The 2012 Campaign and the Timeline of Presidential Elections

Do voters cast ballots for the candidates whose positions best match their own? Or does the race for president come down to who runs the most effective campaign? In their book, The Timeline of Presidential Elections, published in 2012, Erikson and Wlezien documented how both factors come into play. Having amassed data from national polls covering presidential elections from 1952 to 2008, they could track how outcomes take shape over the course of an election year. But they wanted to know whether...