama, where there’s a real outspending. That makes a difference. But you find that even in these real potential tipping point states that it can matter. So tell us about those cases and how much the 2016 example sticks out or doesn’t because we hear this story about Wisconsin and Michigan. Less so about Pennsylvania, which was the battleground from the beginning, but Yeah.
Daron Shaw: Well, it was fun. At the beginning of chapter seven, which is our last empirical chapter… Actually, I’m sorry. It’s chapter eight. It’s the last empirical chapter where we talk about effects. I just did this sort of throwaway analysis trying to figure out what does this matter. I mean, okay, small effects. You and I have been singing this from this hymnal for a long time. But how often is it the case that these small sort of effects would actually as a practical matter come into play? And so our universe here is 18 elections, and we pulled numbers from ’60, ’68, ’76, 2000, 2004, 2016, and 2020. So of that, I believe that’s eight of the eighteen elections where shifts of less than 75,000 votes would’ve changed the Electoral College outcome. And now of course, we’re talking about an actual shift, like move these votes from Kennedy to Nixon.
But man, that’s unbelievable. So for instance, in 1960, 4,429 shifting from Kennedy to Nixon in Illinois. Another basically 5,000 in Missouri. 11,000 in New Jersey, that election shifts. ’68’s kind of similar. ’76, all you need is, I think 5,500 in Ohio, 17,000 in Wisconsin, and Ford wins. But you’re right. 2000 is just a total outlier. That’s a couple of hundred. But man, the 2016 and 2020 elections do to me stand out because in 2016, so you mentioned 5,300 in Michigan for Clinton over Trump, 22,000 in Pennsylvania, 11,000 in Wisconsin. That’s not much. These are really tiny effects necessary to flip that election. Similarly in 2020, 5,229 in Arizona from Biden to Trump, 5,890 in Georgia, about 16,800 in Nevada, 10,300 in Wisconsin. And we don’t have January 6th. I mean, it’s kind of stunning when you look at how many unbelievably close elections there are. To your point about, “Okay, but how realistic is it for one candidate to affect an advantage of that sort?”
To me, and I think you were prescient on this, 2016 was the one. I mean, in 2000, I think my opinion was is that Tennessee and West Virginia were places where Gore was about 10 days late. It’s not that he didn’t campaign. It’s that he was late allocating resources, and the Bush campaign had built an advantage, and that became the steady state. And then it was just a parity fight to the end. So can you get a jump on somebody or can you get them late so that they can’t do the compensatory spending? And man, that 2016 example, in the raw appearances, it doesn’t look as lopsided because Kaine spent more significant time in Wisconsin than people seem to give the Clinton campaign credit for. And I mean from the Clinton campaign’s perspective, that’s why they thought they had Kaine, is that they were going to put him in places like Wisconsin. He was going to lock down those votes.
But what we found was that there was just of nothing effect of Kaine and vice presidents’ generally in this cycle. And so it really didn’t do them any good. They needed somebody else. I’m not sure Hillary would’ve done the trick, but the money they spent, they basically outsourced. They were doing a lot of microtargeting, but they weren’t doing kind of campaign spending. I’m telling you those Wisconsin and Michigan numbers. The Pennsylvania one’s a little different story. She had a very robust campaign in Pennsylvania. But Michigan and Wisconsin, I’m not going to say they got caught napping, but boy, the data suggests that she could have done two out of the three that were necessary with even treating it as a regular battleground state, which she didn’t do.
Matt Grossmann: So 2024, we seem to be down to seven battleground states. Why has the field narrowed? And I know campaigns are going to only play the game that’s in front of them, but are there potential long-term implications to narrowing the field that much for future elections?
Daron Shaw: Yeah, this goes back to the conversation we had about with Alan Abramowitz and others about isn’t it a bad thing that seven states get 70% of the resources and attention of the candidates? I think this is … I think Abramowitz’s point was, it was very much a get off my lawn kind of old man point. And I’m with Alan on that some extent. He said, “When I was growing up, New York and California and Texas were all battlegrounds and they’re not battlegrounds anymore.” And my initial response was, “Yeah, because New Hampshire and Ohio and Florida and Nevada and Arizona are.”
And I actually went into this thinking that it’s a very much an empirical question about the extent to which the number of battlegrounds has shrunk. It turns out that is true. The number of battleground states has shrunk over time.
