Should Campaigns Respond to Electability Arguments?

Abstract

Should candidates respond when they are described as unelectable? Although strategic arguments about the viability and electability of candidates were commonplace in the 2016 election, we know little about whether campaigns can effectively rebut these arguments. Assessments of a candidate’s chances in a general election are often complicated by partisanship and candidate-specific factors, and it is difficult to disentangle viability from electability. Our studies are situated in an electoral context without partisan primaries, which complicates judgments by pitting partisan goals against ideological and electability objectives. In our experiments, a Democratic candidate is described as viable in the first round of voting but unelectable in the second round, and Democratic voters are encouraged to strategically vote for a more acceptable Republican to advance. Subjects were then randomly selected to see a press release from the Democratic candidate responding to that description by asserting their electability. We find that when respondents see a campaign respond to the strategic voting argument by asserting their electability, it significantly improves perceptions of that candidate’s electability but does not change voters’ preferences. Candidates should push back when their electability is challenged.

KEYWORDS:

• campaign strategy
• electability
• political campaigns
• political communications
• voter behavior

Author Notes

Joshua P. Darr (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) is an assistant professor of political communication in the Manship School of Mass Communication and the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. His research focuses on campaign strategy, political knowledge, and the decline of local news, and has been published in journals such as Journal of Communication, Political Communication, American Politics Research, and Presidential Studies Quarterly.

Robyn L. Stiles (Ph.D., Louisiana State University) is a consultant at a management consulting firm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she specializes in strategic political communication, campaign development, and data management. She also serves as an adjunct professor at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.

Notes

1 We will note, as do McKee and Hood (2013, footnote 12), that the existence of strategic voting is not in dispute, and we do not seek to “prove” it here. We make two specific contributions in the American context: examining strategic voting in elections without partisan primaries, and whether or not campaigns can influence strategic voting perceptions by responding to them directly.

2 In Louisiana, if partisans believe their candidate has a chance to exceed 50% in the general election, they should vote for that candidate. If a party’s candidate is unlikely to reach 50%, the strategic considerations of voting for viable and “least-worst” alternatives may take over. In California and Washington, by contrast, viability may be more of a concern in the primary round, since there is guaranteed to be a general election. The 50% threshold is not mentioned in the experimental treatments in this study, so respondents are only presented with an election without partisan primaries. As such, for the purposes of this experiment, these systems are not distinguishable. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for encouraging the authors to distinguish between these systems.

3 There were not significant differences in the credibility or interpretation of the blog and newspaper source. Our focus is on the dynamics of campaign response, and the following analyses include the source treatments only as control variables.

4 The blog and newspaper articles used appear in the Supporting Information Appendix as Figures A1 and A2.

5 The campaign response treatment appears in the Supporting Information Appendix as Figure A3.

6 There were insufficient respondents in Study 1 to achieve statistically significant results after restricting the sample to Democrats.