of the remarks of presidential candidates focused on “goals, problems, and past performance”
(p. 156). Issue priority messages by the candidate may be explicit – via assertions that, for
instance, “Education will be my number one priority” – or implied through attention to an
issue. The allocation of scarce resources like time and money toward discussing education
suggests a certain importance attached to it by a candidate. From the candidates’ point
of view, priority messages have the advantage of being relatively uncontroversial, at least
compared to more politically charged issue position statements. As a result, candidates tend
to present their priorities more clearly than their positions.
4
Candidate priorities represent useful information for citizens. If citizens pay attention
in order to better predict the consequences of the election (Lupia and McCubbins 1998),
issue priorities represent a reasonable prediction of what a candidate is likely to focus on
if and when they ascend to office. Further, as work on issue ownership suggests, citizens
frequently care more that a problem is solved than with how, or with what policy, it is
addressed (Petrocik 1996). Issue priority messages have the additional benefit for citizens of
being easier to understand than more complex policy proposals, which can involve technical
details that make the eyes of even the most wonkish glaze over. Because they are easier
messages, they are easier to process.
An individual need not understand a candidate’s
detailed proposal for improving the quality of education, only that the candidate believes it
is declining and represents a problem that requires fixing with the help of the relevant level of
government. And because of their relative lack of ambiguity, citizens’ evaluations of priority
messages are also relatively straightforward. Thus, the implications for candidate evaluation
should be clearer, which mean if connections between a candidate and the issue priority
develops, citizens should become better at adjusting their evaluations of the candidate in an
appropriate direction.
Work on candidate strategy suggests that opposing candidates need not focus on the
4
Indeed, an emphasis on priorities may be key to the art of ambiguity (see Page 1978).
7
Convention