But my second hypothesis was, well, is it true that the raw number of electoral college votes contained within those battlegrounds has shrunk over time? And that’s also true. It is kind of a function of the sort of battlegrounds that were available back in the day, right? California’s out there with 50, high 40s or 50 electoral votes. And if you don’t get California, you have to cobble together three or four other states equivalently. But one thing that was pretty clear, Matt, is that campaigns had this notion of pivot states very early on.
Also, something that I think we understand intuitively, but no one had really shown is that throughout this time, the notion of multiple pathways is very real, right? This is what campaigns want. They don’t just want a minimum winning coalition. They want as many different combinations of minimum winning coalitions as they can put together given the money that’s available. And I think we all think that that’s true. That just sounds right. But when you see it on paper, if this state doesn’t get, we need these two states, this if-then kind of thing. And it’s been manifest in Romney had this sort of Sun Belt strategy in the Southwest, and different campaigns have different versions of this. I think Hillary had three or four different kind of pathways she was talking about. But that’s something that goes back to the 1950s.
I think it’s interesting that you would think that there would actually be given that states like New York and Texas and California are off the map, that there would be more creative strategies for getting to 270, but that doesn’t really seem to have been the case. Campaigns don’t really seem to want to spend the time and energy to cultivate states that are kind of longer shots. They’re just continuing to bang away at the states that they think are on the map.
Right now it’s interesting, I think if we’re going to talk about the implications of a book like this for 2024, I think it’s right in our face. I really believe that people on the democratic side decided that Joe Biden had one path to 270 electoral votes and that it ran through Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, period, that he could not replace Michigan with Georgia or North Carolina. He had to have those states. And when it looked like that was at best tricky, I think that when people talk about, well, Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama, whoever did not think Biden could win. If we want to be more precise about that, I think that’s what they thought. He had one path and it was a very unlikely path.
So why Kamala or how does she change the race? She has multiple paths. I’m not saying she’s going to win, but she clearly does not have to sweep the blue wall states in order to win. And I think that’s something that’s clear in 2024, but it’s sort of interesting to think this kind of thinking has existed for a long time, that they think in terms of multiple pathways.
So yeah, you’ve got tipping point states, but what a campaign does, it says, okay, Pennsylvania is our tipping point state, but if we lose Pennsylvania, that means we have to drop down to the next two on the rank order and replace those 20 plus electoral votes, which means we need Nevada plus North Carolina. That’s the way campaigns think. And then the question is how far around the tipping point, above the tipping point, how many states do you think you have to allocate resources to lock them down? And then below the tipping point, how far are you willing to go to add combinations of replacements that will get you to 270?
By the way, just as a side note, our friend George Edwards, who’s maybe the most prominent kind of recognized critic of the electoral college, and I had a conversation about this, the distortion between the electoral college and the popular vote is largely driven by the extent to which a candidate sweeps or is capable of sweeping the battleground states in a close election.
So the largest discrepancy we’ve had recently is not the Bush-Gore or the Trump-Clinton where the loser of the popular vote wins the electoral college. It’s actually Barack Obama in 2012. And the reason was Barack Obama won 11 of 12 battleground states in a two point election, 2.5 point election. Now, I’m trying to get George and others to recognize that point that in a close election, ceteris paribus, you’d expect the candidates to roughly split the electoral votes across those battleground states, in a close election.
But Matt, something I’ve been noodling on the other day, and I hope your listeners will chime in on is, I’m not sure I believe that. I thought that, I’ve been saying this for a couple years, but now I’m sort of thinking in this particular election, do we really think that Harris and Trump will split the battlegrounds, which is what you’d expect in a 50-50 election, right? Harris wins four, Trump wins three or vice-versa.
I’m actually thinking, is there something systematic about the election such that what I would really expect is for either Harris or Trump to basically win six out of the seven? And I kind of think I think that. So that’s kind of future research in this area, but I think it’s really interesting about what our expectations in this small subset of states that are going to be decisive.
