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Challenger Profile and Gubernatorial Elections

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Abstract

Although challenger profile or quality is an important variable in explaining legislative elections, its utility in gubernatorial campaigns has not been explored. In this paper I examine challenger profile in gubernatorial contests, using aggregate data collected for all elections from 1977 to 1989. I show that the dynamics of open-seat contests differ from those with an incumbent running. Higher profile candidates run in open-seat contests than against incumbents, but profile level exerts a stronger influence in incumbent races. Economic conditions affect challenger profile in races involving incumbents, but not in campaigns for open seats. Although challenger profile proves consequential, the strength of a candidate's party in the state is the most important variable in explaining outcomes of both open seat and incumbent races.

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... Literature tells us that experience in some offices, such as lower level statewide offices, may be more beneficial than other lower level political office experience. In a 1992 study, Squire [40] argued statewide office holders might make stronger candidates than those with state legislative or local office experience due to statewide name recognition and the experience of running a successful statewide campaign. Additionally, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation [41] found that voters viewed lower level statewide office experience, such as the offices of Attorney General or Lieutenant Governor, as more beneficial for gubernatorial candidates than state legislative, civic or corporate leadership positions. ...
... Candidates who have done this have shown the ability to raise money that is needed for such a contest, have been able to construct a winning coalition in the exact political district (the entire state) that is needed for a successful gubernatorial campaign, and have worked with party activists and media throughout the state during the past campaign. In addition, the previous work by Squire [40] which developed a more comprehensive measure, in fact, treated all lower statewide offices as a single value 3 . 3 Using Squire's [40] work as a model, we examined the possibility of a more comprehensive measure of candidate experience. ...
... In addition, the previous work by Squire [40] which developed a more comprehensive measure, in fact, treated all lower statewide offices as a single value 3 . 3 Using Squire's [40] work as a model, we examined the possibility of a more comprehensive measure of candidate experience. He develops a more comprehensive measure for US gubernatorial elections which ranks different types of offices in an ordinal measure and then multiples that value by the percentage of the state population in the official's constituency. ...
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... The state-level variable of primary interest here is gubernatorial power, measured with the additive index discussed earlier. The other state-level variables include a measure of challenger quality (see Squire 1992;Holbrook 1991), an indicator of statewide economic vitality (see Chubb 1988;Howell and Vanderleeuw 1990), and a measure of partisan strength. ...
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... There is certainly no paucity of literature attempting to develop explanations of gubernatorial election outcomes. The existing research on state executive elections cover a broad range of explanatory factors: incumbency and challenger quality (Squire, 1992;King, 2001), economic conditions (Chubb, 1988;Stein, 1990;Howell and Vanderleeuw, 1990; Leyden and Borrelli, 1995;Svoboda, 1995;Niemi, Stanley & Vogel, 1995;Atkeson and Partin, 1995;Carsey and Wright, 1998), issues (Kone and Winters, 1993;Cook, Jelen & Wilcox, 1994;Niemi, Stanley & Vogel, 1995;Lowery, Alt & Ferree, 1998), and the all-important question of the influence, or lack thereof, of national-level forces (Holbrook, 1987;Chubb, 1988;Tompkins, 1988;Simon, 1989;Atkeson and Partin, 1995;Carsey and Wright, 1998). ...
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... To what extent do strong challengers simply ride a favorable partisan tide, and 1 The phrase is V.O. Key's (1964, 567); the literature on strategic candidacies and their electoral effects includes Jacobson and Kernell (1983); Jacobson (1989Jacobson ( , 2004 ;Bond, Covington, and Fleisher (1985); Bond, Fleisher, and Talbert (1997); Canon (1993); Fowler and McClure (1989); Kazee (1994); Krasno (1994); Lublin (1994) ;Maestas, et al. (2006); Maisel and Stone (1997), Squire (1989Squire ( , 1992; and Westlye (1991). to what extent do they help create the tide? ...
