THE GAMBLE John Sides and Lynn Vavreck THE GAMBLE Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election With a new preface by the authors PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW press.princeton.edu All Rights Reserved Fourth printing and first paperback printing, with a new preface by the authors, 2014 ISBN 978- 0- 691- 15688- 0 Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-16363-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013942892 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion and Ideal Sans Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 To Serena, Ethan, and Hannah, with gratitude and love.—JMS This one’s for you, Larry—for professional inspiration and personal grounding. And for you, Jeff, for the opposite.—LVL CONTENTS List of Figures and Tables ix Preface to the Paperback Edition xiii Foreword by Charles T. Myers xix Acknowledgments xxi Chapter 1: Ante Up 1 Chapter 2: The Hand You’re Dealt 11 Chapter 3: Random, or Romney? 32 Chapter 4: All In 64 Chapter 5: High Rollers 97 Chapter 6: The Action 141 Chapter 7: The Winning Hand 174 Chapter 8: Cashing In 226 Appendixes 243 Notes 273 Index 323 vii FIGURES AND TABLES Figure 2.1. The relationship between economic growth and presidential election outcomes 12 Figure 2.2. The trend in consumer sentiment, 1960– 2011 15 Figure 2.3. The trend in approval of Obama, 2009– 11 20 Figure 2.4. Actual vs. expected presidential approval for Obama 22 Figure 2.5. Actual vs. expected presidential approval for Obama among Democrats, independents, and Republicans 24 Figure 3.1. Percent of Republican governors, senators, and House members endorsing a Republican candidate for the presidential nomination 39 Figure 3.2. Trends in Rick Perry’s news coverage and poll standing 47 Figure 3.3. Trends in Herman Cain’s news coverage and poll standing 49 Figure 3.4. Trends in Newt Gingrich’s news coverage and poll standing 52 Figure 3.5. Trends in Mitt Romney’s news coverage and poll standing 56 Figure 3.6. Republican candidate endorsements, fund- raising, news coverage, and polling in 2011 57 Figure 3.7. Views of GOP presidential candidates by likely Republican primary voters (December 2011) 59 Figure 3.8. Views of Romney by different groups of likely Republican primary voters (December 2011) 60 Figure 3.9. Ideological placements of GOP presidential candidates and themselves by likely Republican primary voters 60 ix x Figures and Tables Figure 3.10. Ideological location of supporters of each Republican candidate and Obama 62 Figure 4.1. Primary voter demographics and support for Mitt Romney 66 Figure 4.2. Delegates won up until Santorum’s exit from race 68 Figure 4.3. Trends in Rick Santorum’s news coverage and poll standing 69 Figure 4.4. Trends in Mitt Romney’s news coverage and poll standing 73 Figure 4.5. Trends in Newt Gingrich’s news coverage and poll standing 75 Figure 4.6. Trends in South Carolina and Florida polls and political advertising 76 Figure 4.7. Views of Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum among likely Republican primary voters 87 Figure 4.8. Republican voters’ perceptions of the ideologies of Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum 88 Figure 4.9. Romney and Santorum support among groups of Republican primary voters 90 Figure 4.10. Perceptions of the Republican candidates’ electability 92 Figure 4.11. Electability, ideology, and the Romney vote 93 Figure 5.1. Index of economic indicators for incumbent presidents 101 Figure 5.2. Issues mentioned in Obama and Romney advertising, May– July 2012 110 Figure 5.3. Trends in Romney’s and Obama’s news coverage 118 Figure 5.4. Poll standing of Obama and Romney in spring and summer of 2012 120 Figure 5.5. Volume of television advertising in early 2012 124 Figure 5.6. Trends in news coverage of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital 125 Figure 5.7. Difference in advertising GRPs during June and July in selected markets 129 Figure 5.8. Opinions of Paul Ryan and other vice- presidential contenders 133 Figure 6.1. Trends in Romney’s and Obama’s news coverage 144 Figure 6.2. Poll standing of Obama and Romney in the fall of 2012 147 Figure 6.3. Perceptions of empathy 154 Figure 6.4. Perceptions of Romney and Obama, before and after the first debate 159 Figure 6.5. Volume of television advertising in the fall of 2012 169 Figure 6.6. Advertising imbalance and illustrative effects on voters 171 Figure 7.1. Economic growth and presidential election outcomes, 1948– 2012 178 Figure 7.2. Election- year trends in the national economy 179 Figure 7.3. The trend in perceptions of the economy 183 Figure 7.4. Estimated effect of party identification and economic evaluations on the vote intentions of persuadable voters 186 