Matt Grossmann: So we’re still in the micro-targeting era until you name a new era. So how will we know if we’re in a new era? And I know that you’re not talking about micro-targeting messages to particular constituencies, but one of the reasons why there might be multiple paths in electoral college states is because there might be one of the candidates over-performs with Latino voters or under-performs with Arab American voters, and that might rely on the ability of the candidates to really deliver specific messages rather than one national message. So, yeah, to what extent is the micro-targeting era really about micro-targeting and how will we know if we’re in a new era?
Daron Shaw: Yeah, I think I will defend to the death the nomenclature we have chosen, but not really. I think what it really is, is a polarized micro-targeted era and there probably are a couple other adjectives that ought to go into this most modern era, and describing it earlier and I talked about these really different, in some ways contradictory possibilities, right? An electorate that really is locked into their partisan silos, but unbelievable information available about Professor Grossmann or Professor Shaw’s specific issues that they care about and messages they might be susceptible to and unbelievable communication technologies available to reach those voters.
So visits are great, television’s great, but as we move to connected television and text messaging and social media and the kinds of outreach that the candidates are capable of is just sort of exploded. So I think with the new era, to me in a lot of ways, I think I was caught off guard actually in 2016 and 2020 about the map.
So for instance, Matt, if we’ve talked about this in 2012 or 2016, the battleground states included Florida and Ohio. In fact, we could make an argument that those are the pivot states in those particular elections. We talk about New Hampshire and Colorado and Virginia. We wouldn’t have talked so much. The Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, those are sort of lean democratic states in those elections.
And so one of the things that’s been fascinating is the coalitional ship that you alluded to just by talking about Hispanic voters or even younger voters. We as political scientists, I think had fallen in love with the Judis and Teixeira story about the emerging democratic majority. The realignment of the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s was done, and now we’re talking about replacement populations. And that seemed to absolutely favor the Democrats. And I think as scholars, at least I was, I’ll speak for myself, I was caught off guard by the less well-educated white population that existed in these upper Midwest states.
It’s not that I was totally unaware of it, I just didn’t think they were mobilizable, and I certainly didn’t think they were mobilizable by a Republican candidate. And that tilted the field back to where these upper Midwest states are now back to being the decisive states the way they were say in the ’80s. And conversely, the demographic story is that that story hasn’t been as prevalent in some of the Southwestern states or in the mid-Atlantic states. So the Virginias and the Colorados are fringy at best battleground states at this point.
The question to me is the extent to which the political parties can actually deal with what seemed to be the coalitional shifts that have existed at this period of time. I think the Republicans clearly have a crisis on their hands. Are Republicans for free trade anymore? Are Republicans for robust foreign policy, the sort defining characteristics of the Reagan realignment, are they still in play? Those are obvious. And criticizing the Biden administration has masked some of those coalitional tensions. They don’t have to necessarily articulate whether they’re for these things or not, whether they actually are the party of the white working class, which is certainly a change from when I was growing up.
And the Democrats have similar problems. They’re just maybe not as obvious because they’re united by their antipathy to Trump. But we’ve seen it manifest in the Israel-Gaza flare up, the tension between younger and older elements of the Democratic coalition. I think both parties have a real problem right now. So might that weaken partisan allegiances in such a way that gives way to a fourth era where given communication technologies, given messaging capabilities that entrepreneurial political parties or candidates are able to reshape things and create persuasive politics in a way that’s been absent from our campaigns in a long time? I think that’s where I bet my money, Matt.
I just can’t believe we’re just going to continue to muddle along with these sorts of incoherent political parties right now with respect to some of the coalitional changes. Maybe they’re so institutionalized and we’re just going to keep slogging forward. But I don’t know, when Trump exits the scene one way or the other, I think there’s some hard choices that certainly the Republicans face, but probably the Democrats in the absence of Trump.
What are they? I think that will shake up politics. I don’t know if partisanship is so hardened that it’s not going to make a difference, but I’m actually kind of hopeful. I think that kind of reckoning needs to occur. I mean, we can’t keep fighting the Roosevelt coalition issue agenda for the next a hundred years. It’s increasingly irrelevant for younger voters. My students could not care less about these sort of scope of government questions that animated politics in my era.
So I do think we’re headed, and it’s a combination of party politics and messaging, as you mentioned, communication technologies or vehicles for communicating that. And I do think we’re going to get even better at targeting.
