Thomas M. Holbrook

• PhD
• Professor at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

In this paper, we explore the roots of perceptions of local corruption in U.S. cities, using survey data collected from 39 cities during 40 different mayoral election campaigns. We examine the impact of the city-level corruption context alongside measures of political information, partisan and racial/ethnic representation in local government, evalu...

Objective This article investigates the extent to which perceptions of the competitive context of mayoral elections reflect actual levels of competition and how that relationship is shaped by political expertise. Methods We use a unique survey data set of more than 6000 respondents interviewed in 40 separate mayoral elections. Results In broad st...

In this article, we investigate the relative roles of local tax policies and respondent attitudes and characteristics in shaping support for local taxes. Using a unique set of survey data collected across dozens of cities over several years, combined with contextual data on local tax systems, we can offer a comprehensive picture of who supports, an...

Using two unique surveys, one that includes over 6,000 respondents interviewed across 39 cities and another that includes over 47,000 respondents interviewed across 26 U.S. cities, we investigate the extent to which perceptions of local conditions—the state of the local economy, the quality of local schools, and local crime—reflect actual local con...

In this research note, we test an assumption that is often made in the literature on local retrospective voting—that peoples’ perceptions of local conditions are well-grounded in reality. To do so, we examine the relationship between objective measures of local conditions and aggregated survey measures of perceptions of those conditions. We focus o...

In this paper, we explore the voting behavior of naturalized U.S. citizens in the 2016 presidential election. Naturalized citizens constitute an increasingly important segment of the American electorate, due to growth in their numbers and their changing racial and ethnic composition. Using data from the 2016 CCES survey, we document differences in...

A Recap of the 2016 Election Forecasts - Volume 50 Issue 2 - James E. Campbell, Helmut Norpoth, Alan I. Abramowitz, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Charles Tien, James E. Campbell, Robert S. Erikson, Christopher Wlezien, Brad Lockerbie, Thomas M. Holbrook, Bruno Jerôme, Véronique Jerôme-Speziari, Andreas Graefe, J. Scott Armstrong, Randall J. Jones, Alfred...

National Conditions, Trial-heat Polls, and the 2016 Election - Volume 49 Issue 4 - Thomas M. Holbrook

The 2012 presidential elections represented the second consecutive defeat for the Republican Party, and its fourth defeat out of the last six presidential elections. In recent years both Republican and Democratic strategists and pundits have spoken of an emerging Democratic Party "lock" on the Electoral College and speculated that even in the wake...

Objective This study examines whether presidential campaigns help voters make informed choices on Election Day, or whether unique campaign contexts can actually hinder quality votes. We explore this question by relating the allocation of resources by presidential campaigns to a measure of correct voting (Lau and Redlawsk, 1997). Methods. We expect...

This paper analyzes the partisan messages of US Senate campaign advertisements. Using data from 2000 to 2004, we measure the levels of partisan cues and “owned” issue mentions in US Senate campaigns. We hypothesize that campaigns are likely to use campaign communications involving partisan cues and owned issues when national and local conditions fa...

Research on local turnout has focused on institutions, with little attention devoted to examining the impact of campaigns. Using an original data set containing information from 144 large U.S. cities and 340 separate mayoral elections over time, our contributions to the scholarship in this field are manifold: we focus the literature more squarely o...

We examine why levels of campaign spending vary across U.S. mayoral elections. Although there has been debate about the extent to which spending is damaging or beneficial, few analyses have sought to understand the factors that inhibit or promote campaign spending. We focus on the impact of city-level attributes, political institutions, and contest...

The Incumbency and National Conditions (presidential approval and aggregated personal finances) Model predicted President Obama would garner 47.9% of the two-party vote, whereas he ended up with 51.8% (based on available information on December 3, 2012). The error in this forecast (3.9 points) is somewhat higher than the average out-of-sample error...

Despite prevailing negative conditions, initial analyses of the 2008 presidential election, including this one, find significant but not particularly strong economic voting effects during the fall campaign. In this article, the authors pay special attention to how the economic information context changed during the campaign and how those changes af...

The introduction of McDonald and Popkin's (2001) measure of the voting eligible turnout rate represents an important advancement in the literature on voter turnout in the United States, most of which was based on studies of turnout among the voting age population. Among other things, their measure called into question many of the findings of resear...

This article offers an assessment of the current state of US presidential election forecasting models. It pays attention to presidential forecasting models from the last three election cycles. It starts by exploring 'under the hood' and describes the specifics of the most widely known models from the 2004 election. In addition, the predictions made...

