Disillusioned Voting
By Daniel Strauss - Jan 30th, 2009 at 3:22 pmLee Sigelman at The Monkey Cage shares his study of whether voters voted for a presidential candidate or against the other candidate in elections since 1964. Sigelman’s study found that a record number of voters voted for one candidate (Obama) rather than against the other one (McCain) in the 2008 election. A graph is provided to illustrate:
(Sidenote: the question Sigelman used to collect the data was not asked between 1968 and 1976.) The findings are a little surprising to me.
For instance, I wouldn’t call Jimmy Carter a great president and it appears that was the instinct of the American people, but they would rather have had him than Ronald Reagan. According to Sigelman’s study, Carter’s election was when anti-candidate voting peaked. The majority of anti-opposition candidate voters would have rather had a mediocre president than a new one–I assume most of the against-voters were Democrats.
Another thing I find interesting is that the second highest year of anti-candidate voting was during Clinton’s 1996 presidential run. According to Sigelman the majority of against voters that backed Bob Dole did so because they didn’t like Clinton. I guess this isn’t that weird. There are always going to be opposition voters and the majority of people who liked Clinton voted for him rather than against Bob Dole. I’m pretty surprised by the 1996 results. Clinton was most successful in his first term so you’d expect people to be voting for him instead of against someone else.
As for the Bush elections, I, like many people I know, wasn’t crazy about John Kerry but would have much rather had him than Bush. No surprise about the 2004 results then.
And the last election isn’t surprising either. Many people clearly liked Obama rather than dislike McCain. One of the biggest failures of the McCain campaign was suggesting that the future could be worse if you voted for Obama, rather than better if you voted for McCain. That’s not terribly appealing, especially when you’ve got an optimistic candidate running against you. It’s pretty easy to see why anti-candidate voting was so low this past year; people believed Obama would be a good president rather than a better one than McCain or Bush.
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