Figures and Tables xi Figure 7.5. The voting behavior of demographic groups in 2008 and 2012 191 Figure 7.6. Media coverage of topics related to contraception and abortion 194 Figure 7.7. Obama approval among whites, blacks, and Latinos 199 Figure 7.8. Perceptions of Obama’s, Romney’s, and voter’s own ideological position 204 Figure 7.9. Candidate favorability and its relationship to preexisting partisan loyalties 214 Figure 7.10. The location of Obama and Romney field offices 217 Figure 8.1. The ideological mood of the American public 229 Table 5.1. The Stability of Vote Intentions from December 2011 to April 2012 105 Table 7.1. The Stability of Candidate Preferences from December 2011 to November 2012 181 PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION The scientific study of presidential elections arguably dates back to a 1948 book called The People’s Choice. Its authors, Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, set out to understand the 1940 presidential race between Pres- ident Franklin Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie in an unprecedented fashion. Setting up shop in Erie County, Ohio, they interviewed a sample of residents every month from May through November of the election year, thereby track- ing the opinions of the same people interviewed at multiple points in time. What they found was surprising to many. At a time when the rise of fas- cism and the development of mass media—especially radio—had raised fears about people’s susceptibility to propaganda, Lazarsfeld and colleagues found that people’s views of the candidates were mostly stable. Very few people switched their support from Roosevelt to Willkie, or vice versa. Campaign propaganda did not seem as powerful as many believed it would be. But the campaign still mattered, just in more subtle ways. For one, it helped to reinforce the opinions people already had. If you were a Roosevelt supporter, the campaign solidified this choice. The campaign also pushed un- decided voters to the candidate that they were already predisposed to support. Undecided voters whose demographic profile made them look like Democrats mostly ended up supporting Roosevelt, and those who looked like Republi- cans mostly ended up supporting Willkie. Lazarsfeld and colleagues showed that a campaign could be consequential, even in an electorate in which many voters were not up for grabs. In the years after this book, other scholars began to use social science methods and data to study elections. Lazarsfeld would help author a second book, this one about the 1948 election. Not long afterward, a team of social scientists at the University of Michigan wrote other seminal books about xiii xiv Preface to the Paperback Edition voting behavior and elections—particularly The American Voter—as well as articles about individual presidential elections that were published not long after the elections themselves. More recently, there have been notable book- length studies of the tumultuous 2000 presidential election and the historic 2008 election, when the first African-American, Barack Obama, was elected president. The Gamble fits squarely in this tradition. It is the story of how Republi- cans nominated Mitt Romney to challenge Barack Obama in 2012, and how Obama ultimately won reelection. We tell this story using similar kinds of tools as these earlier books, including quantitative data and statistical meth- ods. Indeed, one of our central sources of data is a survey not unlike the one in Erie County, Ohio: multiple interviews with the same set of voters over the year before the election. The main difference is whereas that 1940 sur- vey focused on 600 voters in one county, ours includes 45,000 voters across the United States. These tools help us to identify why voters decided as they did and how the campaign affected them along the way. This, in turn, helps explain why Obama won and what implications his reelection has for party competition in future elections. There is a parallel tradition of campaign narratives written by journalists. In fact, perhaps the canonical book in this tradition—Theodore White’s The Making of the President—was published not long after the first social scientific accounts appeared, when White documented the 1960 election between Rich- ard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. White would write other installments after the 1964, 1968, and 1972 presidential elections. Journalists working in this tradition rely on different sources of infor- mation than do social scientists. Rather than crunch data, they spend many months on the campaign trail, following the candidates. They conduct inter- views with the candidates, their campaign strategists, and sometimes a small number of voters.