The other thing that could upset the apple cart is re-regulation of campaign finance, right? Right now, oh my gosh, they’re pouring a billion dollars and the interest groups are pouring comparable amounts of money for targeting. So money is just no object. I mean, you and I have been talking about these strategic decisions, but the reality is that if some outside interest group wanted to dump $25 million in Florida on behalf of Joe Biden or 25 million in Virginia on behalf of Donald Trump, they could do it. So I do think that’s a wild card as well.
Matt Grossmann: So the biggest change this year obviously is the sudden replacement of the Democratic candidate. What do we know from your historical studies about how that may play out? Initial studies seem to indicate that messaging about Harris is much more important ’cause people just know Harris a whole lot less than Donald Trump. Does it matter, incumbents versus challengers and where they travel or where they spend money or how well the candidates are known? Or is it, it just should be treated as two candidates equally able to allocate?
Daron Shaw: Yeah. In the empirical analysis, we have a couple of, we call dummy variables, control variables that exist. One is for incumbency, and what we find is that incumbency seems to limit the ability of the candidate to move away from historical party vote totals. I think that that was going to be a problem for Biden. In terms of moving the needle, he was going to be constrained. We would’ve expected smaller effects associated with the Biden campaign than a Harris campaign, so that’s one thing. We also controlled, by the way, for the extent to which population is a predictor of battleground status, and that number has collapsed in the last era. Larger states were more likely to be considered battlegrounds in the past, partly because of the California and Texas and New York were competitive. But partly, theoretically, you would think that a big target would be more attractive.
That’s just not the case anymore. That coefficient is essentially zero in the modern era. If New Hampshire is competitive, if Nevada is competitive, it’s going to get targeted. Look at Omaha two or Maine two in the current cycle. That’s a single electoral vote. Both those places are going to draw considerable amount of attention. I think to answer your question, Matt, I think where we’re at right now is typically where we’re at in March or April of a regular election year. Think of it this way, if Harris had won the nomination and was riding high, had been holding her hands up and triumph with Doug Emhoff in contest after contest, then she turns to the general election and the Trump campaign would pour $250 million of negative advertising on her head. The difference is that she’s not broke, which is where most candidates tend to come out of the primaries. It’s a time in which we would actually expect there to be a lot of possibility for Trump to move the needle by essentially de-legitimizing Harris by going negative on Harris.
I still think that’s a distinct possibility, and there’s more room for effects there than there would normally be. However, she’s going to be able to travel. She’s picked her Vice President, so she’s got her surrogate, which she wouldn’t have in March, and she’s got a lot more money than if she had exhausted her war chest wrestling to control the Democratic nomination. I’ve got these ambivalent…. I don’t think you’re going to see the kind of movement that we typically see when an incumbent turns their attention to a challenger after the primaries in election year. On the other hand, I do expect there to be more potential for some movement just because she is not well known and she’s not well-defined. Maybe we see debate effects, maybe we see… I think she could gain or lose a couple of points in a state like Arizona, a state like Georgia, and I would be much more skeptical that Biden could gain or lose much by going out there.
Matt Grossmann: You have a previous book about how turnout doesn’t consistently benefit the Democratic or Republican parties. One of your co-authors has a book about how campaigns are increasingly focused on the base over swing voters. Where should we put out… Where should we put this book in the turnout versus persuasion analysis, and what do you make of the recent democratic realization that they agree with you that now that turnout may not favor them?
Daron Shaw: Well first there’s a mea culpa on this, and we state this in the book, but just to be clear, when we talk about effects, we’re talking about vote effects, and that could include mobilization as well as persuasion. What’s happened in the modern era, and we don’t distinguish between these buckets, which I think is a weakness of the book, but it’s an unavoidable weakness, I think in the modern era to the extent that we find some effects, I think they’re largely about mobilization, as you’ve talked about in your research a little bit, and Costas Panagopoulos has talked about in his research. I think that’s absolutely true. I would say this is a small caveat that what people think of when they think of mobilization versus persuasion though is sometimes a little off. I think one of the problems, for instance, that Donald Trump has is not getting MAGA supporters to the polls, it’s convincing Nikki Haley supporters or non-MAGA Republicans to get to the polls.
