Campaigns and Polling Sample Clauses

Campaigns and Polling. There is ample evidence to suggest that historical-fundamentals models can accurately predict an election months beforehand [25]. Yet, there is a large public demand for daily polls [58]. Though there are various explanations for this demand [41, 31], our focus is on the utility of polling to campaigns. Since Xxxxxxx’x bid for the White House [34], polls have had a profound impact on the way elections are won [37, 36, 34]; they allow candidates to make decisions based upon how the public feels. Campaigns now can act upon polls as a source of public sentiment when purposing policies or deciding how to handle an event [36, 35]. Furthermore, such benefits are available to the xxxxxx of the election when they begin to govern [35]. However, this poses an implicit contradiction: How can social scientists accurately predict the outcome of an election so far ahead of time if a candidate’s strategy, decided in part by using the information provided by polls, change the course of an election? Xxxxxx and Xxxx resolve this by suggesting that a campaign’s primary function is to enlighten voters to their candidate and their policy preferences [29]. Scholars, using historical- fundamental approaches, predict what the electorate’s preferences ought to be while the candidates work to enlighten voters to these preferences before election day [29, 10]. One critical assumption made by Xxxxxx and King is that both campaigns operate in a balanced environment with similar resources and staff talent levels [29]. Thus, neither candidate is able to gain a perceivable advantage in voter influence that would drastically change the political scientists’ early models. Assuming that two candidates are running balanced campaigns, only an event with a sizable impact on the electorate can cause a break from the election’s deterministic outcome (i.e. the historical-fundamentals models’ predictions) [59]. The paper adopts this concept of a “shock” from Wlezien and Xxxxxxx [59].