US elections

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Introduction

Many democratic countries enjoy celebrating their democratic origins and each has their own history of the struggle to attain their heritage. England has their Glorious Revolution which brought about the end of the monarchy rule and the beginnings of parliamentary government. France has their French Revolution, which overthrew their own monarchy in favor of pseudo-democratic rule. However, of all the countries with a proud history of democratic traditions, none are, perhaps, as eager to celebrate theirs as the United States of America. Indeed, democracy and the history of the attainment of democracy is such a part of American culture that it is core to the identity of most Americans. For much of its history, the state has been a trend-setter at the front of the world's movement towards the acceptance and refinement of democratic values and mechanisms.

Among its other unique features, the USA is one of the few examples of democratic states with full presidential systems. The role of the President of the United States is essential to the state's very ability to function and, as such, presidential elections are by far the main event of the US electoral cycle, so much so that voter turnout drops remarkably during years when a president is not being selected.

However, American presidential elections are very much unlike what one may come to expect from democratic process. Here, the principles of direct popular vote are abandoned in favor of a complex system that even many American citizens have only a vague knowledge of known as the Electoral College.

The Electoral College method of counting votes sees each state get a number of designated electors, proportionate to the population of said state, or in other words, equal to the number of congress members that state has, with Washington DC getting as many electors as the least populous state. In all but two states, the electors pledge to cast their votes for the candidate that received the majority of the public vote in their given state. As such, for 48 states (apart from Maine and Nebraska), it is a winner-take-all system. The principle itself has been established from the very beginning of the United States' history. At the time of its creation, there was discussion of a popular vote selection, but due to the various complications and slavery issues, it was deserted in favor of the electoral system.

In the last half-century or so, the Electoral College system has not been terribly popular among American citizens. Its approval has been in steady decline over the recent decades and is at one of the all-time lows today. As much as 62 percent of Americans would favor seeing the Electoral College abandoned in favor of the popular vote. The close and contentious nature of the Presidential races of 2000 and 2004 did not help matters with regards to the public opinion of the Electoral College. Many Americans see the college as an outdated system that at the very least needs reformation, if not complete dismissal.

The scientific community has also approached the question of replacing the system with little regard for its historical significance or other symbolic traits. It's been widely criticized for an extensive variety of flaws, including, but not limited to, its lack of inclusiveness, its negative effects on voter turnout, its propensity for electing candidates that don't receive the majority of votes and its general destabilization of the legitimacy of the office of the President of the United States.

When people doubt the legitimacy of the presidential election, discord makes it difficult for the president to govern effectively. A president who fails to receiver the popular vote yet receives the electoral votes needed to win does not have the «mandate of the people,» a phrase so popularly used in American politics when politicians need to get unpopular votes in the house passed. This kind of loss of confidence in the nature of elected officials begins a cycle of stagnation and further discord in lawmaking, only making the Electoral College even more unpopular as time goes on.

Among the other issues brought up regarding the Electoral College is the much debated question of uneven distribution of voting power. The concept of voting power is defined as the probability of the fact that a given individual's vote will decide the outcome of an election. As the Electoral College is drastically different from a popular vote system, it is widely believed to create disproportional voting power for citizens in different states.

While that in itself is an issue, it also contributes to the main topic of our paper - the uneven distribution of presidential candidates' attention. The existence of the Electoral College has certainly contributed to a view of American politics in which presidential campaigns are centered solely on the swing states. Indeed, the two-party system had created a situation where some states are lost or won by default. As such, a token Democrat living in Alabama or a token Republican in Vermont or Washington DC doesn't have much of a chance of impacting the elections and has an equally low chance of garnering their elected official's attention when it comes to issues that they find important.

If one views elections as a process within the framework of an agent-principal system of relations between the electorate and the elected, the lack of voting power for some of the population translates to a lack of leverage. As such, uneven distribution of attention could mean that voters are denied representation, something that the American democracy was set up to specifically avoid.

The minority voters in states aren't the only ones who could feasibly be affected by that. While a popular vote system would mean that each of the candidates would, in a two-horse race, be aiming for 51% of the total votes, Electoral College makes it 51% of votes in the majority of contested states. Unlike most general elections in a bipartisan system, elections state-by-state are often far from closely contested, especially given the huge variance between them in many characteristics. As such, the party base voters in party-favorable states will be left out in favor of their other-state allies. With these issues in mind, it is easy to see why voter apathy in America is a recurring problem. If you were a Republican or Democrat in a state where the opposing party typically won the state by ten percentage points, there really is little incentive to vote for the President of the United States.

