Hope Is a Renewable Resource

Abstract

The 2012 presidential campaign was a referendum on hope and change. The emotional landscape in 2012 appeared similar to that of 2004. While the level of enthusiasm for Barack Obama was noticeably muted, his campaign narrative “forward” was an effective counternarrative to Governor Mitt Romney’s strategy to invoke voter anger toward Obama concerning slow economic recovery. The 2012 Obama campaign strategy is closely inspected and provides the context in which voters’ responses toward Obama and Romney were measured. While economic concerns dominated the tone of the campaign, which are commonly associated with negative retrospective appraisals of incumbents, research suggests that positive feelings influence retrospective candidate appraisals of Obama.

Appendix: Description of Data and Analysis

Campaign Issues

Data for analysis utilizes the 2012 ANES pre-election surveys. All dependent variables are coded dichotomously. The dependent variables reflect the politically salient issues of the 2012 presidential campaign. The topics were selected by reviewing descriptive survey data presented by the Pew Research Center. There are two different categories of dependent variables. First, presidential approval of Barack Obama and, second, policy judgments. There were four topics the ANES utilized to assess Obama’s job performance. They were (1) the economy, (2) foreign relations, (3) health care, and (4) the war in Afghanistan. Each question was phrased generically: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Barack Obama is handling __________.” Respondent answers were coded dichotomously as 1 = approve and 0 = disapprove. Concerning policy judgments, the five key issues selected for calculation were (1) economic performance, (2) gun control, (3) war (Afghanistan and the War on Terror), (4) immigration (pathway to citizenship and profiling), and finally (5) same-sex adoption. The answers reported were coded 1 to represent approval and 0 for disapproval.

Emotional Measures

The independent variables examined include the ANES indicators for emotional responses (hope, pride, anger, fear), traditional long-term factors such as party identification and ideology, and the social characteristics relied upon as standard predictors for turnout which include age, gender, race, education, and marital status.

Variables Controlling for Political Factors

Party identification is an ordinal variable, which allows me to control for independents and weaker partisans. It categorically ranges from 0 to 4, with 0 representing “no preference/non-partisan” and 4 representing “other.” The independent variable controlling for ideology is coded categorically with representations of “liberal,” “conservative,” and “moderate.” The measurements for the ANES emotional responses are discussed in greater detail later.

To help convey the social and political significance of the role emotions play in formulating political judgments, a series of logit models are used to relate a set of dichotomous dependent variables to a set of independent variables. The dependent variables in this project display key issues in 2012 determined to be important to the presidential campaign; this accounts for the dynamic nature of electoral contexts and presidential campaigns.