Hi, I'm David Redlawsk, I am professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. I'm also a visiting professor at the University of Iowa for the last six months following the Iowa caucuses around. A few years back, I wrote a book with a couple of colleagues called Why Iowa, which takes a look at the role the Iowa caucuses play and how they're important in the American nomination process. So when we're talking about voting behavior as political science researchers, we're really talking about trying to understand what it is that drives people to make the choices that they make in an election. It's absolutely the case in American elections at least that voters do vote differently in primaries than they do in general elections, and there are a couple of basic reasons for this. The most important is simply that in the general election, certainly in presidential and congressional elections, we have partisanship as a queue as a way to think about politics. So that when we get to November, for example, this year, most people who think of themselves as Republicans are going to vote for Republicans for office, most people think of themselves as Democrats are going to vote for Democrats. In 60 years of voting research, we have found that partisanship is still the number one explainer for what people do in the general election. But in the primary, you can't do that, you're voting for candidates all in the same party and you have to make decisions about which candidate you want to represent your party. So primaries are much harder for voters, they require more information and they require voters to make choices between candidates who often seem pretty similar. So to do so, voters have to dig deeper, they have to learn a little bit more about the issues, about the personalities, about who the candidates are because you can't just fall back on, oh, that's the Republican or oh that's the Democrat. So in addition to the work I've done on the Iowa caucuses, I do research on emotions in politics and how it influences voter behavior, and I'm particularly have been interested in how emotions like anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm influence what voters do. There's a long line of research in this area that we've been building on. Essentially what the research tells us generally is it as enthusiasm, enthusiasm for a candidate and enthusiasm for a party, that gets people to actually go do something. Whether it's volunteer or whether it's to talk to friends and neighbors, whether it's to actually go out and vote, positive emotions like enthusiasm seem to matter a lot. If we think back to the 2008 election, President Obama ran very explicitly on the positive emotion of hope. It was all over his literature, it was all over what he did. Part of that was to get people out to vote, to do something. But the negative emotions play a really important role here too. For most people most of the time, politics is third or fourth or maybe a 100th on the list of things to worry about. For most people, you're worrying about making a living, will the car start, are the kids okay? So ultimately, it's the negative emotions that actually force us to pay some attention. Scholars who looked especially at the motion of anxiety as something that makes us stop and listen. We become anxious because of something that has happened in the political world or in our own world, and we look for ways to understand it, we try to learn. The other negative emotion that's been looked at extensively is anger, and anger is a little bit different. Where anxiety is general in nature, anger is often at a specific target. We want to do something about it, we want to fix the anger. Again, that can get people to actually pay some attention to politics to look for ways to solve the problems, but it doesn't necessarily get them to go out and actually vote and actually do anything about it, that's where the positive side comes into play. Well, I'd like to think of it a little bit differently, I don't know that we have a choice in whether or not to allow emotions to drive our decision-making. We are, as human beings, both rational and emotional, and the simple reality is that we can't make decisions without emotions. So ultimately, when we think about politics, it is about emotion, we feel about politics. I've written an edited book actually called Feeling Politics. While we want it to be rational, we want people to think about issues, we want them to pay attention to the details. In the end, without understanding what your gut is telling you, what your head is telling you may not get you where you need to be. So we have a sequential primary system for president in the United States. Not everybody gets to vote at the same time and for very interesting but detailed historical reasons, Iowa goes first with the Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire goes next with the first primary, and then we follow it with Nevada and South Carolina, after that a whole bunch of states start voting. What happens because of this sequential system is the voters in Iowa, the voters in New Hampshire, and a little bit less than the other two states, get a lot of attention. The candidates come to Iowa, they come into New Hampshire, they spend literally dozens and dozens of days in hundreds of events on the ground in those states. So voters in those states know a lot about the candidates if they pay attention, and they really have this opportunity to see the whole range of possibilities. As we go further into the process though, candidates start dropping out as we're talking about this today. Cory Booker just announced that he was dropping out of the democratic primary for 2020, and many others have already quit. What this means is that later states aren't going to get to consider those candidates, while Iowa, New Hampshire did. What will come next is when Iowa votes and New Hampshire votes, additional candidates are likely to drop out after they don't do well in one of those states. So once again, the early states got a chance to see them and pass judgment, but the later states don't. At one level, it means the decision is easier for people in later states because there are fewer candidates to have to try to make sense of Iowa, New Hampshire have helped to winnow the field. On the other hand, it means that they don't get the same level of choice and there's a lot of question about whether that's a good idea or not. In American politics in general elections, the one thing that is a given and really never seems to change is the role that partisanship plays. For all the discussion we have every time about whether Republicans would vote, for example, in 2016 for someone like Donald Trump or Democrats would like Hillary Clinton, the reality is that roughly 90 percent of Democrats voted for Clinton, roughly 90 percent of Republicans voted for Trump. That idea that Republicans regularly vote for the GOP candidate, Democrats for their candidate, has driven voting behavior research for a very long time and it really is a truism. Even though people are less likely to call themselves partisans, they are less likely over the last two decades to feel comfortable saying I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican. In the end, their voting behavior still suggests that even many people who call themselves independence regularly vote for one party or the other. So in terms of something that just doesn't change much, at least so far partisanship has been the big dog in this
