Campaigns That Matter offers a unique look at campaign visits in the presidential nomination campaigns from 2008 to 2016. Jay Wendland places his study at the nexus of the literatures on campaign effects and presidential nominating campaigns. He analyzes campaign visits as a factor in presidential candidate strategy, the mobilization of certain groups within the party coalitions, and the nominating electorate preferences for candidates. The systematic analysis of campaign visits offers a unique contribution to the presidential nomination literature. Demonstrating the campaign effects of candidate visits is a tougher task, particularly when focusing on one kind of campaign activity amid many in a complex multicandidate campaign. The contribution is more limited in this respect.
A number of studies have looked at candidate visits as an explanatory factor for the Iowa Caucus, most notably those of Hugh Winebrenner, Rachel Caufield, and Chris Hull. These studies, however, focused on Iowa rather than the broader set of nominating elections. Wendland also looks at voter turnout and nominating voter preferences for candidates, which these and other studies did not do. He finds that candidate visits appear to be an effective strategy for lower-tier candidates who need their smaller number of supporters to turn out to vote. Front-runners, by contrast, seem to rely on media and organized field operations to mobilize supporters. Still, the effects vary considerably by candidate and by election year. Wendland finds that Romney benefited the most from state-level visits in 2012, and Trump and Clinton both benefited in 2016. The mixed results suggest that the effects of candidate visits may be highly contextual, depending on both the race and the candidate.
The literature on campaign effects generally focuses on events like televised debates, candidate gaffes or scandals, campaign spending, campaign ads or ad buys, and news media coverage—all things that can be measured temporally as intervention effects in the analysis of the ebbs and flows of public opinion. Several studies have analyzed presidential candidate visits to states, though these studies generally are qualitative (though see Chris Hull’s Grassroots Rules, 2008, as an exception). No one has looked at the effects of candidate visits across states as a factor in voter turnout and candidate preferences, so Wendland’s study contributes to our understanding of campaign effects and of presidential nominations. Wendland smartly looks at national nominating campaigns in which the powerful confounding force of partisan identification is removed from the behavioral equation and for which the sequential process provides some empirical leverage for analyzing campaign effects.
Candidate activities have a greater potential to affect presidential nomination campaigns in which the prospective voting population cannot rely on party identification to guide candidate preferences and voting decisions. In this context, Wendland lays out the various ways in which candidate appearances can potentially affect a citizen’s political behavior. Candidates certainly behave as if their time and efforts matter, and Wendland documents differences among candidates in this respect. During the invisible primary, nationally known candidates devote relatively more of their appearances to fundraising and visit states across the country, while lesser-known candidates focus their time in the early states on an effort to get noticed. Candidate visits track the primary schedule once voting begins. Wendland finds some evidence that candidates focus their appearances on key party constituencies whose support they need to win. Targeted campaigning seems to pay off with higher voter turnout of targeted party constituencies.
Wendland finds some evidence that campaign visits can sometimes help lesser-known candidates mobilize supporters from particular constituencies of the party coalitions. In effect, lesser-known candidates use their time to boost turnout among what is a proportionately smaller group of candidate supporters. Wendland finds mixed results when it comes to public opinion. Campaigning hard by out-visiting states relative to rival candidates seems to have helped some candidates in some years, although the effects vary across elections. Wendland’s analyses include other kinds of campaign effects as well. Visits and ad buys seem to have helped Huckabee, Romney, and Clinton in 2008; Romney in 2012; and Trump in 2016. The effects of campaign visits were not significant for other candidates in these years.
Thus Wendland partially succeeds at the daunting task of parsing out the impact of campaign effects in presidential nomination campaigns. Other avenues for this investigation, however, may have produced still more fruitful results. For one, Wendland largely assumes that candidate visits attract media coverage and exposure, but he does not measure how much coverage candidates get for their efforts. This intervening factor would seem to be a likely reason to help explain why personal appearances matter for some candidates but not others. Some candidates, like Trump, gain tremendous exposure for their campaign events, whereas others spend days and weeks campaigning on the ground without drawing much attention beyond the rooms in which they speak. Given the focus on presidential nomination campaigns, it likely would have helped this investigation to have measured the volume of local and national news coverage that candidates generate. Analyzing digital, print, and broadcast media generated by events is a critical intervening step between the act of visiting a state and the effects on voter mobilization and public opinion. Without measuring that intervening factor, the inferential leap between visits and observable effects is larger and more tenuous.
Similarly, Wendland appropriately notes that candidates spend a lot of time fundraising during the invisible primary. It would have been a fruitful line of inquiry to have measured the correlation between visits to a particular state and funds raised in that state during that time frame. Given that campaign financial disclosure records are often imprecise with respect to the timing of donations, assessing the correlation between visits and the geographic bases of donations would have strengthened this part of the analysis. In the aggregate, it appears that candidates visit more often the big, populous states that have more wealthy donors. Analyzing in depth the efficacy of campaign visits for fundraising would have added value to the analysis of this kind of campaign activity.
Overall, Wendland offers an interesting analysis of a little-studied subject for which identifying significant effects is a daunting task. He has gathered an impressive array of data on candidate visits, as well as on other campaign effects, in his effort to isolate and evaluate the effects of campaign visits. He shows that presidential nomination candidates are strategic in the allocation of their time and their campaign efforts. He finds mixed results for the effects of campaign visits on both voter mobilization efforts, particularly of targeted constituency groups, and voter preferences for candidates across three presidential nomination cycles. The study could have done more to measure the visibility gained by candidates for their efforts, which could have helped explain the variations that Wendland finds across candidates and across presidential nominations. There is room for the inquiry to be expanded to demonstrate the efficacy of campaign visits and the geographic distribution of campaign fundraising. Yet overall, Campaigns That Matter is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in campaign effects and in presidential nomination campaigns.
