This week I will have several posts discussing new research on the 2008 election — all using the “Why Obama Won” heading. While the attention of pundits and journalists has turned elsewhere, for obvious reasons, many questions about the 2008 election remain unanswered. Political science research helps to answer these questions and revise or update existing narratives of the campaign.
Here’s one piece of conventional wisdom: Obama won by bringing lots of new voters to the polls. You can see this notion reflected in concerns that these voters won’t show up in 2010, thereby hurting the Democrats’s chances. And while this notion may be true, it’s far from the full story.
bq. In the 2008 election, Barack Obama’s campaign brought many new voters to the polls. Were these new voters necessary for Obama’s victory? In this study, I find that they were not.The basis of this finding is an examination of decisions made by people who voted for George W. Bush in 2004. I show that Bush voters’ decisions not to vote or to support Obama were a sufficient condition for Obama’s victory.
That is from soon-to-be published research by Arthur Lupia, who kindly shared it with me ahead of time. Lupia arrives at this conclusion via analysis of vote returns in key states and also the 2008 National Election Study. One piece of data: in the NES, nearly 25% of respondents who voted for Bush in 2004 did not vote for McCain in 2008. About 15% voted for Obama. About 7% did not vote. The remainder voted for another candidate. These figures are based on respondents’ self-reports, which are potentially fallible, but still, the combination of these data and others suggest that turncoats were numerous enough to matter.
Simply put, Obama probably didn’t need new voters to win the election, even though they clearly added to his victory margin. Here is Lupia’s conclusion:
bq. Barack Obama’s success in bringing millions of new voters to the polls was an impressive achievement. But these new voters were not a necessary condition for his victory. When considering whether or not to support John McCain in 2008, a number of Bush voters decided, “No We Can’t.” The number of 2004 Bush voters who decided to stay at home, or to support a Democrat, in 2008 did not grab the same kinds of headlines as new voter stories, but they were a sufficient condition for Obama’s Electoral College victory. Hence, future presidential hopefuls’ attempts to draw lessons from the 2008 campaign should focus not only on how the Obama campaign got so many new people to the polls, but also on why so many people who voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 2004 chose to do something different in 2008. If 2008’s new voters are less energized in 2012, the story of that election may turn on whether voters who once supported a Republican can be convinced to do so again.
Find Lupia’s piece here.