- The Fall Campaign
« Candidate Travels—Rationale,
Methodology and Limitations
Candidate Travels—Rationale, Methodology and Limitations
These calendars attempt to give a sense of how the major party candidates spent their time in the months leading up to Election Day, November 6, 2012, showing where they travelled and what they did. The general election campaign can be said to have started on April 10, 2012 when former Sen. Rick Santorum suspended his campaign, making former Gov. Mitt Romney the presumptive nominee. (More broadly, for the incumbent, President Barack Obama, travels throughout the course of the administration are made to an extent with an eye on 2012).1
The calendars are based on publicly available information. The starting point is information provided by the campaigns and the White House--the daily schedules they e-mailed out to general press. (Campaigns do provide more detailed schedules to the travelling press but these were not available). The thoroughness of these schedules varies. Thus far the Romney campaign has not been providing a lot of detail; there have been many days with just one event on the public schedule and other days with no information at all, and fundraisers are not on their general schedules.
Information from schedules is then verified and supplemented by a close reading of news accounts found using Lexis-Nexis and the Internet. Through news accounts one can confirm that the events on the schedule actually occurred and pick up many of the off the record (OTR) or unannounced stops.
Using these resources it is possible to create a generally complete picture of travels by the presidential and vice presidential candidates.
Visits by the principals are but one measure
how
much effort a campaign put into a particular state. Other
indicators
of activity include how much the campaign spent on advertising, how
much
resources went into field organization, and how many appearances
surrogates,
ranging from relatives to prominent officials to celebrities,
made.
Personal visits can be analyzed using a
point
system wherein a visit by
the presidential candidate is assigned the highest value, a visit by
the
vice presidential candidate the next highest value, and spouses' visits
and visits by various
surrogates progressively fewer points.2
This type of analysis is not attempted here.
In attempting to quantify activity by the principals in a state, one can consider the number of visits, number of days, or number of events.
A visit is fairly straightforward. If a candidate enters a state, does an event or events and then leaves the state, that is a visit. However, a tricky situation arises where two cities are nearby but on opposite sides of a state border. For example if a candidate does an event in Council Bluffs, Iowa, crosses the Missouri River to do another event in Omaha, Nebraska and then returns to Iowa or does some New Hamphire events with a stop in Maine or Vermont thrown in in the middle, an argument could be made that there were two trips to Iowa or New Hampshire. In this study, if a candidate does an event or events in a state, drives over the border and goes out of the state for a nearby event or events, and then comes back in state the same day such a trip is considered as one visit.
A day means a day on which the candidate did some sort of publicly reported activity in the state. For example if a candidate arrives late at night and goes straight to the hotel and then does an event the next morning, that is counted as one day; similarly, if a candidate does some events, overnights, and leaves the next morning without any further events that is also counted as one day. The problem with using visits or days as a measure of activity is that these give the same weight to a fly-in, fly-out airport tarmac rally as to a full-day bus tour with many stops along the way.
Events is finer measure, but there
are
ambiguities
which must be clarified. There are
many types of events: scheduled rallies where the candidate speaks
to hundreds or thousands of people, roundtable discussions limited to
invited guests, fundraisers, and unannounced or impromptu stops where
the candidate meets a few dozen people.
One could make a distinction between
scheduled
events and unscheduled events. A
problem here is that different campaigns or even the same campaign may
not be consistent in terms of what they consider an event.
Sometimes schedules note fundraisers and other times not. Airport
arrivals are sometimes on the schedule and
other times not. A reliance on
schedules leaves out unannounced or unscheduled stops or OTRs (off the
record stops). Unannounced stops at
diners or town squares can be
among
the more interesting activities a candidate does because they are less
scripted. They are often quite brief, just five
minutes or fifteen or twenty minutes. An encounter with a
candidate
in a diner or restaurant can have a multiplier effect beyond just the
individuals there; they may tell their friends about it, and news
photographs may spread images to a wider audience. Careful
research
can find many of these OTRs.
