Do Campaign Stops Actually Matter?
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Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. After Tuesday's primaries, President Biden and former President Trump have mathematically clinched their party's nominations. And now it's off to the races. In the week since his State of the Union address, Biden is making campaign stops in Pennsylvania, Georgia, New Hampshire, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump was also in Georgia over the weekend, and he'll be in Dayton, Ohio this weekend.

These kinds of campaign stops are a cornerstone of presidential campaigns, and we can expect a lot more of them between now and November. There's only one problem. According to our guest today, they don't actually work, at least not all that well and not in the ways that you'd expect.

Christopher Devine is a political science professor at the University of Dayton, and he recently published a new book called I'm Here to Ask for Your Vote, How Presidential Campaign Visits Influence Voters. He's also previously written about whether vice presidential picks matter all that much. And he's here with us now to do some of the conventional wisdom busting that we love here at FiveThirtyEight. So, Chris, welcome to the podcast. Galen, great to be on here. Thank you for having me.

So you have dug deep to try to find a quantitative answer to whether campaign visits matter, tracking every stop during a presidential election from 2008 to 2020. What did you find?

So the short answer is that they don't usually work. Of course, that's the most direct answer. There are all kinds of qualifiers, caveats to that. For one thing, I will say I find some examples in that 2008-2020 timeframe where the campaign visits did seem to make a difference. 2008 in particular, not just Barack Obama, but actually John McCain as well. Their visits as they went, you know, not just to certain battleground states, but even counties within those states,

I find that they increased with each visit, their margin in that county, their vote share by about half a point for McCain, about three quarters of a point for Obama. That's very much the exception, not the rule. By the way, I test this for vice presidential candidates too. So Sarah Palin, for example, didn't have that effect. Hillary Clinton, who supposedly lost in 2016 because she didn't visit Wisconsin, her visits in general didn't

make a difference. So that's the usual pattern that I find. The mobilization versus persuasion piece is another that we might want to get into, where I find that they could have effects in certain scenarios. Okay, so yeah. First, what is the...

test for whether or not a campaign stop mattered? Is it just the vote share in the local county? Like, how do you go about testing this hypothesis? Yeah, that's a great question. So, you know, there's kind of some advanced mathematical stuff here, statistical stuff, regression models, all that kind of thing, just to keep things relatively simple. What I did was I tracked where the candidates went, which counties they went to within battleground states, and

how many times they went to those counties. And I account for a lot of other factors like how would that county voted in previous elections. By the way, I also do this at the respondent level using survey data. So I have kind of the county level analysis and the individual analysis more or less get similar results.

for other things like past partisanship, demographics, also how much advertising was going on in that area at that time. So excluding all those other factors, controlling for all those other factors, what I'm looking for is, was there an increase in the vote share for that candidate, their party, the more times that they went to a given county? And to your point, when I estimate if it really made a difference, I track, first of all, was there a change in vote share? But then I also look at changes in turnout.

So my logic here is that it's not just about whether campaign visits increase vote share, but we might also want to know if it were to happen, well, how does it do so? Is it through mobilization, which is really the most common strategy for campaign visits? That's one thing I document in the book as well, that usually when candidates are picking where to go, they have so many choices, which state to go to, where in that state to go to. They tend to go to places that are basically friendly territory.

They're not trying as much to persuade people in the middle or even over on the other side. The ironic thing is that they actually should be focusing more on that. What I find is that in those relatively rare instances where a candidate's campaign visits drive up their vote share, you usually in the same county or among the same individuals, you don't see an increase in turnout.

So, in other words, they're not driving up their vote share by bringing more people in, you know, bringing some people off the sidelines through these visits. We might think of a Trump rally firing up the base, which usually seems to be the objective. Democratic candidates, I find, tend to go to friendly territory as well. When there's an increase in vote share associated with campaign visits, there's usually no change in turnout. And what that suggests to me is that they gained votes

not by expanding the electorate, but by converting people who are already basically within the electorate.

OK, so it sounds like across these four elections, 2008, 2012, 2016 and 2020, there was a pretty muted effect. But you do point to McCain and Obama in 2008. What was unique about them? Were they, as you suggested, going to places where it was more about persuasion than mobilization? Or are they just uniquely good campaigners? Or was it something about the 2008 environment where people were less polarized?

That's a good question. You know, I don't have all the evidence to quite sort that out. I will say this. When you look at the patterns of where they went, and again, I'm not talking about just going to battleground states. They all go to battleground states. But where do they go within the battleground states? Do they go to a really competitive area or do they go to kind of a base county for their side or for the other side? And what I found, for instance, is that in 2008, Barack Obama tended to go to more Democratic areas. So basically it was mobilizing, it seemed, through the places he was visiting.