All of the above leads us to the central problem of this paper - the effect of the Electoral College system on the uneven distribution of campaign efforts in the United States of America. If the existence of such an effect was to be determined, that would lead to serious questions over the democratic nature of the Electoral College - as it could contribute to the devaluing of certain voters in the eyes of politicians and could continue to wear away at the interest those voters have in voting in general. Many county, city and state level politicians rely on the increased interest in a presidential election to bring important measures to the people for a vote. If disenfranchised voters stop coming to the polls during even the Presidential elections, this will further erode the value of an election cycle as a representation of the people's wishes. The ripple effect of the Electoral College system's perceived influence on campaign efforts could be vast indeed.

The subject of this paper is the 2012 presidential election in the United States. The object of the paper is 2012 presidential election campaigning by the two candidates from the two major political parties during the 2012.

The relevance of the topic is evident as the Electoral College and its effects have been a big part of the debate over democratic institutions in the USA ever since the 2000 election, where the Republican Party candidate George Walker Bush beat the Democratic Party candidate Al Gore to the presidency despite the latter winning the majority of the votes. The election in question was hugely controversial, leaving the American political system in a state of turmoil for more than a month, and the confidence in the system is still suffering the repercussions of that turbulent election. As was previously mentioned, the election of 2000 has not done much for the popular support the Electoral College. Proposals to eliminate it have been popping up ever since and, if the US is truly considering a change in electoral institutions, there is a distinct need of in-depth research on the effects of the existing electoral institutions.

The goal of this research paper is determining the nature and scope of the effect of the Electoral College system on Presidential Election campaigning in the United States of America. More specifically, we plan to determine whether the system subverts the usual patterns of campaign spending and time allocation that would be prevalent in popular vote systems. We want to see whether the effect of the system is big enough to lead to certain states being disproportionately favored in an election.

To achieve the goal of the project, we will need to:

1. Study the history, the context and the modern mechanisms of the Electoral College

2. Explore the potential effects of the Electoral College on the allocation of campaign resources

3. Create a mathematical model that allows for analyzing the scope of the Electoral College influence on presidential campaigning in the US

4. Compare our results with the existing findings and determine areas for future research

The central hypothesis of this paper states that the Electoral College system leads to a disproportionate focus on the so-called «swing states» or «battleground states», i.e. states that that are frequently closely contested in a presidential election. The concept of «swing states» remains in heavy use in the American political debate, as these states juxtaposed with «red states» and «blue states», with the former traditionally voting for the Republican candidate and the latter - for the Democrat.

According to our chief hypotheses in the broadest terms, the contested states get a boost in campaign resource allocation that would not exist in a popular vote system.

But what do we expect to find in particular? Our first hypothesis is that the perceived closeness of elections in states has had a substantial effect on the probability of assignment and the exact amount of a) ad spending by presidential campaigns and b) visits by campaign officials in those states, with higher expectations of a close election leading to lower campaign resource attribution during the 2012 presidential election.

Our second hypothesis states that small states were favored over large states in terms of campaign resource allocation, due to disproportionate voting power and more potential rewards per persuaded voter.

Our third hypothesis is that the found effects will be consistent across both the Democrat and the Republican campaign. The fourth hypothesis is that the relationship between campaign visits and a) election closeness and b) state size will be stronger and more in line with projections for non-fundraiser visits.

The first chapter of this paper will talk about the background for the topic, including a review of the relevant literature and an in-depth analysis of the trends in the Electoral College mechanisms. Chapter two will be dedicated to questions of variable operationalization and the choice of research methods. Finally, chapter three will present the results of the analysis.

1. The history, mechanisms and research behind the Electoral College

electoral college presidential campaign

Background

The Electoral College system has been an ever-present part of United States politics throughout the entirety of the country's relatively short history. In fact, the voters in the USA have never known a nationwide popular vote system (all major elections in the United States are popular vote elections,) as the Electoral College was introduced during the famous Constitutional Convention of 1787. The original Virginia Plan would see Congress choose the country's President, but many of the delegates weren't keen on the idea - fear of corruptive influence was a heavy factor in deciding against this type of election - and instead proposed a different indirect method of Presidential elections - the very Electoral College that persists till this day.

