test 2

59 percent of men won and 63 percent of woman win, so they pretty much both essentially have the same probability (something happens in between to get from one pool to the other)

election outcomes can be predicted months in advance by using statistic (some elections aren’t predicted correctly but the majority of them are)- main evidence of campaigns not mattering

-best way to make it stay in the voters mind is to use great visual imagery

are they showing a certain image with certain music or images next to each other, deliberately putting a textual message over an image, etc (ie: Nixon campaign)

-trying to put more weight on predispositions than others

Campaigns will deliberately make paid media ads for the free media to pick up

-ads will be more effective when they deal with issues that the news are already covering (paid media cover same issues as free media)-->people already think its important

-gender issues (such as women’s rights) and when women discuss it, it is more likely to be a correct theory

-free media coverage of ads increase their impact (media discusses whether or not the ad is true or not, etc)

-the fact check (when media covers ad) have a higher impact on voters than the actual ad (even if the fact check goes out of its way to put down the candidate)--reason for this is possible bc of sympathy factor, because of the idea of it being repeated over and over again and sticking the image in their mind

-ads that match voters’ stereotypes most effective (ie: democrats “own” the concept of social spending and republicans “own” defense

-easier and cheaper to tell people what they are already doing is right----when they did an experiment, they found that there was an increase in perception of candidate's position when a dem spoke about unemployment (dems "own" unemployment)

-perceptual screen- not an ID one, but instead an issue one

-compared to historical campaigns, today’s campaigns are more timid and not as negative as  they were back then (ie: Jefferson’s candidacy)

-when comparing positive and negative ads, there is no real evidence showing that one has more impact than the other (however: negative ads provide more information to impact voting than positive ads)

-concern issues (policy issues, what govt is doing and should be doing)

-back up their claims (include evidence, sources, more researched, and more careful with what the candidate is saying)

-government can’t limit campaign spending (based on 1^st amendment and that spending limits goes against freedom of speech)àbased on the idea that times have changed and it was the only way for candidates to speak to a wide range of people via posters, etc

-government can limit campaign contributions because if they don’t, then candidates can bribe individuals and it can lead to corruption

can run ads about environment, education, etc, but not generally for the candidate (supreme court said that it can’t say “vote for, support, elect, defeat, reject”, but they “educate” you about itàie: swift boat veterans about Kerry)

-the fact that citizens united used their own money for a movie, can BCRA regulate that?

-“Do documents funded by corporations count as electioneering?”àQuestion asked

-instead of doing a ruling right away, the supreme court calls for a “redo” and Justice Roberts says “lets argue whether or not it is legal to limit corporations spend”àcitizens united said they didn't have a problem with that and go along with it

-unlimited donations to PACs and 527s

-the case rules no ban on corporations or unions spending their own money to directly campaign for candidates (original case had nothing to do with this ruling) and its groundbreaking because it gets rid of the original ban (made from 1907-1920) but there is a limit on how much they can spend

Corporations and unions can now spend their own money:

                                -Unlimited direct spending on ads for/against candidates

                                -Unlimited but disclosed donations to PACs and 527s

                                -Unlimited and anonymous donations to “non-profit” groups

-these really gear up towards this as it gets closer to election day

-for election day, this is important because the majority of all registered voters are democrats,   so if the democrats could get all the registered voters to vote (GOTV), then they could win, but when voters are asked to vote, they are more likely to vote republican

-more people the candidates contact, the more likely they are to vote

-Gerber and Green experiment:

-30,000 registered voters in New Haven, CT

-some randomly chosen to get GOTV message (some got the message and some did not and this was used to see how effective each message was)

-see if they then voted in November 1998 election

-They designed the experiment based on p(probability your vote will make the difference) times  B(benefit being that your vote will win) – C (cost but the experiment didn’t use C) + D (civic Duty and they used this by playing on the fact that it is their duty as an American to vote and  represent what your forefathers fought for)

-different types of mobilization (some people got these and others were left alone which acted as the control group)

all of them increased turnout but it is difficult to see which one has the largest impact  because the black bars (the likelihood of it changing people’s voting habits) is overlapping one anotheràall three of the messages worked but you can’t tell which message is best

even things that are completely nonpolitical and other things of that natureàthey then put it all in one database and use they to appeal to the individual through a group of these specific tactics  (one piece of information doesn’t work but a bunch of them can provide info on how people will  vote) (Obama article online)

the House of Representatives decide, and every state gets one vote (hard for all of them to agree because some state like cali has 62 members of the house)

the electoral system is not 1 national election in which you compete for 50% of national vote, but instead 50 state elections in which you try to win a majority of votes in as many of those states as possible (that is why on the syllabus there is an S in the parenthesis)

-Voters in small sates are over-represented (look at sheet in folder)

This happens because the small states automatically have at least 3 electors, because there are automatically 2 senators and at least 1 house member

-Electability- the shot that the candidate will actually win in the general election

-viability-how likely they are to win the primary; you may vote away from the first preference (because they aren’t going to win) and pick someone you know will beat the person you like the least  because there are more than 2 candidates in primaries