John McCain, on the other hand, was focusing more on persuasion. He actually went to counties that, on average, were a little more Democratic, less Republican. That's where he tended to go. And at the same time, Sarah Palin was actually going to particularly Republican counties. It seems like they had kind of a divide and conquer strategy. Of course, they didn't conquer all that well.

But McCain, in that case, was going more to somewhat Democratic areas, at least competitive areas. And Palin was going more to Republican areas, apparently trying to fire up the base. They did campaign together a lot, by the way. About a quarter of their visits were joint visits. But when they separated, that tended to be the pattern. I don't find any evidence that Palin was successful. Again, generally, I don't find that mobilization works with campaign visits. But I do find that McCain was successful. And again, he was going more towards competitive areas, basically trying to persuade voters.

The American people know my record. They know I'm going to change Washington because I've done it before. They know I'm going to reform our broken institutions in Washington and on Wall Street because I've done it before. I think that strategy paid off for him. I should also point out here one of the interesting findings

when you dig into not just kind of the overall effect and again i'm using county level data but also survey based you know respondent level data one thing i also find is if you divide up those counties or if you divide up people based on partisanship you know i test the effects there as well and what i see is that in the last two elections so 2016 and 2020

And remember, generally campaign visits aren't making a difference. In the last two elections, all four presidential candidates, not the VP candidates, but all four presidential candidates had a significant effect

helping themselves when it came to swing counties. So if we're talking about the county level, so even Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020, when he visited competitive counties, instead of focusing on the base, he actually drove up his vote share in those cases. And so did Hillary Clinton in 2016. So did Joe Biden in 2020. So I don't want to oversell this. Again, the takeaway is that campaign visits don't really matter as much as we think.

But there's also, I think, a hopeful lesson here is that when candidates stop focusing so much on just firing up the base and instead try to reach out to people who are undecided, kind of in the middle, these competitive counties, they actually do make a difference. All four presidential candidates have in the last two elections, even Donald Trump. So when we're saying they don't matter all that much, but in these particular instances, they do matter. I mean, to what degree? Like, what are we talking about? A degree to which it could change the election or...

You know, it's one of those things that comes down to, look, in a close election, anything can matter, right? You know, the weather can matter. The VP pick can matter, as we'll get to. All this kind of stuff. In a really close election, who knows? Could be anything. But if we're trying to map out strategy for an election, should campaigns invest a lot of their hopes and dreams based on campaign visits or, again, as we'll get to the VP pick? You know, these types of things matter at the margins. That's what a lot of political scientists, myself included, conclude.

looking at evidence about elections throughout the years, is that, look, for the most part, these things are about the fundamentals, as we call them. How's the economy doing? What do people think of the incumbent president, especially if that person's running for re-election, but even if they're not? How long have they been in office? Those are the things that really structure the outcome of a presidential election. The rest of it matters, but matters on the margins.

a campaign visit here or there. Hillary Clinton having gone to Wisconsin a time or two, you know, come on, this stuff's not going to make much of a difference. Now, in those states, when they come down to a few thousand votes, sure, they can make a difference. Pennsylvania the last time around, Georgia the last time around, Wisconsin in 2016. But nobody knows in advance which states are going to be that close. They can estimate that. Campaigns have to be smart about how they allocate these visits. But none of us should expect that it's all going to come down to one visit here or there. And I should mention, by the way,

that Hillary Clinton didn't visit Wisconsin narrative. I think there's something to that maybe symbolically about her campaign. For instance, one thing that I show is that she didn't campaign that hard, at least when it came to campaign visits. She was doing a lot of fundraisers and things like that. But being out in public for the first, I think it was 50 days of the campaign, she was out there about half the days on the campaign trail, holding campaign rallies and other events like this. She did visit some states like Pennsylvania. She went to a lot and still lost there.

We hear a lot about her losing Wisconsin as if she would have won the election if she had just gone there. Well, remember, she had to win not only Wisconsin, but also Michigan and Pennsylvania. Michigan, she visited a little bit. Pennsylvania, she visited a lot. So it's really easy to overstate how much these matter. So actually, this gets something that I was thinking while I was reading your book, which is

measuring the effects at the county level only captures maybe part of the effects of a candidate visit. So I used to cover local politics in Wisconsin. And so when a presidential candidate goes to Green Bay, yes,

The local press in Green Bay covers it, but so does the statewide press. And so does, in many cases, the national press. And for the case of Donald Trump's rallies, very frequently the national press in 2016. And so campaign visits don't just serve to attract the attention of maybe the tens of thousands of people who live in the particular area where you're campaigning.

It also serves to focus statewide and national attention on you, how you present yourself, and also how you talk about that part of the country in relation to, you know, the election or your ideas or your policy stances. And so is there something that in looking just at the county level we miss about what it means to campaign in person, in public? Yeah.

