7 - Elections

Summary

We have asked how the public evaluates presidents, how it forms ties to political parties, and how it decides upon a mix of most preferred polices. In five previous chapters we have produced a large stock of answers to these queries, and we have left doubts hanging here and there. Pushed to defend these matters – Approval, Macropartisanship, and Mood – as subjects of inquiry, we might briefly argue their inherent importance, the pleasure of knowing why and how they move. Ultimately, however, our recourse would be this: they matter for election outcomes in the United States. For elections are the central issue of democratic governance. If we are going to understand politics, then we must understand elections. That is the sole business of this chapter.

But how should we approach the topic of elections? For chapter after chapter we have ignored the differences and distinctions among Americans and asked how much we could learn from studying the electorate as a unit and, in particular, a unit with interesting variation over time. We have dealt with evaluation, identification, and preferences not as individual choices, approve or disapprove, Democrat or Republican, more environmental control or less, but as barometers of a unitary electorate. Approval, Macropartisanship, and Mood we treat as barometers of how the electorate thinks about things and where it is. When we do so, we lose the power that differences and distinctions bring to analysis.