Understanding the Origins of Campaign Strategies

Just as theories of American voting behavior were largely developed with indifference to campaigns, research on campaign strategy has often failed to fully incorporate voters. In this paper, I develop a more nuanced understanding of campaigns that accounts for the way in which candidates learn from previous elections when crafting their strategies. Using campaign advertising data from the 2000 presidential election, I demonstrate that candidates' decisions to target African Americans, Hispanics, the elderly, union households, and members of the religious right are based on the influence those groups had exerted in determining recent statewide outcomes in the 2000 presidential election. I conclude by discussing the important role that candidate learning plays in the development of campaign strategies by producing an interdependency between candidates and voters that serves to represent the interests of some groups while leaving other voters absent from the campaign