Yeah, it's really a fair question. So some of this gets into the weeds, the methodological stuff. Basically, the bottom line there is that the state-level visits are so highly correlated. They were, I think it was about 0.9 in my analysis of the 08 to 20 elections year by year. Meaning the Republican and the Democrat are both going to the exact same places. Exactly. So it's hard to tease out. Plus, I'm also looking for presidential versus vice presidential candidate. So just when it comes to setting a progression model, controlling for these things, it's hard to like

disentangle those control for those other visits when a lot of them are happening in the same place. You get a little more precision with estimates when looking at the county level. I put it this way, Galen. So if we were finding more dramatic effects at the county level, I think that would suggest that

we're going to see clearly less of an effect. I mean, whatever effects happening in Green Bay, for instance, if there's also an effect in other parts of Wisconsin, it would be less than that. We think it'd be most intense in the local area. So if we were finding those significant effects, really strong effects locally, we'd think there might be some fading out as you go across the state, by the way, even into other states that may share media markets.

But when we're not finding much at the local level, it makes it much less likely that we'd also find effects if we zoom further out across the state. But even to sort of define yourself nationally, I mean, so, for example, take the 2020 election. And I know that part of this is narrative and part of this is quantitative, but Joe Biden does significantly less in-person campaigning than Donald Trump because of the pandemic.

And so you could sort of count the maybe the counties where he goes versus where he doesn't go. But ultimately, what ends up happening is you get a narrative of Joe Biden is campaigning from his basement and Donald Trump is out in public. And particularly in this case, those two candidates are not just have a differential in terms of how many in-person campaign visits they're making, but they're also expressing something about their policy positions in doing so.

Joe Biden is saying, well, because I'm doing this virtual campaigning and because I'm staying in my house in Delaware, I'm showing you that I think the pandemic is a big deal. And Donald Trump is saying, I think we ought to get back to normal. I think the economy should be up and running. I think kids should go to schools. And I think you all should come to my campaign rally.

And so people are expressing things about themselves, their campaigns and their view of the country in how they behave on the campaign trail. And I think in some ways you get this in your book where like there's something bigger than do you move the needle a half a point in Maycomb County, Michigan? There's something bigger and sort of like small D democratic about the campaign trail.

Absolutely. That's one of the major points of the book, too, is that there's a real symbolic value in these visits. You're mentioning even going to Green Bay, for instance, or you could think of traveling to the panhandle of Florida versus Miami or going to where I live here in Dayton, Ohio versus going to Columbus. You send all different kinds of messages depending on where you go, but also how much you're out there. People read something into the campaign. I even go through where they...

the sites they have for these visits. A lot of times they're trying to send a message about who they are based on where they go and even the venue that they choose for showing up at a college campus versus a union hall and other things like that. More directly to what you were just asking, though, the frequency with which they're out campaigning, I think, is a big part of the story. I start off the book by talking about what I call the basement narrative. We had kind of the Wisconsin narrative in 2016 that Hillary Clinton lost because she didn't go to this

Wisconsin, we have the basement narrative in 2020 that Joe Biden campaigned from his basement. Actually, as I show in counting up the visits year by year, Joe Biden, he had more campaign visits, as I define them, at least than Kamala Harris or Mike Pence. And he was not that far behind Donald Trump, nine behind Donald Trump. Now, Trump lost 10 days of

on the campaign trail because of COVID and his hospitalization. So he would have ended up a little further beyond that. But to your point, it's not that Joe Biden wasn't campaigning in 2020. He had a different way of campaigning. So he held these smaller events, and Kamala Harris as well, once she joined the ticket. Once Joe Biden got out of the basement, basically in June of 2020, and then through the summer and more so in the fall,

He and Kamala Harris as well, they were holding smaller events, socially distanced. You know, Trump would mock him on social media for seating people at a distance from each other. But it was very much a message that the Biden campaign was trying to send, is that symbolically what they were doing these visits, holding drive-in rallies, for example, essentially car rallies with limited space.

So folks, it's time to stand up and take back our democracy. As opposed to Trump's rallies where he was trying to fill up arenas in person, you know, as much as he could pack people in. It sent a different message, exactly what you're saying. Trump was saying, let's get back to normal. Let's campaign as we normally do, just like we should, you know, shop and go to school and do all these other things like we normally would. Let's open the schools, please. Open the schools.