Little evidence links the strategic decisions of campaigns to individual-level voting behavior. Yet for campaigns to matter in the way that experts argue, exposure to campaigns must also matter so there should be observable differences in the structure of vote choice between battleground and non-battleground states. Combining presidential campaign...

The idea that economic conditions influence election outcomes and voting behavior is hardly novel and would appear to be close to uniformly accepted, especially in the case of American presidential elections. Beginning with the early aggregate studies (Arcelus and Meltzer 1975; Bloom and Price 1975; Kramer 1971; Tufte 1978) and the important indivi...

The October 2008 issue of PS published a symposium of presidential and congressional forecasts made in the summer leading up to the election. This article is an assessment of the accuracy of their models. The Incumbency and National Conditions Model predicted that John McCain would receive 44.3% of the two-party presidential vote; he ended up with...

At the time of this writing (early August, 2008), the political landscape would appear to bode well for Barack Obama and spell almost certain disaster for John McCain. With presidential approval hovering in the high-20 and low-30% range for more than a year, and levels of economic satisfaction bottoming out, it “should” be a terrible year for the R...

This article explores the impact of cognitive style, as measured by need to evaluate and need for cognition, on information acquisition during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign. Using data from the 2000 National Election Study I show that both constructs are related to measures of candidate information, i.e., correct ideological placement, correc...

Our objective is to investigate the relationship between presidential campaign activities and political mobilization in the states, with specific focus on the mobilization of core constituents. Using data on presidential campaign visits, presidential campaign media purchases, and party transfers to the states, we highlight some interesting mobiliza...

Our objective is to investigate the relationship between presidential campaign activities and political mobilization in the states, with specific focus on the mobilization of core constituents. Using data on presidential campaign visits, presidential campaign media purchases, and party transfers to the states, we highlight some interesting mobiliza...

The forecasting model I wrote about in the October 2004 issue of PS (Holbrook 2004) is best described as a referendum model. It incorporates presidential approval (Gallup polls averaged from June through August), a measure of aggregate satisfaction with personal finances weighted by the tone of economic news (averaged from June through August), and...

The forecasting model presented here is a revised version of a model developed prior to the 1996 election (Holbrook 1996) and is essentially a referendum model. The original model regressed the incumbent party percent of the two-party vote on presidential popularity, an aggregate measure of satisfaction with personal finances, and a dummy variable...

Given the heavy reliance upon polls during election campaigns and the importance of state results in presidential election outcomes, this study examines the determinants of accuracy in statewide presidential trial-heat polls. Using Lau’s (1994) examination of national-level polls as a guide, we find that sample-related characteristics like sample s...

Given the heavy reliance upon polls during election campaigns and the importance of state results in presidential election outcomes, this study examines the determinants of accuracy in statewide presidential trial-heat polls. Using Lau’s (1994) examination of national-level polls as a guide, we find that sample-related characteristics like sample s...

Objective. We provide an examination and update of a presidential election forecasting model that we have previously developed to predict state-level presidential election outcomes. Method. Our model consists of September statewide trial-heat polls in 1992, 1996, and 2000 along with a prior vote variable. We use this model to generate predictions f...

This paper examines the importance of political knowledge in shaping accurate perceptions of the political world—specifically, how levels of general political knowledge influence the accuracy of specific political judgments, how those judgments might also be shaped by “wishful thinking,” and how political knowledge attenuates the impact of wishful...

The knowledge gap hypothesis holds that when new information enters a social system via a mass media campaign, it is likely to exacerbate underlying inequalities in previously held information. Specifically, while people from all strata may learn new information as a result of a mass media campaign, those with higher levels of education are likely...

This research integrates apparently contradictory portrayals of the role of political parties & electoral competition in American states' public policy making. From one view, political parties are essentially sincere, leading us to expect conservative or liberal dominance to yield changes in public policies that are in keeping with those ideol...

Although political campaigns have long been thought to have relatively minimal effects, recent literature suggests a more definitive role for campaigns in determining election outcomes. This articles contributes to this growing body of research by focusing on a campaign that is widely viewed (albeit in the absence of much empirical analysis) as hav...

This paper presents a simple forecasting model for state-level presidential outcomes, based on statewide preference polls and a lagged vote variable. The analysis illustrates two important points. First, the candidate who is leading in a state in September usually goes on to win that state in the November election. Second, the combination of pre-el...

