Assessing the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

Panagopoulos, Costas ; Cohen, Jeffrey E.

Like all but three presidents since the end of the Second World War, Barack Obama was reelected in 2012. (1) Obama triumphed over Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 332-206 in the Electoral College and by 51 to 47% in the national popular vote. Obama secured a second term with fewer electoral votes and fewer popular votes than he had accrued in the 2008 election cycle, becoming only the second Democrat in U.S. history, the other being Franklin Roosevelt, to win a majority of the popular vote more than once. Most preelection polls showed modest advantages for Obama (relative to Romney) over the course of the campaign, but the contest between the two contenders, at least according to preelection polls that registered voter preferences, remained close throughout (Panagopoulos 2013).

The president faced several headwinds in his reelection quest. First, despite signs of economic recovery from the severe recession that began in 2008, the economy remained fragile. Economic growth was anemic. During 2009, gross domestic product (GDP) growth fell by 2.3% but only rebounded in 2010 and 2011 by 2.5% and 1.8%, respectively. This compares with an average GDP growth rate of 3.2% for all years from 1946 through 2011. (2) Unemployment tells a similar story. The unemployment rate stood at 8.2% in January 2012, about 2.4 percentage points higher than the average for all months from 1948 through 2011, according to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (3) Thus, on the economic front, often among the first factors that analysts look at in predicting and accounting for election outcomes, Barack Obama did not appear an overly successful steward. And the public seemed to agree that the president's economic leadership was lackluster. From mid-May 2009 onward, Gallup polls showed more voters disapproved of the president's handling of the economy than approved. (4)

But elections are not only about economics. The passage of other important legislation may affect a president's reelection prospects, which is one reason Paul Light (1982), among others, urges presidents to hit the ground running to secure major legislative accomplishments. In the legislative domain, Obama was also challenged. His signature piece of domestic legislation, health care reform (or so-called Obamacare), was controversial. Early in the debate on health care reform, pluralities of voters disapproved of the president's job in handling the issue according to Gallup. Over the first six months of 2012, well into the reelection season, disapproval on health care ran ahead of approval by 15-25 percentage points in almost all Gallup polls. (5) Additionally, the passage of Obamacare contributed to a major voter backlash against the administration and to the emergence of the Tea Party, which led to a resounding election defeat for the Democrats in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.

Looking at general indicators of public opinion would not necessarily indicate that Obama would be a formidable competitor. His overall job disapproval ratings tended to outpace his approval numbers by about two percentage points on average during the first six months of 2012, although his favorability ratings were stronger with about a four percentage-point edge for favorable versus unfavorable evaluations. Such modest favorability advantages do not portend a strong electoral showing.

Despite these challenges for Obama, elections are contests between two candidates. In some respects, Obama likely benefitted from disarray and other developments in the GOP. First, Romney was not the darling of the Republican right wing, the strongest faction within the party. Romney had to contest for the nomination, along with other contenders including former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, former Pennsylvania U.S. Senator Rick Santorum, and Texas Governor Rick Perry, who, at one point or another were frontrunners in the GOP field. Although Romney emerged without clear evidence that the primaries divided the party, Obama appeared to have more enthusiastic backing from Democrats than Romney had among Republicans. Obama also outpaced Romney in campaign fundraising, raising $1,123 billion overall compared to $1,019 billion for Romney, according to reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Overview of the Special Issue

This symposium explores the nuances of the 2012 presidential election cycle. We have assembled seven articles that touch on important aspects of the presidential election, including the primary and general election campaigns.