But what is the Electoral College system? In the briefest of terms, the Electoral College provides for the election of the President via indirect terms - the voters state-by-state pick electors, who, in turn, elect the next President. Technically, every state held the right to introduce whatever system of appointing electors that they see fit and, while some states allowed voters to choose electors either on a district basis or on a general state basis, other states would dispense with popular vote aspect altogether and instead allow their legislative bodies to nominate electors. The latter system did not last and not present in any state by the time the Civil War came to an end.

The original plan for Presidential elections would see the Electoral College be a significant, deliberative and, most importantly, independent body. The electors, who would be picked for their unbiased character and political capabilities, were conceived as figures who actually had the power and responsibility to elect the President.

Obviously, that vision of United States presidential politics never exactly came to fruition. As revealed in Dixon (1950), the entire idea of non-partisan electors was fully circumvented by party politics within the span of three electoral cycles and, as such, electors became fully tied to the political parties that nominated them.

The modern political process in the United States of America would be largely no different if the process of casting votes by electors were automated - i.e. if they didn't use actual people in that role. And, while the fact that the casting is done by independent (for the most part) human beings, that does not lead to much in the way of skewing the intended results.

For instance, there is the practice of voting for «unpledged electors» - people who will act as electors if voted for but do not explicitly pledge to voter for a certain candidate. That practice, although in tune with the original vision for the role of the Electoral College, has not been in use since 1964.

The other famously discussed phenomena is that of «unfaithful electors» - those who pledged to give their vote to a certain candidate but did not follow up on that pledge. In some states, such behavior is punishable by law, but, in general, it's very much a non-issue. While American history has seen 157 counts of such faithlessness, only 9 of them belong to the XX and the XXI centuries. A given election has not seen multiple faithless electors since 1896 and the faithless electors have never successfully impacted the outcome of an election.

Today, the nationwide number of electors is set at 538 - that exact figure has remained unchanged for more than 40 years. The number for every state is equal to the amount of representatives the state in question has in the United States Congress. That number, in turn, is made up from the two seats each state gets in the Senate and the amount of state representatives in the House, with the latter being proportional to the state's population. It is worth noting that, while the two chambers of Congress have a combined 535 voting members, the Electoral College also include an additional 3 electors from the non-state Washington DC, which were granted by the Amendment XXIII in 1961.

The current maximum amount of electors belongs to the state of California, which has 55, but has its importance downplayed somewhat by the fact it rather reliably votes for Democrats. Texas is the second most-represented state with 38 electors, while Florida and New York both have 29. On the other end of the spectrum, there are seven states (and DC) that have the minimum amount of 3 electoral votes. The median number for the 51 eligible territories is 8 electoral votes.

The uniqueness of the whole system stems from the fact that, in 48 out of 50 states, the electors are chosen on a winner-takes all basis. To reiterate, that means that getting the relative majority of the popular vote in any of those states will see that candidate in question get all the electoral votes. There is no proportionality and the margin of victory has no affect on the distribution of electors.

The method of counting also does not ensure that the winner of the popular vote becomes President. Indeed, out of the 57 presidential elections that have been held in the United States as of this writing, 4 have seen the candidate with the majority of the popular vote miss out on the presidency.

In 1824, the first such occasion saw John Quincy Adams beat Andrew Jackson on electoral votes, albeit that situation had little to do with the Electoral College itself. The latter candidate, despite procuring 10% more votes than Adams, did not manage to secure the majority of electoral votes and would go on to lose the election by the decision of the House of Representatives.

1876 provided a more famously contentious example - Democrat Samuel Tilden secured 51% of the vote, but came up one electoral vote short in the Electoral College. His opponent, Hayes, was 19 down with 20 electoral votes to play for in states that had election results disputed - the traditional swing state Florida, the closely contested South Carolina and two states that were won by 3-percent margins in Oregon and Louisiana. He allegedly later received those 20 to become President over a famously undemocratic internal agreement between the two parties.

Just 12 years later in 1888, Republican Benjamin Harrison swept the electoral votes by a margin of 65 despite coming up tens of thousands of people short in the popular vote. Largely, his victory was attributed to picking up 36 points in New York due to a one-percent victory over Democratic rival Cleveland - if the 13 thousand voters that tipped Harrison over Cleveland didn't show up, the election would have a different result.

However, both the most famous and the most recent case of a popular vote inversion happened almost a century later in 2000. That election saw a closely-contested race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore. The latter carried the popular vote by half a million people, but lost the electoral vote by five. The election was disputed, as the closest per-state margin was found in Florida, which saw Bush win by less than a thousand voters and which had more than enough electoral votes to tip the election in either candidate's favour. The margin triggered automatic recounts that were cut short by a Supreme Court decision and multiple-post election research papers gave different answers on who'd be declared President if the recounts did proceed, showing just how close this election truly was since even the expert scholars had trouble agreeing on the turnout.