This paper focuses on an important aspect of presidential debates: the degree to which voters are able to glean candidate information from them. Using an open-ended measure of candidate information, the analysis tests hypotheses concerning the impact of debates on information acquisition among the mass public for all debates from 1976 to 1996. The...

This Romanian translation of an excerpt of Holbrook's Do Campaigns Matter? (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996) notes that televised debates have become a permanent fixture of US presidential campaigns. They began in 1960 with the Kennedy-Nixon debate, went into a hiatus in 1964, 1968, & 1972, but returned in 1976 to stay. Statistics are produced showi...

Building on the work of previous forecasters, I develop a model of presidential elections that deviates from earlier work by including a measure of aggregate personal finances. The results of the analysis indicate a highly accurate model and predict a Democratic victory in 1996. The discussion of findings emphasizes that, although the model predict...

Building on the work of previous forecasters, I develop a model of presidential elections that deviates from earlier work by including a measure of aggregate personal finances. The results of the analysis indicate a highly accurate model and predict a Democratic victory in 1996. The discussion of findings emphasizes that, although the model predict...

Although retrospective economic voting does not require voters to have precise information about recent economic conditions, it is arguably the case that the quality of retrospective voting as a democratic accountability mechanism hinges on the degree to which citizens have reasonably accu rate perceptions of the state of the economy In this paper...

A thorough examination of the impact of campaign politics on presidential elections in the United States is presented in this book. Using actual election results and empirical evidence, the author also incorporates data on additional factors such as media coverage, the impact of nominating conventions on public opinion, presidential debates, and ot...

One unresolved debate in election studies concerns the relative importance of political campaigns and the national political and economic climate in determining election outcomes. In this paper, a model of candidate support that incorporates campaign variables and national conditions is developed and tested using trial heat data from the 1984, 1988...

In this article I examine a much neglected area of American politics: the political consequences of vice-presidential debates. Specifically, I explore how perceptions of candidate performance in the 1984 and 1988 vice-presidential debates influenced vote intention and evaluations of the vice-presidential candidates. Using panel surveys that allow f...

Electoral competition is a concept that has played a central role in much of the state politics literature. One commonly used indicator of competition in the states is the Ranney index. We offer an alternative indicator of competition, one based on district-level outcomes of state legislative elections. After evaluating both indicators in terms of...

This paper investigates the impact of holding a party leadership position or being a committee chair on votes for incumbents in state legislative elections in 1986. The results of the analysis indicate that majority party members who hold these positions of authority enjoy a greater electoral advantage than expected in their states. Leadership posi...

Gubernatorial power is a concept that has received considerable attention from students of comparative state politics. One aspect of gubernatorial power that has been overlooked is its relationship to gubernatorial elections. This article explores the relationship between gubernatorial power and incumbent security in gubernatorial elections from 19...

Long before the Americans With Disabilities Act at the national level, the states were very active in the area of disability rights legislation. As with many other policy areas, the degree of commitment to disability rights — as reflected in the stringency of disability rights legislation — varies substantially across states. Somewhat surprisingly,...

This study is an empirical examination of political corruption in the American states. Using the number of public officials who are convicted of crimes involving corruption as the dependent variable, four explanations of corruption are examined—historical/cultural, political, structural, and bureaucratic. We find that corruption is associated with...

Copeland and Meier's (1987) analysis of infant mortality rates in the United States found that the Medicaid program significantly reduced the infant mortality rate among both white and nonwhite infants but the Special Supplemental Food Program for Women Infants, and Children (WIC) only significantly reduced the infant mortality rate among white inf...

In this study a state-level model of presidential election outcomes is developed and empirically tested for the years 1960 to 1984, using pooled cross-sectional analysis. The model specifies presidential elections as a function of long-term and short-term, political and economic, state-level and national variables. Several important findings emerge...

This paper explores the determinants of gubernatorial election outcomes at the national level. Gubernatorial elections are found to be sensitive to swings in the national economy and presidential popularity. Somewhat surprisingly, gubernatorial elections are not found to be sensitive to the type of midterm election phenomenon found in congressional...

The study of American politics at the state level has, in recent years, been held back by the lack of sufficient data to operationalize key concepts. In this article we assess survey, policy, and roll-call measures that may be used to operationalize one such concept, state political ideology. Each of these measures performed well on reliability and...

Abstract will be provided by author.

This paper is an analysis and update of the DeSart and Holbrook (2003) presidential election forecast model. It compares the performance of our original state-level forecast model (with national-level extrapolations) to an updated model that takes into account national-level forces. We also assess the performance of various models that take into ac...