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... Some might argue that the average American voter can not be relied upon to remember which party controls Congress, and therefore is hardly sophisticated enough to consider party control of state government when deciding how to evaluate state 15 Our primary purpose here was to examine the impact of divided vs united government on gubernatorial elections. Future research might also consider the importance of challenger quality (see Squire 1992) independently, as well as its relationship to state economic conditions and the presence of unified government. 16 The relationship between State Economy X Unified Government and our dependent variable was surprisingly robust across different specifications. ...
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... 1 For example, looking at the effects of candidate spending on electoral competition, Partin (1999, p. 19) found that gubernatorial elections are "a horse race of a different color" in that, unlike legislative elections, incumbent spending matters almost as much as challenger spending. 2 In addition, gubernatorial elections are more visible, gen-erate greater media coverage, attract more experienced candidates, and are generally more competitive than legislative elections (Kahn, 1995;Squire, 1992;Squire & Fastnow, 1994). As such, campaign finance reforms may have a much different effect in gubernatorial than in legislative campaigns. ...
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Election forecasting, as a science with models to be tested, got its start in political science 20 years ago (Lewis-Beck and Rice 1984; Rosenstone 1983). When the enterprise began, it was not popular. Forecasts, while entertaining, were not held to be serious research. As high-quality models with accurate forecasts were published in leading journals (see review in Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992), forecasting achieved more respect in the discipline. The 1996 presidential election was a high point. Forecasters formulated models that accurately predicted, well in advance, the presidential winner's vote share (Campbell and Garand 2000). This encouraged forecasters to ply their trade for new elections, and in 2000 scholars again met media demands to predict the presidential vote. On the front page of the Washington Post in May, one forecaster predicted a Gore victory and was quoted as saying, “It's not even going to be close” (Kaiser 2000). In the end, most of the 2000 forecasts greatly overestimated Gore's share of the vote.
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The study of “divided government” has focused on the split partisan control of executive and legislative branches. The concept of divided government can also be applied to the study of state executive branches. There is no plausible reason for state electorates to prefer one party for governor and the opposing party for other state executive branch officials, yet many states have a governor of one party, while several of the state executive branch officers are of the opposing party. This study examines the extent of divided executive branches in state politics. Incumbency, state partisanship, and the changing nature of Southern politics affect levels of divisiveness in state executive branches. Electoral features do not affect levels of divisiveness. The data comprises states that have separately elected state executive officers between the years 1968 and 1993.
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This paper oers an explanation for the common observation that political incumbents not only frequently win reelection, but often face weak competition or no competition at all when running for reelection. I explain this outcome by modeling the entry decision of potential elec- tion candidates as a process of self selection. Candidates choose either to enter a political race against a known-quality incumbent or to wait for an open election. The model predicts that the entry decision is non-monotonic in candidate quality: both low-quality and very-high- quality candidates choose to enter the race. The tendency of mid- quality candidates to stay out increases the ex-ante probability that the incumbent will win, suggesting an explanation for incumbency ad- vantage, the existence of uncontested races and of "sacri…cial lambs".
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Critics are quick to accuse wealthy gubernatorial candidates of attempting to "buy" elections. But although self-financed gubernatorial candidates sometimes win, their electoral success does not necessarily imply that voters can be bought. To the contrary, I present evidence that self-financed campaign spending has a far weaker marginal effect on electoral results than externally-financed campaign spending. For every Corzine, there's a DeVos - who spent record amounts in his 2006 attempt to unseat Michigan's incumbent governor, only to lose by an embarrassingly wide margin. Money can't buy the governor's mansion. This empirical finding presents a theoretical puzzle - why would externally financed spending trump self-finance? The solution lies in strategic incentives facing would-be campaign donors. A candidate's ability to raise funds serves as a crucial indicator of her electoral viability. When it comes to influencing voters, a candidate's ability to raise money matters far more than her ability to spend it. As such, the apparent correlation between campaign spending and votes is largely spurious.
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We examine challenger emergence in Senate elections by looking at the 1992 campaign in depth. We develop unproved measures of incumbent: vulnerability using data from the 1988 and 1990 NES Senate Election Studies. These measures are used to test the hypothesis that higher-quality challengers are more likely to challenge vulnerable incumbents. We find generally weak relationships between our incumbent vulnerability measures and challenger quality. Instead, challenger quality scores increase with the size of the pool of potential high-quality challengers.
