Issues and The Presidential Primary Voter

Abstract

Most agree that voting in presidential general elections is largely contingent on the evaluations of the candidates, issues, and parties. Yet in presidential primary elections the determinants of voter choices a.re less clear. Partisanship is inconsequential, information about candidate personalities and policy positions is scarce, and a fourth factor, expectations, may influence voters. In this paper, we reconsider the influence of political issues in presidential primaries. We argue that pa.st work has not adequately considered how "issues matter" in primary elections. Primaries are intra-party affairs, and the political issues which typically divide the parties are not very relevant in primaries. Instead, we focus on the policy issues ea.ch candidate chooses to emphasize in their quest for the nomination, which we call policy priori ties. With data gathered about media coverage of the presidential contenders in the 1988 primaries, and using exit poll data from the 1988 Super Tuesday primaries, we show that issues, as policy priorities, do matter in presidential primary elections. This research also implies that primary campaigns matter, since information concerning the policy priorities of the candidates reaches the intended audience.

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