Most importantly for us, the election in question highlighted the importance that individual states could play under the Electoral College - Florida, originally considered a reliably red state, saw a significant increase in advertising and campaign resources when it emerged as a swing state. The state immediately saw an influx of resources that put it among the states that received the most ad spending.

It is important to note that states, in general, get a lot of leeway in the question of determining the mechanism they use to pick out electors. As such, there are two states that have went against the «winner-takes-all» tradition and instead opted for a more proportional distribution. It is fairly interesting that the two states in question are Nebraska and Maine - holding five and four electoral votes respectively and ranked 37^th and 41^st in population size. These states would typically not see much campaign resources allotted to them due to their relatively small number of electors, but aside from that, Maine has been reliably blue since 1988 and Nebraska has been reliably red aside from a short stretch in the early 1900s. These are not states that have much to lose by switching their votes from winner take all to proportional, but they also have seemingly little to gain as well. In addition, calling it fully proportional is way generous - instead, both states institute a system where two votes go to the overall popular vote winner, with each remaining one going to the winner in a respective congressional district.

It is worth noting that, in the three electoral cycles that preceded 2012, Maine's electoral votes always went to the Democrats in full, while Nebraska had all gone to Republicans bar one district in 2008. The effects of these systems on ad resource distribution and campaign visits will be discussed in further sections of the paper.

We've discussed how the Electoral College is an integral part of the outcomes of the United States presidential elections. However, it is even more important to state that the aforementioned elections have created certain stereotypes about the presidential election process, including a notion that only few states are important for any given presidential election. But how long has that exact notion persisted for?

To tackle that question, one needs to consider a term that is central for American presidential politics - the «swing state». Defined as any given state in which the presidential election is closely-contested between the two major parties (and could, perhaps, «swing» one way or another), the term itself is omnipresent in modern political discussion. Other often used terms are «battleground state» (a state in which the candidates will still battle each other for the chance to win) or «purple state» (purple being the color created when you combine red and blue meaning the state is an even mix.)

While the exact origins of the notion are hard to pinpoint, it is worth noting that historians and researchers use the phrase «swing state» in relation to many elections of the past - most notably, the aforementioned election of 1888, where New York and Indiana - home states of both major candidates and carriers of 51 electoral votes combined - became the focus of the candidate's attention.

At the same time, the swing state phenomenon has never been as hotly observed as it is now due to the fact that, simply speaking, there are less states that are legitimately unpredictable. As pointed out by NY Times' 2012 feature on election shifts over the recent decades, the number of states that went between Republican and Democratic support within the timeframe of four years is much lower now than it has been half a century ago. In other words, the states that actually determine the variance in election outcomes and becoming few and far between.

Much of that can be attributed to the increasing racial subtext in presidential politics since the 1960s. That decade, dominated in some degree by the Civil Rights Movement and the reaction of various voters to the major parties' attitude towards it, saw the introduction of the Southern strategy. Utilized by prominent Republicans Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater, the strategy appealed to the core, anti-desegregation values of the Southern electorate (Boyd, 1970) and has played a big role in shaping the modern «red states», thus decreasing the amount of Southern states that would be «in play» in subsequent elections.

It also was part of an inverse effect which saw the more progressivist states of the North alienated and, as such, made many of those states a lot less likely to be contested. In addition to that, the GOP's tough stance on immigration has effectively turned California from a battleground state to a safe state for Democrats due to a large Hispanic population.

Generally speaking, many of the outlined factors could be regarded as part of a bigger process which researchers refer to as the «polarization» of the American electorate. While literature on the topic at hand is mixed - some studies accept the premise of increased polarization (Abramowitz and Saunders, 2007), while some reject the concept outright (Fiorina et al., 2006) - it could account for the lesser number of actual «swing states» and, as such, an increased focus on those states that do remain contested year after year.

Another possible reason is that as the United States ages and areas settle into a particular political atmosphere, people may tend to remain or move to areas most agreeable to them. Indeed, most people will go wherever the jobs are available, but for those that have choices, they might choose to live in an area that is more in line with their lifestyle. While this likely doesn't explain the concentrations one hundred percent, surveys over the years have shown people have particular places in mind when they think of where they'd like to live or even retire. When you can be choosy, why not choose a place where your values are more reflected by the rest of the community?