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Objective. Research on gubernatorial elections has focused extensively on the impact of the economy, ignoring other noneconomic issues that voters may consider when casting their ballots. This article examines the impact of one such noneconomic issue, crime, to determine whether voters hold governors accountable for crime rates and, if so, whether they incorporate national‐ or state‐level conditions. In addition, I investigate whether more educated segments of the electorate are likely to engage in issue voting. Methods. I empirically analyze these propositions using aggregate‐level data on gubernatorial elections from 1986–2004. Results. The data analysis reveals that crime significantly influences gubernatorial races, voters consider state‐ rather than national‐level conditions, and that crime rates have a larger impact in states with a more educated population. Conclusion. Future inquiries should explore other noneconomic issues at the national and subnational levels to determine the breadth of issues that impact elections.
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Who controls the nomination in gubernatorial elections? This dissertation seeks to answer this simple question. Parties have classically been the organizations held responsible for throwing their collective effort behind a candidate and controlling the nominations. Yet, in recent years, scholars have noted a steady weakening of American political parties through a succession of major alterations in the political landscape: the loss of patronage-based organizations traditionally used to uphold party organizations; competition from interest groups; and the ascendancy of media-based campaigns and political consultants which buoy candidates' personal organizations. Not only that, recent work suggests that national party organizations have displaced their state-level counterparts. The combined result of these strains on the party system, scholars conclude, is the rise of a candidate-centered politics and of an electoral politics that can no longer count parties as critical factors in the political system. My dissertation tests whether parties have been dealt out of the nominations process in gubernatorial primary elections in six states: Colorado, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Texas. My principal evidence is elite public endorsements of candidates. I find that the tempo, quantity, and quality of endorsement activity varies from election to election according to many factors. My research finds that endorsement activity fluctuates within four principal domains - across election type (general or primary), across the level of competition in a given election, across party, and across states. Contrary to many recent studies, I do not find evidence of an "extended party" - of a broad set of actors (interest groups and highly-partisan influential elites)
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Objective. The diversity of campaign finance laws in the U.S. states allows the effects of these reforms to be measured. I investigate the impact of contribution limits and public financing on campaign spending in gubernatorial elections. Methods. I conduct a multivariate regression analysis of general election spending in races for governor from 1980 to 2000. I analyze levels of spending per voter, as well as challengers' share of total spending. Results. State contribution limits do not hold down overall spending. Candidate acceptance of public funding and spending limits reduces spending by incumbent governors more than it reduces that of challengers. As for challengers' share of spending, I find that public funding programs improve challengers' ability to match incumbents' spending dollar for dollar. Conclusions. State programs that offer public funding to candidates effectively favor challengers. This points to the potential of these reforms to make federal elections more competitive.
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This study seeks to explain why some incumbents attract politically experienced, well-financed challengers while others do not. Using data from contested House races in 1980, we analyze the effects of four sets of variables including: (1) incumbents’ policy and nonpolicy behavior (ideological discrepancy and use of “perks” for advertising and casework); (2) local partisan conditions (previous vote margin and the normal partisan vote in the district); (3) district diversity; and (4) the national tide. We find that both short-term and long-term partisan forces (previous vote and normal vote), national tides, and policymaking behavior (ideological discrepancy) significantly affect the probability of attracting politically experienced, well-financed challengers. District diversity and incumbents’ use of “perks’ available for advertising and casework, on the other hand, are not related to any indicator of challenger quality.
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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 elections. Also, incumbency is a very important determinant of gubernatorial election outcomes.
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Economic voting is examined in gubernatorial and senatorial elections. The findings of this study show that the assignment of functional responsibilities in a federal system determines the subject of voters' retrospective and prospective candidate and party evaluations and thus differentiates the content of vote decisions at each level of government. Voters are thought to assign the federal government a preponderant responsibility for managing the national and regional economies, and thus hold congressional and presidential incumbents more accountable than their subnational counterparts for subnational macro- and microeconomic conditions.
