The 2008 presidential election, part I.

Cohen, Jeffrey E.

This issue of Presidential Studies Quarterly presents the first of a two-part symposium on the 2008 presidential election. Although all presidential elections are important in their own right, that of 2008 may be of greater moment than most. For the first time in U.S. history, a black American was elected president. Given the long and often violent history of racism and racial tension in the United States, the election of a black president marks another step toward a society of racial equality. However, the election of Barack Obama was not the only instance of demographic upheaval in presidential politics. For the first time, women were considered viable candidates for the presidency and for the tickets of both parties. Somewhat remarkably, the two leading contenders for the Democratic Party's nomination were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Although white men, such as John Edwards, were also major candidates, never before had the nomination of a major party come down to nonwhites and women. Not to be left out of this achievement, John McCain, the Republican Party presidential nominee, named a woman, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, to be his vice presidential running mate.

Several features of the papers in this special issue are notable. First, the papers cover a wide variety of topics, from influences on the vote, to campaign dynamics, to election rhetoric, to the role of race. Second, these papers make use of a variety of data, including old workhorse sources, such as the American National Election Studies and election data, but also data from the National Annenberg Election Study and the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, as well as data on presidential rhetoric and other presidential preference polls. Related to the variety of data, these studies also offer a range of methodologies, including newer experimental designs and content analyses of presidential rhetoric. Combined, the papers in this special issue provide us with a well-rounded perspective on the 2008 presidential election and chart directions for future research on presidential elections and the presidency more generally.

The Papers, Part I

Following Republican dominance in presidential elections for all but two contests since 1980, some commentators began speculating on whether Obama's election heralded a shift to advantage Democrats and perhaps a partisan realignment as well. In this symposium, James E. Campbell reviews a large number of factors that led to the Democratic victory in 2008. According to Campbell, most of the short-term factors played against the Republicans, including an unpopular president, an unpopular war in Iraq, and a poorly performing economy. But Campbell also shows that had these short-term forces not been so strong or uniformly worked against the Republicans, the contest would have been tight. In particular, partisan and ideological identifications in the American public were relatively similar, and both parties had to contend with vigorous contests for the nomination. The longer-term implications of these short-term forces will have implications for the future competitiveness of the two parties in presidential contests, according to Campbell.

Gary C. Jacobson's contribution focuses on the effects of the Iraq War. Jacobson argues that the Iraq War cast a long shadow on the 2008 election; the war's first effects were felt long before the November contest. Jacobson highlights several effects that the war had on the 2008 presidential election. The unpopularity of the war not only ate away at President George W. Bush's approval, but also spilled onto the public image of the Republican Party. On the Democratic side of the election ledger, antipathy to the war not only provided the foundation of support for Barack Obama's candidacy, but also may have been one reason that Obama defeated Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party's nomination, recalling Clinton's early and continued support for the war. In contrast to Campbell, who views the war as a short-term force on the election, Jacobson's analysis raises the notion that the Iraq War may have long-lasting effects on the political landscape, tilting the partisan advantage to the Democrats, and perhaps also realigning political power within the Democratic Party.

Party identification has been critical in our understanding of electoral realignment. But party identification will play a larger part in our understanding of realignment if it is a stable, individual-level attribute. The degree of stability in individual partisan identification has been a matter of some controversy, a theme that Kenneth Winneg and Kathleen Hall Jamieson tackle in their contribution. First, Winneg and Jamieson use the 2004 and 2008 National Annenberg Election Studies to compare trends in party identification. They find that the gap in party identification widened from a modest 4-point Democratic advantage in 2004 to a comfortable 9-point lead in 2008. Moreover, they inform us that much of the trend toward the Democrats resulted from minority movement away from independence. Thus, for the most part, Republicans held onto their traditional support. Winneg and Jamieson use the 2008 study to further explore the dynamic properties of individual-level partisanship. They find that the vast majority of people held to their partisan identification throughout the campaign, but a measurable subset of the population did shift. Again, Republicans stood pat in their identification with the GOP throughout the campaign. Shifts in partisan distribution came from Democrats gaining identifiers until the late summer conventions at the expense of independents, but after the conventions, Democrats lost some ground to independents. Winneg and Jamieson's analysis presents a nuanced and complex portrait of party identification dynamics over both the long and the short term. Conceptually, they lead us to partisanship as stable for most but changeable for some. The number of those who change their identification, the direction of change, and the stability of that change have implications for the linkage between party identification and realignment. It may be too early to tell whether 2008 ushered in a realignment or not.

Perhaps no vice presidential nomination choice in recent memory has stirred as much controversy as McCain's selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Some argue that Palin energized base Republican voters behind McCain, whose relations with that wing of the party had been strained for much of his political career. Without an enthusiastic party base, the argument goes, McCain would not have been able to run a competitive campaign against Obama. Others, in contrast, contend that Palin was a polarizing figure--for every Republican standpatter that she attracted, she repelled Democrats and, more importantly, independents who might have voted for McCain. Bernard Grofman and Reuben Kline investigate the vote consequences of vice presidents on all tickets from 1968 to 2008 using American National Election Studies data. Overall, they find a negligible impact of vice presidential running mates, including Palin's 2008 candidacy. However, they are clear to note that their analysis focuses only on the final vote choice. Palin's selection may have had an effect earlier in the campaign, may have affected views of McCain, and may have influenced campaign contributions, suggesting a rich future research agenda on the effects of vice presidential selection.

A simmering debate among political scientists is the dimensionality of American politics. The Poole-Rosenthal NOMINATE methodology offers among the strongest statements suggesting a unidimensionality to American politics. In contrast, some argue that there are two (or three) issue-based dimensions: the classic economic policy dimension, a cultural politics dimension, and perhaps a foreign policy one. Melvin J. Hinich, Daron R. Shaw, and Taofang Huang enter this debate, arguing that issues tend to be arrayed along one dimension, but that a second reform--establishment dimension also exists. The reform--establishment dimension is pertinent to presidential elections because, so often, candidates for the office align themselves with reformists who critique the Washington establishment. In 2008, both Obama and McCain made such claims for their candidacies. Using a variety of data, Hinich, Shaw, and Huang test how effectively Obama and McCain associated themselves with reformist impulses and rallied reform-minded voters to their side. They conclude that neither candidate did this effectively. Obama's inability to capture reform voters, despite claiming the mantle of reform, may have implications for his presidency, the policies that he pursues, and his ability to rally public opinion to his side.

As mentioned earlier, perhaps the most significant aspect of the 2008 contest was the first-time election of a black American to the presidency. The 2008 election raises a host of questions regarding the evolving role of race in American politics. Pearl K. Ford, Angie Maxwell, and Todd Shields, using specially designed surveys conducted in Arkansas and Georgia, test some relevant hypotheses. They build on symbolic racism theory, which argues that few people are now overtly racist, yet certain policies and political symbols may activate racial attitudes, in particular a denial or minimization of the current existence of racism, and that racial attitudes are often intermixed with conservative orientations to politics. Creating improved symbolic racism survey instruments, Ford, Maxwell, and Shields find evidence of symbolic racism in the attitudes and voting behavior of some whites in Arkansas and Georgia. Thus, while Obama's election may mark another step in racial progress in the United States, the evidence presented by Ford, Maxwell, and Shields suggests that we have not yet entered a postracial era either.

Jeffrey E. Cohen is a professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at Fordham University. His most recent book is Going Local: Presidential Leadership in the Post-Broadcast Age.