Earlier in this paper we've discussed that consideration of Electoral College effects on campaigning is necessary in the grand scheme of things as the system itself appears potentially subject to change, with record-low popularity in polling, increased focus on a smaller number of states and the presidential politics still somewhat reeling from the aftermath of the 2000 debacle. But just how likely or possible is this change?

To answer that question, one has to remember that the United States already came somewhat close to abolishing the Electoral College at one point in their history - in the aftermath of the 1968 presidential election, which saw Nixon dominate the election on electoral votes despite a very narrow popular vote win.

The disparity in question led to the introduction of what was known as the Bayh-Celler Amendment, which would see the institution of a popular vote (Crezo, 2012). The winner would be required to collect at least 40% of the popular support to become President - for other cases, the proposition included a runoff election between the two most-voted for candidate. The Amendment was endorsed by Nixon and passed by the House of Representatives, but was filibustered in the Senate, failing to get to a vote before the end of Congress.

The most current attempt to subvert the Electoral College is the aforementioned interstate agreement known as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. The proposition in question will not require constitutional amendments and will see the states that sign on give all of their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the majority of votes across the nation. The states that have signed on pledge to enact it into action when the total number of electoral votes among participating states will be enough to constitute the majority. So far, there are 10 states + DC, coming to a total of 165 votes out of a required 270. Among them are large states like Illinois, New York and California - but it is worth noting, that most states that have accepted the proposal would be best characterized as «blue».

Literature review

Our paper fits into the existing research on the various effects of the Electoral College on various aspects of United States' political process. The uniqueness of the Electoral College system in regards to the rest of the world's democratic traditions has long made it a hotly-discussed topic not just among political pundits and the electorate, but within the scientific community. This particular method of vote counting has been approached from many different theoretic standpoints, with researchers utilizing both the more abstract models of game theory and the quantitative methods that rely on an abundance of data.

For the most part, research has been focused on the perceived theoretical downsides of the Electoral College and their supposed scope. For instance, Lizzeri and Persico (2001) highlighted the issue of diminished provision of public goods in a winner-take-all system. They used game theory models to demonstrate how a politician's winning strategy in such a system allows for under-provision of public goods and specifically stated that the problem is most notable in the existing American vote counting system.

Meanwhile, Barnett (2009) dedicated a paper to the potential «worst-case scenarios» of the Electoral College divergences from the popular vote outcome. He found that, on a purely mathematical level, a candidate running against a single opponent in the United States Presidential Elections could win the presidency with 21.6 percent of the popular vote. When accounting for realistic vote distribution and the correlation in neighboring states' voting habits, he put the minimal number at a more reassuring, albeit still rather unusual 45%.

There are a lot of other points of criticism - for instance, Rutchick et al. (2009) state that the Electoral College creates a false sense of polarization within the American electorate that, in turn, leads to inspiring a rise in actual polarization. Creating a binary situation out of a state, red versus blue, leads people to an us vs them mentality, when in reality people cannot be characterized as simply one or the other. A model where there are only two choices certainly makes the situation seem more polarized, with no one allowed to remain in the middle - a fact which simply does not play out according to polling data where a large chunk of the population calls itself «independent» or «moderate,» clearly indicating that they themselves would prefer not to be lumped in with one side or the other.

Meanwhile, there are other noted drawbacks - Cebula and Meads (2007) noted the system's role in depressing voter turnout, while Webster (2007) criticized its role in lowering the electoral influence of ethnic minorities.

However, if all of Electoral College literature were negative on the subject, there would be little in the way of debate. There are many defenders of the system and, while they are mostly focused on disproving the proposed negative effects of the Electoral College, that hasn't stopped them from coming up with strong arguments. To present just one example, Williams (2011) presents a paper on Electoral College reform, in which he brings up the point that a popular vote system in the US would be immensely harmed by the existing different voting laws in different states. Given that America is an exemplary federation, the states do have a lot of autonomy in establishing voting laws and that could potentially eschew the results of a popular vote count.

Most of these factors only tangentially affect campaign resource distribution, but there is one parameter in particular that has a huge influence on our chosen topic - voting power. The concept is widely used in Electoral College debate ever since John Banzhaf's landmark paper entitled «1 Man, 3312 Votes». In it, the author defined the «voting power» of an individual as the probability that his vote will be decisive for the outcome of the election.