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The study examines the relationships between House incumbents and challengers by considering three ways in which the resources of one candidate may affect the strength of the other. Using data from the 1978 and 1980 elections, the analysis first considers the effects of various incumbent activities in the interelection year (e.g., trips to the district, the cosponsorship of bills, visibility on national news broadcasts, committee prestige, leadership, tenure, ethical problems, and policy discrepancy with the district) on challenger expenditures and challenger PAC contributions. Problems of ethics and policy help challenger campaigns to a modest extent, but none of the positive resources of members forestall challengers' funding efforts. Second, the study evaluates the possible reciprocal relations that may exist in the election year between incumbents' activities and challengers' campaign funds. No simultaneity is found; instead, to the limited extent that effects are present, challengers prompt incumbents to increase their levels of activity, without incumbents gaining any corresponding benefits from these increased efforts. Third, the analysis reveals that incumbents' resources in office have little short- or long-term influence on the members' or their opponents' campaign revenues and relatively weak impact on decisions of district electorates. The study concludes that incumbents and challengers act in ways relatively independent of one another, basing their current actions on previous efforts in office and prior electoral outcomes, rather than the activities of their opponents.
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This paper tests Jacobson and Kernell's strategic decision-making theory by examining individual candidacy decisions in four congressional elections. The partisan balance in a district appears to be an important variable for predicting what type of challenger runs in either an open-seat or an incumbent election. The candidacy decisions of experienced challengers in incumbent elections appear to be influenced by changes in economic conditions, as predicted by the strategic decision-making theory. However, economic conditions do not appear to influence candidacy decisions in open-seat elections. This difference is probably a result of the differing prospects for challenger success in incumbent and open-seat elections. Jacobson and Kernell (1981) propose that the candidacy decisions of quality challengers are an important link between changes in economic conditions and the electoral fortunes of the party in power (the president's party). Their theory rests on various assumptions about the behavior of "quality" (i.e., politically experienced, office-holding) challengers in congressional elections. This essay examines these assumptions and subjects them to an empirical test. In Jacobson and Kernell's strategic decision-making model, congressional challengers believe voters hold candidates from the party in power responsible for changes in the state of the nation since the last election. Candidates assume that these evaluations influence the way people vote: if conditions have improved since the last election, voters are more likely to vote for candidates from the party in power; if conditions have gotten worse, then more people will vote for candidates from the party out of power. A quality challenger is more likely to run for Congress when conditions favor his party, because he thinks his chances of winning the election are higher than they would otherwise be. Conversely, if a party faces an unfavorable political climate and expects strong electoral opposition, candidates from the party will tend to be politically inexperienced, run underfinanced campaigns, and receive fewer votes. The overall effect of individual strategic decisions is to increase the aggregate vote for the party that is "advantaged" by changes in national conditions and to decrease the vote for the "disadvantaged" party. A president
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To understand changes taking place within political parties we must work from a realistic theory, one that accepts these parties as office-seeking coalitions. On that premise I lay out three interacting sets of variables: 1) The structure of political opportunities, or the rules for office seeking and the ways they are treated, and 2) the party system, or the competitive relations among parties, define the expectations of politicians, and thus lead them to create 3) party organizations, or the collective efforts to gain and retain office. Hypotheses derived from the relations among these variables allow us to examine changes in American parties in the twentieth century. They explain why the Progressive era reforms, in tandem with the post-1896 party system, produced an uneven distribution of party organization and weak linkages among candidates and officeholders. The same theory also explains why changes taking place since the 1950s are producing greater organizational effort and stronger partisan links among candidates and officeholders.
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The 1978 CPS national election study, which includes many new questions about congressional candidates, is analyzed to discern what voters know about congressional candidates and why House incumbents are so successful at getting reelected by wide margins. Scholars have underestimated the level of public awareness of congressional candidates, primarily because of faulty measures. Voters are often able to recognize and evaluate individual candidates without being able to recall their names from memory. Incumbents are both better known and better liked than challengers, largely because they have the resources enabling them to communicate with their constituents frequently and directly. Yet the seriousness of the challenger is equally important for understanding the advantages of incumbency and why incumbency is less valuable in the Senate than in the House. Finally, public assessments of the president provide a national dynamic to congressional voting, but the effect is modest compared to the salience of the local choices.
