Title: The General Election: So You’ve Got the Nomination, Now What?
Abstract: The general election phase of the campaign for president has many similarities to, and differences from, the nomination phase. While the emphasis is still quite heavily on states, the particular states and their characteristics change dramatically. In the nomination phase, candidates focused on exceeding expectations and adding delegates, even if they didn’t win a particular contest. In the general election, nearly all the contests are winner-take-all and all of them are at the same time—momentum is of a different kind. During the effort to gain the party nomination, candidates had to make their cases to party activists—the voters most likely to turn out to vote in primaries and caucuses and thus are more ideological. In the general election, the appeal must be to independent and middle-of-the-road voters who will decide the election, while at the same time keeping one’s base1 sufficiently motivated to work and vote. Lastly, time is even more of the essence. Where during the primaries and caucuses the campaign was at work for months and may still have had months to go before the party contest was settled, in the general election time is measured in weeks and days.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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