And the sort of messaging you need to do to accomplish that is not red meat make America great again, messaging, so I think there’s a tendency to think mobilization equals red meat campaigning, and I think that’s so really simplistic. I don’t think that’s quite right. It could be, but it might not. This book admits the possibility for mobilization effects. My earlier work, I think the point is it was fun making this argument because people would come back and they say, “Well, in this election, democratic turnout was high and the Democrats… Or turnout was high, and the Democrats did well.” And my response was always, “Yeah, the point of the book was that there’s no systematic relationship, that it’s largely short-term forces that drive peripheral voters to go to the polls.” I think in this election, that’s what Harris did.
I think you were looking at an election where the Democrats needed… The variance in turnout was going to be on the democratic side, and the higher the turnout, I would’ve expected probably a marginally pro democratic effect because my supposition would be those are Biden voters who basically bit the bullet and said, “You know what? He’s old. I don’t like him, but he’s better than Trump, so I’m going to vote.” I think that’s gone. I think the Democratic vote is now baked in. I think Harris and her joy… And I would say the Democrats that I talk with, it’s not so much joy, it’s relief. There’s a relief on the democratic side. I think turnout is going to be very, very high. And that is something that I think has changed, which is, I’m with you, Matt, I think that the interesting question is Republican turnout, and I’ll give you a quick example in passing.
In 2018, I was talking with some people in Texas and Ted Cruz was running against Beto O’Rourke in the Senate election, and I asked them, “What’s your thought on the election a few days before the election?” And they said, “If turnout is below eight million in Texas we’re in trouble, if it’s above eight million we’re great.” And I said, “Really?” And they said, “Beto’s voters are going to show up. I don’t care if they’re young, they are going to show up. The question is whether Cruz’s support in rural Texas and West Texas is going to show up. That’s the variable.” And I’ve tucked that story away because I’ve thought about that five or six different specific instances, Matt, where I think that’s basically been the dynamic, which is… And I think it was the dynamic in 2020, the question wasn’t whether Democrats were going to walk across broken glass to vote against Trump.
That was going to happen. The question was whether Trump supporters were actually going to show up and vote, and they did, which is why it was a really close race. This time around, I think you went from a race where the question was Democratic turnout. I think we may now be back into an era where I think we’re probably in that 60% range of the voter eligible population, and I’m not so sure that if we get to 62 or 63, that doesn’t help Trump. I think, I think that, but we’re really dealing, I hope, with a new conventional wisdom now, which is peripheral voters vary, and it depends on political context. And even the hardcore people who thought that if everybody voted Democrats would win elections because it’s lower status, lots of racial ethnic minorities and young people, all of which is true. But I think the coalitional shifts and the fact there now all these less well-educated white voters who are of nominally, they’re Trumpy and they’re nominally Republican, I think that’s further complicated, I think eroded, whatever the conventional wisdom was on turnout.
Matt Grossmann: Anything you want to tell us about what you’re working on now or that we didn’t get to or that we should be looking for this year?
Daron Shaw: Sure. I’m working with some Texas elected officials on a question, I hope you’ll find interesting and your listeners as well. The question, it was after the 2022 election, we were in a conference of political consultants and we asked them, “What could political science do that would be interesting to you? What do you want to know?” I’d say two or three of them independently said, “We want to know whether talking to the legacy media matters at all, because we’re spending a lot of time and attention and staffing on that. Does it make any sense for us to do that in pure self-interested terms?” I’ve got an elected official that agreed to turn over all their email and text requests messages, and whether they responded to those messages, and then all of the media coverage over a month.
I’m analyzing now whether responding versus not responding made a difference in terms of the tone of the coverage and then whether they ran some polls at the beginning and end, and whether the nature of that coverage had any impact on public opinion. And it looks like the short version is that response matters for shaping media coverage. However, the nature of media coverage doesn’t matter much for voters, which I think I expected, but anyway. To the extent that you’d find that question interesting, I think you’re seeing it today with both candidates campaign strategies at the presidential level, I think Harris is… I had an example, I may change my example to be a Kamala Harris example about not really caring or catering to the legacy media because why would you do that now? Hopefully that’s the next article.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. Does nationalized media mean the death of local politics? How campaign money changes elections before and after citizens united? When information about candidates persuades voters? Does the 2022 election show how democratic campaigns win? And how record television advertising is shaping American elections. Thanks to Darren Shaw for joining me. Please check out Battleground and then listen in next time.