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To resolve the paradoxical finding that economic conditions and presidential popularity powerfully relate to quadrennial movement in the House vote, but explain little individual voting variation, Jacobson and Kernell have advanced their "strategic politicians" model of midterm elections. Purportedly, the early-year political environment helps determine how many of a party's strong potential contenders risk challenging incumbents; voters in turn respond to the quality of candidates before them in November, and thus indirectly reward the party favored by this early-year environment. Despite its current prominence, however, the theory does not stand up to empirical investigation. A time-series equation of midterm outcomes regressed on early-year national conditions does not fare particularly well when contrasted with comparable equations assuming direct-effects voting. Furthermore, challenger quality has only a weak influence on individual voters--subordinate, in fact, to the effects of economic attitudes and presidential evaluations.
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The 1986 midterm election results departed from the normal pattern in which the president's party loses governorships and control of a significant number of state legislative chambers. For the first time since World War II, the presidential party scored a net gain in governors. At the same time, it sustained only minor losses in the legislatures. The election was unusual in the degree to which national forces, which normally work to the disadvantage of the president's party, were neutralized. The exposure/base year variable and the large number of open-seat contests worked to produce a high level of partisan change among the governorships. The absence of a strong national trend, coupled with the increasing institutionalization of state legislatures, worked against partisan change in the legislatures. National party involvement in state elections increased and is resulting in more integrated party structures.
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This analysis of the elections of state governors in 1978 assesses the effects of campaign spending by Democratic and Republican candidates while taking into account the influences on these electoral outcomes of partisan strength and incumbency. Although one party's spending is found to be the best predictor of the other party's spending, Democratic candidates' expenditures have a different relation to the election outcomes than Republican candidates' expenditures. Despite the powerful influence of campaign spending, party strength and incumbency retain their own substantial effect on gubernatorial elections.
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This article seeks primarily to examine two widely held assumptions: (1) that American governors have recently become more politically vulnerable; and (2) that vulnerability is related to certain non-political variables. Four measures of vulnerability have been employed to test the initial proposition, and then two of these measures are related to state economic and demographic data by means of simple linear correlation analysis. Finally, the study inquires into the impact of presidential races on the success of incumbent gubernatorial candidates. The major conclusion of the study is that the vulnerability of governors has remained about the same over the last 70 years, but their visibility has apparently increased greatly.
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Aggregate-level data are used in this analysis to explain the outcomes of Senate elections between 1974 and 1986. Using the individual Senate contest as the unit of analysis permits estimating the relative influence of a wide variety of factors on Senate election results including political characteristics of states, characteristics of the candidates, and national political conditions. Of these factors candidate characteristics had the strongest impact on the outcomes of Senate elections. The importance of candidate characteristics has had two major consequences for Senate elections. First, two-party competition has spread to every region of the country: in Senate elections, no state can be considered safe for either party. Second, money is probably now more important than ever, especially for challengers and candidates for open seats.
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Common to both political folk wisdom and political science is the idea that the mid-term congressional election is a referendum on the performance of the current administration. The more popular a president and the more successful his policies, the better his party does at the midterm. The president's party almost invariably loses some congressional seats in off-year elections (since the Civil War the president's party has added House seats only once—in 1934—though it occasionally picks up Senate seats). But the extent of its losses varies widely (from one to 56 House seats in postwar midterms), depending, so the theory goes, on how the electorate rates the administration's performance. The 1982 congressional elections will, in this view, be a referendum on President Reagan's administration and in particular on his economic policies, which have been the focus of political attention since inauguration day. If this is true, then economic conditions prevalent through the spring of 1982 (a potentially devastating combination of deep recession, high unemployment, and high interest rates) and Reagan's shaky support in the polls (less than 50 percent approving his performance in all Gallup surveys during the first four months of 1982), portend a Republican disaster of major proportions in the fall. Remarkably, almost no one is seriously predicting anything of the kind. And it may indeed be a mistake to bet on enormous Republican losses—partly, we will argue, because they are not widely anticipated.