Four of our articles deal with the contest within the Republican Party for its nomination. Since 1976, every presidential election contest has had a series of nationally televised debates. These debates not only have become institutionalized, but offer the voters a rare comparison between the candidates on the same venue and have become among the most viewed of election campaign events. Thus, researchers naturally ask, what effect do the presidential debates have on voters and the election? Our first article, "All Knowledge Is Not Created Equal: Knowledge Effects and the 2012 Presidential Debates," by Jeffrey A. Gottfried, Bruce W. Hardy, Kenneth M. Winneg, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, asks a key question: what do voters learn from debates, if anything? The authors offer an important addition to extant knowledge by focusing on the conditions at the debate under which voter learning may occur. Using two waves from the Annenberg Public Policy Center's Institutions of Democracy 2012 Political Knowledge Survey panel, Gottfried and colleagues find that voters do learn about issues and candidate positions from watching the debates. But more importantly, knowledge was learned at a greater rate when the candidate's presented accurate information that the other candidate did not challenge, compared to when the opposing candidate did challenge that information. Moreover, consistent with confirmation bias theory, when information was contested by a candidate, voters' preferences for one candidate over the other affected learning. Their findings open a score of additional questions and have implications for the conduct of debates.

Our second article on the Republican nomination, "Following the Money: Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) and the 2012 Presidential Nomination" by Dino P. Christenson and Corwin D. Smidt, probes the perennial issue of money in politics. This question is all the more crucial in the wake of the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court decision in 2010, which held that the government could not regulate independent expenditures by corporations, associations, or labor unions. There were at least two consequences of this decision, the strengthening of Super PACs and the large amounts of money that they were able to collect and spend. Christenson and Smidt ask what impact Super Pac spending had on the contest for the Republican nomination. Using a novel panel design, they find that Super PAC spending tended to complement the spending of the major candidates and, thus, did not appear to have an independent effect on the nomination.

The third article that addresses the nomination process, "Momentum and Media in the 2012 Republican Presidential Nomination," by Ernest B. McGowen and Daniel J. Palazzolo, looks at the interrelationship between candidate momentum and media reporting. Conducting a content analysis of major newspapers, they compare reporting in those newspapers with how often the candidates are mentioned and whether the mentions are positive versus negative. They find that media reporting tends to correspond to the momentum of candidates, based upon candidate vote results and fundraising in the primary season. One of the most intriguing and unexpected findings was that the correspondence between momentum and news reporting did not seem to hold for Mitt Romney, the front runner during the primary period. One question for future research is whether this finding is unique to Romney or applies to frontr--unners in general.

The final article that considers the nomination campaign is "The 2012 Iowa Republican Caucus and Its Effects on the Presidential Nomination Contest," by Todd Donovan, David Redlawsk, and Caroline Tolbert. Donovan et al., extend their earlier research on the impact of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary on nomination processes and outcomes. Since the mid-1970s, when caucuses and primaries supplanted the convention for selecting the parties' candidates for the presidency, there has been concern about the outsized influence of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary on who wins the nomination. Part of that concern is that neither state is representative of voters nationally and that Iowa caucus goers in particular are not even representative of Republicans in that state. One rationale for the greater emphasis on caucuses and primaries is that they would be more representative of voters than the convention system in selecting the parties' candidates for the president. If these early states have outsized influence on the nomination and are unrepresentative, then the post-1970s nomination system is not living up to its promise. But Donovan et al. find that Iowa caucus goers in 2012 are representative of Republican voters in that state. On the other hand, the Iowa caucus results had a pronounced impact on the nomination. Thus, while some may criticize the importance of Iowa in selecting a candidate for office, the media attention to the caucus helps introduce and define the candidates to voters nationwide. Donovan et al.'s findings are important to critics of our nomination process and advocates of various reforms.

Our second set of articles looks at influences over voters in the general election campaign. The first article in this set, "Winning with a Bad Economy," by Justine D'Elia and Helmut Norpoth, addresses the question raised in this introduction: If the economy was so weak, how did Obama win? This question has important theoretical implications, as well as practical ones, since so much research on elections stresses the implications of economic performance, especially for incumbents running for reelection. D'Elia and Norpoth, using the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES), find that voters were more likely to blame Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, for the weak economy than Obama. The severity of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 probably accounts for voters holding Bush accountable three years after he left office, much like voters blamed Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression for many years, to the electoral advantage of the Democrats. Furthermore, despite the sluggish recovery, voters credited Obama for its improvement and were somewhat optimistic about its continued improvement under Obama's stewardship. From this analysis, it appears that voters have a more complex understanding of the economy and political accountability than the standard retrospective voting theory.

