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Candidates are fairly good at delivering a central message and staying on target.
Sixteen of the 26 candidates who ran for president from 1952-2000 stressed the same
issues in their advertisements and their speeches. In most cases, competing candidates
focused on different issues. In only two elections, 1968 and 2000, do competing
candidates talk about similar topics. In 1968, both Nixon and Humphrey talked about
domestic politics (albeit somewhat different ideas about domestic policies). In 2000,
both Bush and Gore talked mainly about education and healthcare. For the remainder of
campaign years, candidates campaign on different topics – waging their efforts almost as
if the other candidate was not in the race. All of this may be for naught, though, since
media coverage of campaigns only loosely resembles actual campaign discourse.
These findings beg the question of whether the news media ought to be reporting
on what they think is important in the given political climate or on what the candidates
actually say. A mirror model of newsmaking would suggest the latter. Seeing the media
as responsible for putting objective events in context would be consistent with the former.
Still another possibility is that the media frame their campaign stories based on what the
public think is the most important issue at the time, regardless of whether the candidates
talk about it. Data from Gallup on the nation’s most important problem sheds some light
on the last possibility. In the early part of the last half century, indeed, Americans
thought foreign policy was the nation’s most important problem. I was sure to use
surveys prior to the start of the election campaign so that causality could be somewhat
isolated.
(Table 5 here)
Convention