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As the U.S. states develop their political institutions and take greater responsibility for their economic well-being, two concerns that have long driven research on national elections—electoral insulation and economic accountability—should become central in research on state elections. I investigate institutionalization's effects on the vulnerability of state elections to major periodic forces—coattails, turnout, and economic conditions—and how political responsibility for economic growth is apportioned between presidents and governors in state elections. The investigation relies upon dynamic models of state legislative and gubernatorial outcomes estimated with a pooled data set comprised of most states and elections in the years 1940–82. The results, which have important implications for state government more broadly, indicate that institutionalization has substantially insulated legislative elections against major threats and that state legislators and governors have less to fear from their state economies than is often thought, but also that state elections are becoming more susceptible to swings in the national economy.
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I break down gubernatorial electoral outcomes into expected vote and short-term changes, using an intrastate baseline measure. Employing these measures, I find evidence of period effects in the role played by incumbency, including the growth in its importance in the last decade. Incumbents' gains are most notable in first reelection contest, but tail off in subsequent races. Moreover, these advantages are more pronounced after a two-year term than after a four-year term. Other factors influencing incumbents' success are less clear in their impact: Sabato's measure of reputation is associated with electoral gains, but increasing state bureaucratization appears more weakly linked.
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Fourteen states were examined with time-series regression analysis from 1946 to 1980. The analysis determined that unemployment and inflation do not adversely affect the incumbent party's vote for governor. These findings contrast with economic effects found at the congressional and presidential levels. (Author)
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The study of state politics has suffered because of the lack of good data on major political orientations at the state level. This paper briefly discusses this problem and the need for survey-based measures, and then presents sets of estimates of state partisanship and ideology. These are derived from aggregating CBS News-New York Times polls at the state level. Using fifty-one polls taken from 1974 through 1982, our estimates are based on over 76,000 respondents. The estimates are shown to have good overall validity and reliability, and should prove valuable in studies of comparative state elections and policymaking.
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Why do strong challengers oppose incumbents in some House districts and not in others? This paper compares the influence of several different strategic considerations which attract or dissuade good challengers: national political tides (Jacobson and Kernell, 1983), district level political forces (Bond et al., 1985), and preemptive spending by incumbents (Goldenberg et al., 1986). Examination of House races from 1972 to 1980 suggests that the local political climate plays the greatest role in determining the quality of a district's challenger, while the impact of national tides fluctuates, and preemptive spending has little effect. These findings shed light on the actions of House incumbents and the dynamics of congressional elections.
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A number of recent attempts have been made to construct statistical models for predicting election outcomes. Such models have been applied to elections in various settings, though in the American context they have been limited mainly to elections for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency. The present study is an attempt to apply some variations of these models to gubernatorial elections in the United States in the period from 1910 to 1970.
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Analysis of both district-level and aggregate time-series data from postwar House elections supports the thesis that strategic political elites play a pivotal role in translating national conditions into election results and therefore in holding members of Congress collectively accountable for the government's performance. More high-quality candidates run when prospects appear to favor their party; they also win significantly more votes and victories than other candidates in equivalent circumstances. Thus, strategic career decisions both reflect and enhance national partisan tides. The electoral importance of strategic politicians has grown over time in tandem with the trend toward candidate-centered electoral politics. This has rendered the effects of national forces less automatic, more contingent, thus threatening the capacity of elections to enforce some degree of collective responsibility
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In this article we examine the relationship between incumbent governors' popularity ratings and their subsequent vote percentages. Analysis shows that the popularity ratings are clearly related to the vote percentages. Specifically, our model suggests that an incumbent governor can be confident of reelection with a popularity "approval" rating above approximately 48%.
From Governor to Governors
  • Thad E Beyle
A Bittersweet Prospect for the GOP This Year," Wash- ington Post National Weekly Edition
  • Paul Taylor
  • Dan Balz
Hillside to Stateside
  • Dick Kirschten
They're All Crooks - Whatever Their Names Are
  • Richard Morin