According to Banzhaf (1968), voters in large states are granted disproportionate voting power by the Electoral College system - hence the title of the paper. This view has been contested among American political scientists - for instance, Gelman and Katz (2011) criticized Banzhaf's use of the random voting model and instead suggested that it's smaller states who are at an advantage due to the Electoral College. Either way, there is a consensus in the fact that the existing system affects the distribution of voting power, which in turn influences campaign spending and other campaign resources on a state-by-state level.

Finally, there have indeed been studies on the effect of the Electoral College on campaign resources. Big strides in this have been made by David Stromberg of Stockholm University who wrote several papers on campaigning and the Electoral College. Some of the most notable research in the field is presented in Stromberg (2002), subtitled «The Probability of Being Florida». In it, Stromberg creates a model of optimal campaign visits in a two-horse race Presidential Election under the Electoral College. The University of Stockholm professor utilizes data from elections starting at 1948 to comprise a measure that he dubs as Q, which is an approximate likelihood of a given state being both decisive in the election and a swing state.

He finds that a winning rational strategy involves a focus on the states that are likely to be decisive (i.e. the probability of their sole election results being able to affect the outcome of the election due to large enough numbers of designated electors) and are traditionally close. He then compares the model to the real campaign strategies of Presidential candidates and finds a high correlation between his model predictions and the actual data from the 2004 election.

Stromberg's paper is an essential study of the relationship between Electoral College institutions and campaigning and it is one we plan to expand upon. However, it is extremely crucial not to undersell the sheer interest that political scientists have displayed in studying the effects of Electoral College on presidential campaigning. In fact, it probably is fair to say that this particular topic of discussion was brought into the mainstream political science consciousness by Steven Brams and Morton Davis (1974), whose work entitled «The 3/2s rule in presidential campaigning» still appears as a landmark reference in much of the research.

At that point in time, research still appeared more focused on the actual premise of a state's worth being determined by its value in electoral votes without regarding for the closeness of a state election. Brams and Davis were very much in line with that with their study suggesting that the key to presidential campaigning strategies lied in resources being dished out in direct proportion to the electoral vote. In fact, as the name gives away, they went further than suggesting simple proportion and argued that a rational candidate in an ideal model (that is, where the states are all equally competitive) needed to distribute his resources by applying an exponential factor of 1.5 to the given electoral votes in a state. Applying that to the modern system, one would see California, as such, get 50 times more campaign resources than a given 4-vote state - for instance, New Hampshire - despite it being only 30 times less populated than California.

The «3/2 rule» research wound up spawning more than one influential paper as, just a year after, it was challenged by Colantoni et al. (1975). The authors, looking to expand on the existing studies of Electoral College influence, posited that the Brams and Davis approach is wrong in trying to fit a singular model to resource distribution strategies across every states. Placing extra importance on both state-by-state variance and the dynamic nature of campaigning, the paper criticizes the 3/2 rule, albeit the disproportional attention towards large states is found to be the true.

One of the first strides in addressing attention to the factor of election closeness has been made in Shaw (1999). In it, the author tasks himself with explaining the actual allocation of state value in campaign strategies. First and foremost, he collects data on which states were assigned into which category by the respective campaign managers of the candidates in three election cycles - 1988, 1992 and 1996. The states, according to Shaw, were grouped up into five estimated types - Base Republican/Democrat, Moderate Republican/Democrat and Battleground. The author then also goes on to show that the classification of states in campaign strategies is highly correlated with both candidate visits and advertising spending.

While an important work in the overall field of Electoral College campaigning studies, it is worth noting that Shaw's paper was criticized immensely in Reeves et al. (2004), who stated that his claims were not substantiated by the presented data.

The hypothesis of battleground states receiving more campaign attention was also supported in Hill and McKee (2005). The paper presents a two-step analysis of the 2000 election campaigns. The first part of the paper finds substantial proof for Shaw's findings on competitiveness of a given state being positively correlated with both media spending and candidate visits. In the second part, the authors state that the increased candidate attention leads to a substantially higher level of voter turnout in those battleground states.

But is the scope of campaigning even something that influences voters' lives in any way? Research has also been made in that area and, as claimed by Benoit, Hansen and Holbert (2004), the Electoral College rules have a very significant indirect effect on the voters' political knowledge and awareness through their influence on campaigning.

Using data from the 2000 presidential election which, according to the authors, showed a case of extreme focus on battleground states, the authors found that swing state voters were, indeed, more knowledgeable on the issues at hand in the election. It was also found that voters residing in the so-called superbatteground states had higher levels of issue salience, i.e. the issues important to them were reflected in targeted campaigning.