Over 60 years ago, the authors of The American Voter (Campbell et al. I960) set out a typology of factors that they argued affect the vote decision, party identification, issues, and candidate traits. Given the general lack of information about politics and public affairs, the American Voters authors, and their followers, have focused attention on party identification and candidate traits. Our second article, "Candidate Character Traits in the 2012 Presidential Election," by David B. Holian and Charles Prysby, asks whether perceptions of Barack Obama's and Mitt Romney's personal traits affected vote choice in the 2012 election, building on a long line of important research. Using the 2012 ANES, Holian and Prysby find that Obama had an advantage over Romney on three of four traits, empathy, integrity, and competence, and that both candidates had similar ratings for the fourth trait, leadership. Obama's trait perception advantage was not due to positive and strong ratings from voters, but rather from the poor ratings voters gave to Romney. Overall, Obama's trait perceptions were a mixed bag of unfavorable and favorable ratings. Given Obama's mixed assessment and Romney's poor assessment from voters, it is illuminating that Obama's trait advantage had a strong effect on the vote.

In a recent article, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff criticized political scientists, and other social scientists, for their inability and/or unwillingness to predict important events. (6) But for almost two decades, there has been a vibrant literature on predicting presidential election outcomes, among other elections. The authors of our last article, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien, have been important contributors to that literature, which aims to apply social scientific theory for election prediction. In "Proxy Models and Nowcasting: U.S. Presidential Elections in the Future," Lewis-Beck and Tien bring two innovations to the literature on presidential election prediction, as well as adding the 2012 election to the small set of cases for analysis. First, they develop a proxy model, followed by their nowcasting model. Unlike a prediction model, which relies on what theory suggests will influence the vote result, a proxy model aims to maximize predictive ability, that is, to produce the most accurate election prediction. Lewis-Beck and Tien rely on one variable in their proxy model, the difference between voters who say that business conditions are better as opposed to worse, based on the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers. Nowcasting allows updating of the prediction as new data become available, a possibility with the Survey of Consumers, since it is fielded monthly. The Lewis-Beck and Tien proxy model is quite accurate, plus it is able to predict the election outcome accurately as much as six months prior to the election. Thus, Lewis-Beck and Tien have made an important advance in election forecasting.

We hope readers agree these selections help demystify some aspects of the 2012 presidential election. Although this symposium merely scratches the surface in terms of studying and understanding the 2012 election in context, the articles will help answer some important questions and, perhaps more importantly, raise new ones for further scrutiny and inquiry. Scholars wdl likely grapple with these and related research questions for many years to come, but, we warn, the 2016 cycle is just around the corner!

References

Campbell, Angus, Philip E. Converse, Warren E. Miller, and Donald E. Stokes. I960. The American Voter. New York: Wiley.

Light, Paul Charles. 1982. The President's Agenda: Domestic Policy Choice from Kennedy to Carter (with Notes on Ronald Reagan). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Panagopoulos, Costas. 2013. "Campaign Effects and Dynamics in the 2012 Election." Forum 10 (4): 36-39.

COSTAS PANAGOPOULOS AND JEFFREY E. COHEN

Fordham University

(1.) The three one-term presidents are Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush. Seven presidents' administration before Obama won reelection-Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy-Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush.

(2.) Source: http://www.measuringworth.com.

(3.) These statistics were acquired from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, http://www.bls.gov.

(4.) See pollster.com for details on public approval of the president's handling of the economy.

(5.) These statistics were collected from pollster.com.

(6.) "The Decline of the Public Intellectual?", New York Times. February 19, 2014.

Costas Panagopoulos is a professor of political science and director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham University.

Jeffrey E. Cohen is a professor of political science at Fordham University and the author of numerous hooks on the American presidency.