Some Opinions About Candidate Traits

Some Opinions About Candidate Traits

Brian J. Gaines

In the spring of 2008, the Illinois Opinion Monitor asked Illinois (adult) residents whether certain traits of John McCain and Barack Obama would help or hurt these candidates to win votes in the upcoming presidential election. We chose qualities that have already been discussed often in the media and that seem likely to arise in the campaign. For both candidates, we asked about age (McCain being comparatively old, and Obama comparatively young, as against past presidents) and experience (McCain’s 25 years in the Congress, Obama’s decade in state and national politics). We also asked about two very salient features, Obama’s race and McCain’s time as a POW. Finally, we asked about McCain’s recent history of working with Democrats, a quality that might endear him to Democrats and independents, but also might annoy or alienate his own party’s conservative base. Likewise, we asked about Obama’s liberal voting record, which should please his party’s liberal base, but could be a barrier to reaching swing voters.

For each quality, we asked respondents not only about their own reactions, but also about how they think others will react. We wanted to see, for instance, if those who say they’re more likely to vote for Obama because he would be the first black president think most other voterss are similar or, instead, that most others will react differently to race.

Because our respondents are all Illinois residents, we do not assume that the results below are necessarily a good guide to national sentiment. We expect that Obama will enjoy a home-state advantage in the presidential election, as most major-party candidates do. Whether an overall friends-and-neighbors effect should show up strongly in these items is not obvious, and without national polling data with which to compare, we can only speculate about possible bias.

Each table below shows where our respondents who answered both questions placed themselves. Cell entries total 100 percent (except for rounding). The totals in the right-hand column show how respondents said the given trait will affect others; totals in the bottom row show the respondents’ answers about the traits’ effects on themselves. Numbers of respondents vary between 965 and 975 (due to a small number of the 1,000 poll respondents choosing not to answer at least one of these items).

Results
Age decisively favors Obama, and his potential to be the first black president helps him, on balance. But McCain’s history as a POW helps him even more and he has the clear edge when it comes to job experience. Finally, the contrast in their legislative styles also seems to be a potentially potent weapon for McCain. Many respondents say that his history of working with Democrats helps him to win votes; meanwhile, only among Democrats does Obama’s rather liberal voting record strike a positive chord.

1. Age
Obama has a very clear edge in the battle of youth versus experience. Very few of our respondents reported that John McCain’s age would be a plus for them or that they thought others would react favorably to his age. Indeed, the most common reply was that his advanced age would hurt his odds of winning both the respondent’s vote and the votes of others. For Obama, the modal reply was that his young age would have no effect, but nearly a quarter of respondents said both that his youth would help with them and that they thought that it would help him win the votes of others as well.

Surprisingly, the patterns above are quite robust across age groups. About half of our respondents were 53 or older, but their reaction to McCain’s age is virtually identical to the reactions of those under 53. Even the differences across partisan groups are muted. Particularly in their assessment of how McCain and Obama’s ages will affect others, Republicans, independents, and Democrats hold very similar views.

2. POW and Race
John McCain’s compelling personal history can be an asset as he campaigns. Perhaps unsurprisingly, almost no one reports that they see his having been a POW as a liability, either for them personally or for others. Nearly three-quarters of voters say they think McCain’s history as POW will help him win the voters others.

Obama’s race will no doubt continue to be widely discussed. Already, he has made history by winning a major party nomination. Although he is of mixed parentage (in racial terms), the dominant view is that he would be “the first black president.” Our respondents mainly said that his race had no effect on them, and was more likely to help than hurt with others. There’s always some danger in taking survey responses at face value. Might respondents feel compelled to say that they’d never hold race against a candidate? Yes, but our design allowed respondents to give a socially desirable personal answer while also predicting how others would react, and even in their third-person responses, our respondents were, collectively, of the view that race would be a net plus for Obama.

3. Experience
Ironically, while age appears to be a disadvantage for John McCain, its close correlate, experience, seems to help him. McCain has served in the U.S. Congress for more than a quarter of a century, and our respondents mainly viewed this record as advantageous: a majority said that his experience would help him to win their votes. They also told us that others will view his experience even more positively. Obama, by contrast, has not yet completed a full term in the U.S. Senate. We informed respondents that he also served in the Illinois Senate for eight years, but it seems clear that his professional resume is regarded as less of an asset than is that of his opponent. The split was roughly one-third in each category of “helps,” “no effect,” and “hurts,” both in the first-person and the third-person. Most respondents picked the same response for themselves and for others, an approximate three-way tie between helps-helps, hurts-hurts, and no-effect-no-effect.

4. The Pros and Cons of the Center
Our final query was meant to tap a quality that might cut both ways for each candidate. John McCain had to overcome suspicions of conservative Republicans to secure his party’s nomination, in part because he has been known for at least the last eight years as a consummate bipartisan. Barack Obama may strive to portray himself as a centrist in the general election campaign, but his roll-call record is unambiguously liberal.

Our respondents regard McCain’s having worked closely with Democrats as a clear asset: exactly half said it would help him win their votes and 57 percent thought it would help him with others. The ratio of those saying that trait would help with themselves and others to those saying it would hurt with themselves and others was a whopping 34-to-6.

As expected, it was Republicans who were least likely to report being personally impressed by McCain’s bipartisanship: only 40 percent of them said it would help him secure their votes, as against clear majorities for Democrats and independents.

For Barack Obama, a liberal voting record may prove to be a liability. There is, of course, some fuzziness in the claim that his record is liberal. The nonpartisan National Journal rated him the most liberal senator based on roll call votes cast in 2007. We did not cite that study, out of concern that respondents might confuse National Journal with the conservative opinion magazine National Review. Instead, we simply counted how many times Obama voted for or against the position espoused by the avowedly liberal group Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). ADA scores remain one of the most commonly used variables in political scientists’ analyses of roll call behavior.

On the whole, more respondents were put off than turned on by this fact. Likewise, respondents expected that others would not be impressed. How about distinctions across parties? For Democrats, the help-hurt ratio was 46-to-13. Ominously for Obama, only 20 percent of independents said this record would help with them, while 45 percent said it would hurt. Not surprisingly, Republicans were the most hostile: 7-to-66 was their personal help-to-hurt ratio.