The issue gained what was possibly record traction in 2012, as much of the media began reporting on the focus of campaigns on swing states. USA Today reported the exposure of swing state citizens to ads, Time heavily critical of incumbent candidate Obama for his extreme attention of battlegrounds, while Business Insider oversaw the campaign effects on Romney's VP selection - stating that he picked Paul Ryan because of his clout with Wisconsin.

At the same time, there were local newspapers drawing attention to their states being neglected - editorials of this kind were released in The Oregonan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), San Angelo Standard Times (Texas) and, even, surprisingly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Pennsylvania.

Simultaneously, a dissertation by Hendriks (2009) has displayed the existence of a certain «battleground effect» which shapes political behavior in both contested and non-contested states. Among the effects which were advocated and elaborated in the paper was the fact that it was not only regular citizens were influenced in their political perceptions and behavior by campaigning, but so were US Congressmen. The author found that senators were more likely to support presidential policies if their state received more visits.

The assigned value of each state is then included into the model as the dependent variable with TV ad cost, competitiveness and electoral votes acting as predictors. After running the calculation, Shaw finds that the interaction terms TV ad cost and competitiveness, as well as electoral votes and competitiveness, act as the best predictor for a state's classification in the respective strategies.

The research doesn't simply stop at election year campaigning only, as evidenced by Doherty (2005). In that paper, the author attempts to balance the notion of the permanent campaign (the phenomena which sees a public official remain in campaign mode throughout his tenure due to the possibility of re-election or, in case of definite final term, obligations for future of own party) and the effect of the ever-unique Electoral College.

Doherty takes data from 1977 to 2004, encompassing five US presidencies, to see if there's truth to the permanent campaigning stereotype for presidents and whether or not that campaigning is affected by the specific traits of Electoral College. He implements a wide variety of models where the number of presidential visits serves as the dependent variable, as he accounts for first - or second - term, the specific year of the given president's tenure, the differences between the standalone analyzed presidencies and so on.

The paper starts with a very peculiar note on how Bill Clinton made his maiden visit to Nebraska as president a whopping eight years into his term, but the actual findings are a little more reserved - while the notion of permanent campaigning is, for the most part, confirmed, with certain disproportionality noted in presidential visit patterns. That disproportionality, however, is not entirely consistent across different presidencies - while the likes of Carter and Reagan tended to favor states which they were popular in, the latter presidents focused on the states perceived as more competitive.

Findings of this nature were also reported in Kriner and Reeves (2012), although there the authors went one step further. Analyzing the election cycles from 1988 and 2008, they've found evidence of federal spending in states influencing the voters' decision. Importantly for the goals of our paper, this effect is found to be most prevalent in battleground states. As such, federal spending on states could very well be seen as yet another part of the permanent campaign.

2. Data and methods of research

Operationalization and data collection

As previously stated, one of the main hypotheses of this paper is that presidential candidates in the United States are basing state-by-state resource allocation on the perceived closeness of the election in the states in question. In other words, every state is viewed as an entirely separate battleground and the outcome for all of them, barring Nebraska or Maine, is either all or nothing. Campaign resources are, naturally, not limitless and the execution of their distribution could very well be decisive in a given election - and, as such, under our assumption, a lack of election closeness in a given state seriously limits any sort of incentive either candidate would have to campaign in it. Not all resources are monetary. Time spent in the state, issues promised to be addressed, support for local infrastructure, all these are factors in limited supply and used by candidates to secure votes. Just like with any business, the candidates need to use their resources wisely to reap the rewards. If a state is already in a candidate's pocket, so to speak, then spending time and money there would only deplete campaign funds needlessly. It is much more logical to spend what little resources a candidate has earning new votes. As much as a candidate might appreciate a large, loyal state holding a big number of electoral votes, they simply aren't worth spending money on if they have already promised up their votes. Even a state with only four electoral votes that is a battleground state theoretically has more value to a democratic candidate than a loyally blue state with thirty votes.

But how does one go about measuring election closeness? Well, first and foremost, any sort of perception on whether a state is in play is based on a preliminary prediction of the eventual election results in said state. And, as far as modern elections and any sort of electoral studies are concerned, one of the best ways to figure that out lies in polling.

For the purposes of this study, we were interested in polls that asked respondents the essential question of which of the two main candidates they'd be voting for. Obviously, the election featured third-party candidates - most notably, Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson and Green Party's Jill Stein. However, data on three-way or four-way questions about the presidency was not used, as it tended to produce percentages far greater than those actually picked up by either of the third-party candidates in any state.

