transitory.
Gore’s campaign influence
Table 1 shows the models of Gore’s evaluation as a function of each issue priority. Beginning
with the first column, the priority individuals gave education as an issue was clearly related
to evaluations of Gore; the coefficient is positive and statistically significant implying that
the more highly citizens rated the priority of education, the more favorably they felt toward
Gore. The interaction between issue priority and issue emphasis, however, fails to achieve
any conventional level of statistical significance. The positive and (at least modestly) sig-
nificant interaction between an individual’s priority rating of education, Gore’s ad emphasis
on education and individual partisan identification denotes that in places where Gore’s ad-
vertising campaign focused more on education, the more important education became as a
standard for evaluating Gore among Democrats. The negative and significant partisanship-
issue priority interaction, finally, indicates that given no attention to education in Gore’s ad
campaign, Democrats gave less weight to education in their evaluations of Gore than did
Republicans on average.
Table 1 here
The remaining coefficients in this column of the top portion of Table 1 are not statistically
discernibly different from zero. In other words, Gore’s ad campaign was not universally
influential. His attention to education does not noticeably increase the weight given to
education in his evaluations among independents. Nor does his advertising attention to
education have any direct effect on evaluations.
14
14
To be clear, the coefficient for the “direct” effect of ad attention indicates the effect of increasing ad
attention for independents who rate the priority of education as “medium”; in other words, when x
1i
= 0
and x
2i
= 0.
17
Convention