Walter Shapiro: Why Clinton voters will come back to the fold
... Despite the efforts of Clinton activists like clothing entrepreneur Susie Tompkins Buell to highlight feminist grievances with the nomination process, the truth is that the Clintonites really have no alternative but to toe the party line. And there is a strong presumption among political scientists -- based on a landmark study from the 1970s and buttressed by statistical analyses of polling data from other presidential elections -- that voters rarely carry resentments from the primaries into the voting booths in November.
So after a nomination fight without an overriding issue, there is absolutely no ideological reason -- beyond ruffled feelings -- for, say, college-educated feminist voters to vote Republican. As Monika McDermott, a political science professor and pollster at the University of Connecticut, puts it, "If the history of the past 20 years of voting has shown us anything, it is that women are more likely to vote Democratic and these particular [pro-Hillary] women are hardcore Democrats. They will get over how Hillary was treated very quickly when they realize that the alternative to Obama is John McCain."
Pre-convention polling tends to magnify the potential for defections because the standard "if the election were held today …" question asks voters to jump ahead of reality and imagine their behavior at the end of an arduous campaign in November. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post Poll last week found that 24 percent of the Democrats who backed Clinton prefer McCain over Obama. But these numbers will certainly decline as base Democrats gravitate to their party's nominee with increasing enthusiasm. "You are asking people to tell what they're going to do six months from now and the circumstances of six months down the road aren't present," says Lonna Atkeson, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. "So you're asking them to base their decision six months from now on the data that they have today. And that's very hypothetical and unrealistic."
Atkeson is a strong proponent of the counterintuitive theory that a fractious presidential primary fight actually ends up helping a political party because it increases turnout and mobilizes more activists. And she has found a consistent pattern over the past three decades that the vast majority of voters do not abandon their party just because their favorite candidate lost the nomination. A statistical analysis of 1984 polling data by Atkeson found that by the time of the Democratic Convention former supporters of Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson had a significantly more positive opinion of Walter Mondale, now that he was their party's nominee, than during the primaries. But Atkeson's most persuasive evidence comes by way of an academic researcher who in 1976 polled the same group of voters (in Los Angeles and Erie, Pa.) six times from the early primaries to the November election to see how their candidate preferences evolved.
This kind of repetitive polling is a rarity akin to finding a unicorn in your backyard. Luckily, 1976 was the perfect year to test what happens to sore-loser voters after the primaries since there were vigorous nomination fights in both parties. Despite a scorched-earth primary battle between President Jerry Ford and conservative challenger Ronald Reagan on the Republican side and widespread Democratic doubts about Jimmy Carter, the data demonstrated an unequivocal picture of party loyalty as the ties that ultimately bind in November.
Atkeson used this treasure trove of polling data to see whether voters who had initially backed one of the losing 1976 Democrats (such as Scoop Jackson and Mo Udall) in the primaries changed their assessment of Carter after he became the de facto nominee. As Atkeson writes in an unpublished paper, "Differences between the winner and loser backer groups [in the primaries] began to decline sharply in August after both party conventions ... In October, during the heart of the general election period, winning and losing Democratic factions had become very similar in their evaluations of Carter." The same pattern emerged on the GOP side in 1976, despite the stark differences between Ford and Reagan, both ideologically and stylistically. Atkeson noted that while Carter's popularity among Democrats increased during the campaign, "Reagan supporters showed an even more dramatic improvement in their overall evaluation of Ford."...
Read entire article at Salon
So after a nomination fight without an overriding issue, there is absolutely no ideological reason -- beyond ruffled feelings -- for, say, college-educated feminist voters to vote Republican. As Monika McDermott, a political science professor and pollster at the University of Connecticut, puts it, "If the history of the past 20 years of voting has shown us anything, it is that women are more likely to vote Democratic and these particular [pro-Hillary] women are hardcore Democrats. They will get over how Hillary was treated very quickly when they realize that the alternative to Obama is John McCain."
Pre-convention polling tends to magnify the potential for defections because the standard "if the election were held today …" question asks voters to jump ahead of reality and imagine their behavior at the end of an arduous campaign in November. For example, an ABC News/Washington Post Poll last week found that 24 percent of the Democrats who backed Clinton prefer McCain over Obama. But these numbers will certainly decline as base Democrats gravitate to their party's nominee with increasing enthusiasm. "You are asking people to tell what they're going to do six months from now and the circumstances of six months down the road aren't present," says Lonna Atkeson, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico. "So you're asking them to base their decision six months from now on the data that they have today. And that's very hypothetical and unrealistic."
Atkeson is a strong proponent of the counterintuitive theory that a fractious presidential primary fight actually ends up helping a political party because it increases turnout and mobilizes more activists. And she has found a consistent pattern over the past three decades that the vast majority of voters do not abandon their party just because their favorite candidate lost the nomination. A statistical analysis of 1984 polling data by Atkeson found that by the time of the Democratic Convention former supporters of Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson had a significantly more positive opinion of Walter Mondale, now that he was their party's nominee, than during the primaries. But Atkeson's most persuasive evidence comes by way of an academic researcher who in 1976 polled the same group of voters (in Los Angeles and Erie, Pa.) six times from the early primaries to the November election to see how their candidate preferences evolved.
This kind of repetitive polling is a rarity akin to finding a unicorn in your backyard. Luckily, 1976 was the perfect year to test what happens to sore-loser voters after the primaries since there were vigorous nomination fights in both parties. Despite a scorched-earth primary battle between President Jerry Ford and conservative challenger Ronald Reagan on the Republican side and widespread Democratic doubts about Jimmy Carter, the data demonstrated an unequivocal picture of party loyalty as the ties that ultimately bind in November.
Atkeson used this treasure trove of polling data to see whether voters who had initially backed one of the losing 1976 Democrats (such as Scoop Jackson and Mo Udall) in the primaries changed their assessment of Carter after he became the de facto nominee. As Atkeson writes in an unpublished paper, "Differences between the winner and loser backer groups [in the primaries] began to decline sharply in August after both party conventions ... In October, during the heart of the general election period, winning and losing Democratic factions had become very similar in their evaluations of Carter." The same pattern emerged on the GOP side in 1976, despite the stark differences between Ford and Reagan, both ideologically and stylistically. Atkeson noted that while Carter's popularity among Democrats increased during the campaign, "Reagan supporters showed an even more dramatic improvement in their overall evaluation of Ford."...