-Before 1972: state party leaders choose delegates (back then, in hopes of being chosen, potential candidates would suck up to the 50 state party leaders)

-After 1972: voters choose delegates in state elections

Iowa and New Hampshire are the reasons why there is never an election day for primaries (voters aren’t swayed by commercials or big spending, but instead swayed by the fact that candidates meet voters personally—candidates can do this in new Hampshire and Iowa because they are smaller states, unlike California)

-since WWII, 90 percent of incumbents have won their seats again

-86 percent of incumbents won in the 2010 HOR elections

-on average incumbents win about 65 percent of the vote (if you only need 50 percent to win   then that’s a good number)

-being an incumbent is worth bout 8% points of the vote

the average gain in vote share won by candidates running as incumbents for the first time compared to their vote share in the initial election

voters are most likely going to vote for you because you               are an incumbent:

          -institutional perks

          -constituency service

voters don’t vote for you because you are the  incumbent, but because you are the better candidate (that happens to come from who the   incumbent is)

            -quality effects

            -scare off effects

-incumbents are able to scare off challengers from actually running  against them

                  -hold a “war chest” and save up money throughout their term before  the actual primary in hopes to scare off quality challengers

                  -get endorsements from other party members

process of using a state’s population to decide how many Representatives         (House members) in Congress it gets

                                -since 1910, the number of HOR is 435

                                -distributed according to state populations after census  (census done every 10 years)-->if one state loses a seat, it has to be gained somewhere else

-supreme court: each district must have equal population

-if population within state moves, have to redistrict

-The legislature draws district lines in most

states. Some states have an advisory commission

to suggest lines to the legislature;

others use a backup commission in case the

legislature can’t come to an agreement. Still

others give all power to a commission – either

a politician commission that can include

legislators, or an independent commission

where legislators don’t have a vote.

-most states: state legislature and governor, like any other law

recommend district plans to the legislature, but the

either legislators or other elected officials can sit on the

commission, but the legislature as a whole isn’t involved-members of congress don’t draw the lines, state legislators are the ones who draw the lines

-tends to be problem because legislators make districts to benefit them (ie: Brooklyn with hakeem jeffries’ house and Obama’s house in Chicago)

drawing district lines to ensure a particular election outcome (minority/majority, party lining, draw district lines in hopes of making a competitive election, drawing lines for people with the same interests)àdistricts have to be connected

-packing, cracking, tacking

Thornburg v Gingles 1986-

Miller v. Johnson 1995

Hunt v. Cromartie 1999

race can’t be the only factor drawing linesà whites said drawing lines in               this way discriminated against them (the lines were drawn to pack the blacks into one area so     they can represent the Democrat and the rest of the districts are then republican because all the                 blacks are put in one placeàboth parties agreed originally because it would benefit them but             whites in that area soon grew angry)

race can be central factor if you use it to create a partisan gerrymander

                **if you are creating a majority-minority district to limit a particular race, it is illegal, but if you                     are redistricting it based on partisan, then you can.

• Equal population

• Voting Rights Act

• Contiguity

• Compactness

• Political boundaries

• Communities of interest

• Electoral outcomes

-assigning unequal

numbers of people to districts, and making some votes worth less than others

– instead of redrawing the district lines.

an alliance of social groups coming together to support a party or candidate

                -for coalitions, we ask about the overall vote (ie: 61 percent of all voters for Obama were white)

-for presidential elections, your not aiming to get 50 percent of the vote but instead a majority of the electoral college (270)

-lower income families

                -union members

                -Catholics and immigrants

                -farmers

                -African-Americans

                -white southerners

**A challenge though for the democrats was that some of the groups clashed over certain issues (such as African Americans and white southerners about civil rights)

not similar to the new deal coalition bc the new deal was stable and lasted a long time, the modern day are not stable and a lot more fluid

                -depending on which dimension (religion, income, race, etc) you stress as a party, you can create different coalitions

-nobody belongs to just one social group (there is no one that their only attribute is their race, or occupation, they have multiple ones)

-for some people, all of their identities point them to the same party, but for others, they have one attribute identifying for one party and one attribute identifying with the other so it causes them to vote for the other party

high religious attendance (R) + low income (D), low religious attendance(D)+ high income(R) (this group is the one that’s fought over because in the first group, blacks won’t vote for  republicans regardless and evangelicals won’t vote for democrats regardless so no point on focusing on them)

a significant and enduring change in the party coalitions

                -1928 was a huge republican coalition and they shifted in 1932 and stayed that way for a while

-since the 1960s, we haven’t seen one party dominate every election the same way the new  deal did in the 30s 40s and 50s.

-dealignment occurs?

-a partial realignment?

-the south slowly switches parties--answer to question

people decide they are neither party

                                -occurs when people don’t trust the govt, or gridlock occurs

-a couple of groups swapped sides

-biggest change were the blacks and white southerners from 1950s to 2000s

-in the 50s, ¼ white southerners were democrat and 6 percent were blacks, but in 2000, 19 percent of blacks supported dems and only 16 percent supported the