In a ‘My Campaign’ Era, Wedge Issues Trump National Interests

Newswise — The days of a national election resulting in a presidential mandate are over, and a new era of segmentation and personalized pitches to voters has serious implications for democracy, according to Todd Shields, a University of Arkansas political scientist.

"The idea of a national election has expired, and the notion that the president takes office with a mandate from the public is a joke in today's presidential election," Shields said. "The public is not voting on the same issues. Thanks to sophisticated campaign technology, polls and targeted messages, my campaign experience as a white male will be very different than my neighbor, an African American mom."

In The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns, published by Princeton University Press, Shields and D. Sunshine Hillygus of Harvard University employed a "pluralistic approach" to examine campaigns and candidates, primarily in the 2000 and 2004 elections. They drew on research in political psychology, political communication, voting behavior and candidate positions and made use of a wide variety of data sources and methodological approaches.

"The question of whether political candidates are responsive to citizens' preferences is at the very heart of how democracy functions, and it is in the context of political campaigns that we can find the answer," the researchers wrote.

Often the relationship between voters and elected officials is discussed as being either "top down" with politicians shaping public opinion or as "bottom up" with politicians responding to direction from the people. According to Shields, it's not an either-or situation, but rather a reciprocal relationship.

"A candidate may be listening from the bottom up but using information from the top down," Shields said. "The candidate is listening in order to form campaign messages to influence us."

Both political parties spend a great deal of time and money targeting voters in key battleground states, often to the exclusion of voters in other states. In particular, Shields and Hillygus found, campaigns are interested in identifying persuadable voters -- "partisans who disagree with their party on a personally important policy issue." Voters like anti-abortion Democrats or environmentalist Republicans are not stereotypical, uninformed "undecideds." On the contrary, they are persuadable by either party "not because of the absence of political preferences but rather because of the complexity of those preferences." Candidates have a chance to pull these persuadable voters into their column.

Campaigns make strategic use of wedge issues to retain their own conflicted voters or persuade partisans from the opposing party to cross over. Candidates are more likely to make use of divisive issues, Shields and Hillygus found, "when they have more information about the preference of the voters and when they are able to narrowly target their campaign messages."

By their analysis, in the 2004 election, persuadable political partisans made up roughly 25 percent of the voting public. Independents accounted for another nine percent. Shields and Hillygus estimated that some 2.8 million voters switched to the opposing party in the 16 key battleground states in the 2004 presidential election, and they noted that "Bush's margin of victory over Kerry in those states was just 200,000 votes."

"I guarantee that, in 2008, strategic calculations to target messages are growing," Shields said. "Not only are selected voters targeted through direct mail, but also through social network sites like Facebook. And campaigns are not guessing about regional preferences anymore. If you are a conflicted voter in Florida, you will be inundated with information tailored to your concerns. They will know what car you drive, where you shop, where you eat out and your voting record. They can easily target you with messages that they want you to think about."

Shields noted that in 1972 Richard Nixon's campaign emphasized states rights and an end to busing, issues that had a wedge appeal to the South. But, because campaigns were still primarily national, he had to deliver similar messages in Michigan.

In a mode that could be called "My Campaign," today's candidates operate on the level of individualized issue messages: "Tell me the issues that are important to you, and I'll tell you what you want to hear," Shields said. There is a sharp difference between the national speeches and the individualized messages.

"A candidate's national campaigning is very vanilla," Shields said. "At the lower level, not on the media radar, is an extremely segmented campaign. Both parties have so much information on people in the battleground state of Missouri, for instance, that a volunteer knocking on a door knows how many people have touched that voter and which message to emphasize today. That's the underground campaign."

While Shields and Hillygus concluded that the full impact of this changing information environment on candidate and voter behavior is not yet known, they warned of some "potentially grim prospects for the impact of this campaign tactic on American democracy: political inequality, superficial politics and a crisis in governance."

They use the example of the Republican presidential campaign in 2004. Voters throughout the country were identified as part of various segments and "targeted with messages that directly corresponded to the issues that predisposed them to support President Bush." For example, likely voters in the battleground state of Michigan were divided into dozens of separate microtargeted segments, including "tax and terrorism moderates" and "terrorism and health care Democrats."

"Different segments of the population were each told that some issue they cared about was a top priority of President Bush," the researchers wrote. "This type of segmentation means that any interpretation of what the election was 'about' will be incomplete, because there was in reality a multiplicity of policy agendas presented to the public and a multiplicity of different agendas supported by voters."

In their concluding chapter, Shields and Hillygus put the "potentially grim" implications into the context of American democracy: "When campaigns attempt to reach out to the full electorate, a candidate must harmonize and synthesize interests, incorporating them into a policy message that resonates with the general interest of the nation. The extent to which contemporary microtargeted campaigns give priority to the needs and desires of citizens who are emphasized because of electoral expediency affects the degree to which the electoral process fails to live up to the democratic ideal."

Shields is a professor and chair of the department of political science in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. He was a founder of the Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society and directs the center. Hillygus earned her bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Arkansas and was one of Diane Blair's students. She is now an assistant professor of government at Harvard. Funding by the Blair Center supported two of the surveys used in the research for the book.

The book is dedicated to Blair: "She was the rare academic who contributed both to political science and to the real world of politics. Diane seamlessly blended her passion for research and teaching with her passion for politics -- and that passion was infectious."