Corwin D. Smidt

More Bang for the Buck Campaign Spending and Fundraising Success

Can candidates spend their way into financial success? We propose that the 2007 presidential money primary offers unprecedented leverage to evaluate spending’s influence since it allows for sharper controls of confounding factors. Our results demonstrate that greater candidate spending on fundraising-related efforts is associated with significant future financial benefits. We estimate that, prior to the primaries, increases in spending have an equal or larger payoff than increases in a candidate’s viability and find different types of spending are beneficial for frontrunner and long-shot candidates. The results consistently indicate greater early spending works to advantage candidates, suggesting a lack of initial resources is a significant obstacle for candidates who seek to financially benefit from their campaign’s performance.

Deus ex Machina Candidate Web Presence and the Presidential Nomination Campaign

Using data from the 2008 presidential nomination contest, we offer systematic tests of the relationships between traditional campaign factors, the Internet and campaign performance. We find that claims of the Internet’s relevance to modern campaigns are warranted, as it is a unique facet of campaigns and significantly improves candidates’ financial and electoral support. The Internet is especially helpful to candidates in generating small-donor contributions and in maximizing contributions after early primary victories. Overall, these findings suggest that the Internet offers a viable mechanism for long-shot candidates to overcome the resource demands of the current presidential nomination system.

Riding the Waves of Money: Contribution Dynamics in the 2008 Presidential Nomination Campaign

The 2008 primary was the most nuanced and expensive nomination contest in history. We investigate how this massive battle for contributions played out over 2007 and the first half of 2008 by analyzing the daily dynamics of candidate contributions using the Federal Elections Commissions collection of individual contributions. Not surprisingly, Giuliani and Clinton were the leaders in contribution momentum during the latter parts of the so-called money primary. This pattern abruptly changed in 2008 as both parties experienced a structural change in contribution flows. While Iowa and New Hampshire placements helped their causes, the South Carolina primary was by far the most rewarding early contest for Obama and McCain. Furthermore, primary victories do not benefit all candidates equally, as Clinton and Huckabee gained far less than their counterparts in response to their early victories.

The Consequences of Elite Party Politics for American Macropartisanship

Studies of macropartisanship exclusively focus on presidential performance’s role in driving partisan updating. Performance may determine which party benefits from updating, but I propose that the occurrence of mass updating more so depends on whether there are changes to the substance of elite party divisions. The greater the change in what characterizes party differences in Washington the more likely a portion of Americans update their partisanship accordingly. In confirmation, mixture model estimates find a separate updating component within macropartisanship that does not automatically respond to party performance. Instead, updating significantly grows in prominence the more party divisions within Congress change by issue focus and ideological alignment. These findings extend and integrate macropartisanship and issue evolution studies by showing how they can fit together within a more general model of party coalition dynamics.

Prelude to populism: Mass electoral support for the Grange and Greenback parties

This article uses underutilized individual-level data to examine who supported two third parties, the Grange and Greenbackers, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. We find that Greenbackers attracted individuals employed in non-agrarian occupations and others who were wealthier compared to major party voters. However, the Grange principally appealed to farmers, indicating third parties that are believed to have appealed to similar constituencies often appealed to different electoral groups. Both the Grange and the Greenbackers appealed to voters lacking strong ethnocultural identifications with either major party.