The polling data in question was collected with the ultimate purpose of being used for crafting the independent variable - a value of election closeness - and, as such, we made sure that there was no reverse affect - that the polls were not affected by either the successes of the failures candidate campaigning. As such, the chosen range of polls was artificially set for April to June of 2012.

The range was not picked at random. In fact, according to most sources, April and May represented the beginning of actual head-to-head campaigning between Democratic incumbent Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney. Up to that point, the latter candidate has already been on the campaign trail for quite a while - but, on a bit of a different stage with different opponents in the process known as the Republican Party presidential primary. As such, the former candidate - Obama - had little reason to do much campaigning of his own - he was unopposed in his own primaries by virtue of being a popular incumbent and had no known opponent to campaign against.

While we could've talked about an earlier start to head-to-head campaigning in other elections, the Republican primary remained a pretty close affair throughout, with preliminary polling in late 2011 placing Romney in second or third to various candidates. Come actual primaries, which are lengthy state-by-state «elections» between potential candidates, many of his opponents hit trouble with various scandals, allowing the former Massachusetts governor to assume the front running position. His nomination became a certainty only by early April, when main opponent Rick Santorum formally suspended his campaign (Cohen, 2012). His other viable opponent - Newt Gingrich - had his campaign firmly in debt by that point (Siegel, 2012) and announced his forfeiture in early May. Finally, Libertarian Ron Paul would continue campaigning until June, but with Romney announced as the party's presumptive nominee back in April, that was but a formality.

With us selecting April and May as our main points of reference, the central assumption is that that date range represented the phase of campaign planning for both of the main candidates and that they were developing their strategies in accordance to polling data that was collected and released at the time.

That assumption can, of course, be challenged by the fact that electoral campaigning is a dynamic process and that candidates adjust their campaigns accordingly to any shocks that affect voter preferences throughout the campaign. While that is indeed so, it is an assumption we're willing to make as, for once, a dynamic analysis would make it almost impossible to separate cause and effect in regards to campaign spending and, in addition, the early polls act as solid predictors of the election outcome, at least in terms of actual closeness of said elections. The actual discrepancies between prediction and outcome will be discussed later on in the paper on a case-by-case basis.

Using polling data has presented us with another, slightly unexpected challenge that, in a certain way, underlines and reaffirms the central hypothesis of the paper. While early polling data for the likes of Florida or Ohio is really easy to come by - those happen to be the states everyone talks about prior to the election, considered to be the main battlegrounds deciding the election, the polling data for the likes of Alaska, Kansas or Hawaii ranges a little scarce to completely nonexistent. For instance, polling aggregator electoral-vote.com lists no polls for a number of states, despite having as comprehensive a collection of polling data as one is likely to find anywhere in regards to the 2012 presidential election.

It is also worth noting that most states are covered by vastly different groups of polling companies and organizations - while there are some agencies that have polling data for most states (Rasmussen, Public Policy Polling, Survey USA and so on), much of the date is very much local - collected by universities or regional organizations.

Since polls are costly to run, and no or very little poll data seems to be available for some states, it feels logical to assume no one was interested in spending the time and money to poll for those states. It is worth pointing out that the states with the least polling data fall solidly within either the Republican or Democrat camp and have little to offer in the way of electoral votes. It's highly likely that this lack of polling is just further evidence of the disparity of resource spending between swing states and those not in play.

That aside, the inability to limit used polling data to one source is not particularly negative for this topic, as picking a big-time pollster organization would mean subjecting the research to the influence of those pollster's biases. For instance, as reported by FiveThirtyEight, many of the big-name polling companies ended up significantly underperforming in regards to correctly predicting election outcomes with their fall polls (Silver, 2012). Rasmussen, which has a reputation for being biased towards the Republican party, indeed registered a significant deviation of their predictions from the actual results during the election. While the same wasn't true for Public Policy Polling, the other real heavyweight in state-by-state polling, they conversely have a reputation for being a bit Democratic-leaning. Some question how it is possible to sway polling data to favor one party over another when the questions are so similar. As an example, a well-known aspect of Rasmussen polling is that they do not call cell phones when performing their calls, a fact which is stated quite clearly on their website's FAQ. Excluding cell phone users has been cited by many analysts as a key reason their data is so skewed toward one party. Public Policy Polling may have similar issues with their polling mechanisms.

For their polling analysis, FiveThirtyEight used an aggregate measure composed of different poll results from various companies. In more specific terms, they utilized a weighted average, assigning weights to various poll results based on previous success of the company's predictions.