Perhaps the only thing more difficult than trying to actually win a presidential election is figuring out how and why someone else wins. A few groups at Penn, however, have taken some major initiatives to make sense of just that.
Both the Wharton School and the Annenberg School for Communication have launched efforts to learn more about the public's voting preferences.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center has two initiatives: the National Annenberg Election Survey -- first conducted in 2000 -- and the new Web site FactCheck.org.
FactCheck.org labels itself as a "consumer advocate" for voters and has been operating since December 2003. It allows concerned voters to sign up for periodic e-mails which contain reports that assess the accuracy and validity of statements made by the two presidential candidates. At the bottom of each e-mail is a bibliography of FactCheck.org's sources as well as links to those sources.
According to its Web site, the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey was the largest academic election poll ever carried out. It was comprised of 100,000 interviews, and the 2004 NAES plans to match it. The survey is being conducted from October 2003 to November 2004 after the election.
The survey team includes Kathleen Hall Jamieson -- the Elizabeth Ware Packard professor of Communication at Annenberg and the Walter and Leonore Annenberg director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, NAES Managing Director Ken Winneg, Political Director Adam Clymer and Washington Research Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center Erika Falk.
The survey also seeks to analyze how voters feel about certain issues and what traits they look for in a president. Some of the studies are broken down demographically in order to find out how views differ between different races, ethnic groups, sexes and occupations.
Two of the more recent studies were conducted on swing voters and voting practices in the 20 crucial battleground states, one of which is Pennsylvania.
"The data suggests that these people are perhaps more available to Kerry than to Bush, because of their deep antagonism toward the situation in Iraq and their gloominess about the economy," said Clymer in an interview with The Los Angeles Times.
Kerry, however, "still needs to establish in their minds that he's presidential, and Bush is obviously trying to prevent Kerry from doing that," he added.
Not only does this survey track voter preferences, it also tracks the influences of various forms of political communication, such as home and workplace conversations, as well as various types of media.
"The most likely cause of Kerry's boost is the impact of his advertising in these states," Clymer went on to tell Bloomberg.com.
"Nationally, there has been no real change in his favorable-unfavorable balance, but where the ads have been intense, there has been a change."
The studies are conducted through telephone interviews according to a rolling cross-section (RCS) design. This complicated methodology allows the researchers to track voter trends more accurately because it compensates for many different types of possible inaccuracies.
Politicalforecasting.com, another Internet-based initiative, is currently hosted by the Wharton School's Marketing department. The site has a "Pollyvote" feature, a regularly updated average of the results from various pre-election polls such as Gallup, Fox News and the Associated Press.
The Web site was conceived of by a research team called the Political Forecasting Special Interest Group. It is led by Marketing Professor J. Scott Armstrong, the director of the Web site, as well as by Alfred G. Cuzan, Political Science professor at the University of West Florida and Randall Jones, professor of Political Science at the University of Central Oklahoma.