If a candidate goes jogging or takes a
bike ride around town that will usually be unpublicized, but the
candidate
will be seen and there may be reports or photos of the activity.
For example in 2008 there were occasional mentions and reports of Sen.
Obama
going to a gym to work out
or play basketball; but there were other times when he engaged in such
activities and they were not reported. (There are instances where
one
would want to include such activities, as for example when Paul Tsongas
did a photo op at the Concord YMCA during the 1992 New Hampshire
primary campaign).
Church services can be a murky area.
Sometimes the schedule shows
that a candidate will attend and/or speak at a church service; that is
clearly an event. Other times attendance is a private matter and
not publicized, but there still may be photographers on hand to shoot
the arrival or departure.
Private meetings are another difficult
area.
Sometimes a schedule will note private meetings; more often they do
not.
Some private meetings are reported on, others are not. Some
necessitate
that the candidate make a separate trip, and others are quickies tacked
on before or after an event. Without a full schedule, rigorous
analysis is not possible.
In terms of keeping
score, elected officials do official events and
campaign events. In the case of
President Obama's trips calculations are done to determine how
travel
on Air Force One or Marine One is charged to the taxpayers.
In
April
2012
the
RNC
charged
there was a blurring of the lines of official and campaign
travel at taxpayers' expense, to no
effect. (+) An analysis
could be done considering only campaign events, and excluding official
events, but in the campaign season everything can
be seen as political.
The vice presidential nominees had busy
schedules and those are tracked here. Audiences like
to
see a candidate's wife as well as the candidate. These calendars do
not
consistently note husband and wife appearances because the presence
of the spouse is not always noted in schedules/reports. Solo events and appearances
by Michelle Obama and Ann Romney (as well as Jill Biden) are tracked.
A word
should
be said about joint visits. Having
the whole team present—the presidential and vice presidential
candidates and their wives—may have a greater impact than if just
the candidate appears; if one were doing a quantitative analysis one
might want to take that into account. At the same time, doing too
many
joint
appearances cuts down on the campaign's ability to spread its
message.
Finally, the calendars document the travels
of the Libertarian and Green party candidates from the point at which
they became their parties' nominees. Relatively good information
was available on Johnson-Gray and Stein-Honkala events, but the
low-budget Constitution party campaign was largely below the
radar.
To conclude, these calendars provide as
complete
a picture as possible of travel by the principals based on publicly
available
information. They are not definitive—some
unpublicized
fundraisers
and
unannounced
stops
are
no
doubt
missing—but
include all major public events, and as many
unannounced
events as it was possible to document through extensive research.
Notes.
1. See Brendan J. Doherty. Aug. 2012. THE RISE OF THE PRESIDENT'S
PERMANENT CAMPAIGN. Lawrence, KS:
University
Press of Kansas.
"In this eye-opening book, Brendan
Doherty provides empirical evidence
of the growing focus by American presidents on electoral concerns
throughout their terms in office, clearly demonstrating that we can no
longer assume that the time a president spends campaigning for
reelection can be separated from the time he spends governing."
2. Molly Willow proposed an amusing scoring system for visits in "The Flip Side" feature titled "Stump 'N' Go" that ran in the Columbus Dispatch on Sept. 2, 2004. A Bush or Kerry visit counted as 10 points, a Cheney or Edwards visit as 8 points, a solo visit by Laura Bush as 4 points, but a solo visit by Elizabeth Edwards or Teresa Heinz Kerry as only 2 points. Ms. Willow scored a panolopy of surrogates. Appearances by musicians or bands with hits in this decade were valued at 3 points (more than the Democratic candidates' wives), but if the musician or band had an older hit the visit was valued at -3 points. Interestingly Ms. Willow also proposed a distance effect, introducing a multiplier for events in Columbus proper or in central Ohio.