Joe Biden was trying to say, we need to be more cautious. That's part of what this campaign is doing. And if that meant being mocked for holding small events or not enough events, I think they were willing to risk it to get across a larger message. In thinking about your analysis, you know, maybe a takeaway that campaigns or people who work in politics could take from your book as well. If it doesn't really matter, we ought to spend our money somewhere else. Like if we're not actually moving forward.

the needle. Like, do you think that's the case? I mean, do you think that people who work in politics who read your book should say, actually, this doesn't really matter? Let's be careful not to over-interpret these results. If the takeaway from it is, you know what? Hey, these things, they take a lot of the candidate's time. They cost a lot of money. Why not just spend that time not moving around the country, not...

flying around nonstop, but rather doing fundraisers, doing things virtually, holding rallies virtually, which Biden tried, for example. I think that would be over-interpreting the results. Part of what we saw, given the narrative about Joe Biden in 2020, was that when one candidate doesn't campaign in what's considered the traditional way—it's actually a modern way, this is really set in place more than anything as I go through some of the history of campaign visits—

It's really with Harry Truman's whistle-stop tour in 1948, which showed that campaign visits really could make the difference in particular circumstances in a really close race. Ever since then, it's been expected of candidates, presidential and vice presidential candidates, that they campaign nonstop. And really, people read something into it when a candidate—and Joe Biden's not the first, Richard Nixon, 68 and 72, and others, Gerald Ford, the Rose Garden Strategy in 1976—

People read something into it when a candidate for president or vice president doesn't campaign as aggressively as we tend to expect. In Biden's case, I think it just reinforced concern about his age and ability that maybe he wasn't out there very much because he couldn't handle it. Maybe he wasn't ready to be president.

This criticism of Biden that because he wasn't legitimately campaigning, and by legitimate, I mean campaigning as aggressively in person, nonstop, big crowds, because he wasn't following that script. Some people read into that that this isn't someone who's really deserving of the presidency.

Joe Biden, in some people's eyes, it almost seemed like he was jogging for the presidency. He was sort of moving, but not that hard, not that aggressively. And so some people looked at it and said, basically, do you even deserve to be president? If you're not willing to work your tail off for this, maybe you're not deserving. Maybe you shouldn't get my vote. And so there's a legitimacy factor there.

that comes into play here too, where in order to be a legitimate president, you need to campaign legitimately. And people measure that more than anything else, not by campaign ads, not by fundraising numbers, but by how often are you out there in person campaigning among the people? Chris, this might be a stretch, but I'm going to ask you to hang with me for a second. So what you just said there brings to mind a quote from the

the late Queen Elizabeth II that has been brought up multiple times this week, which is, quote, I have to be seen to be believed. And this has been brought up, of course, in reference to the fact that the Princess of Wales, Catherine, has not been seen in public for two and a half months. And so when we talk about sort of the legitimacy that accompanies being seen in public, I'm

And I'm sorry, I know this is not your expertise, but I have been Kate pilled and I've fallen down the rabbit hole on the where is Kate situation. Like, is this an example of what you're talking about that? Like, I mean, frankly, she's not trying to win an election. They don't have elections for monarchs, but there's a certain legitimacy that accompanies how you are perceived in public and more so now than perhaps ever before.

So I'll say this. I think, you know, in those cases, and this does relate to Joe Biden in 2024, even more so than 2020, is it just reinforces questions about, hey, is this person OK? Are they up to the job? Of course, we're describing very different jobs between Kate Middleton as a princess and Joe Biden as a president. But I'm so happy that I've gotten you to make this analysis. Me too. This is unexpected. This is great. So, yeah.

Think about Joe Biden in 2024, let's say, and you could apply the same to Kate Middleton right now. If people have questions and then the person in question, let's say Joe Biden, is then not doing the normal things, the thing we would normally expect, it just reinforces the tendency to ask questions about it. So in Joe Biden's case, I'm really interested to see what he does in 2024. As skeptical as I am about campaign visits,

as far as the really concrete effect on the vote, I do think they matter tremendously symbolically and help to carry messages about the candidate. Donald Trump, his vigor out in the campaign trail reinforces the idea that sure, he's pretty old, he's in his late 70s, but he's still very lively, right? Joe Biden, in his case, there's a lot of doubt among his critics, certainly, but even among some of his supporters that he's physically up to the job, at least for another four years.

And so if he were to not campaign the way a candidate normally does, it just makes people ask, well, why are things not as they normally would be? There must be some reason because he knows that this is what's expected of him. And so I think it just encourages people to ask those questions even more. I see the risk.

in sending him out there if his folks are concerned about his ability to do it. But voters are going to pick up on that and they'll say, look, I know something's up here. I know the campaign's worried about him too. If they're not sending him out, I mean, sure, he's doing the job of president. That's going to limit your campaigning. By the way, I do find that when you look at campaign visits over the years that incumbent presidents campaign less, including Trump in 2020. But people are going to say, this is so unusual if he's not really out there. There must be an explanation. Maybe it's the age thing.

Well, this is why I asked you earlier on, you know, is measuring the county level effects of campaign stops missing in some ways the point in the sense that, you know, you think back to 2008, for example, which I guess as a campaign where they mattered more than some of the more recent campaigns, but like,

You think of Barack Obama going to Berlin and there just being this massive rally at the Brandenburg Gate. And he takes on this air of a celebrity. And for people watching back home, thousands of miles away from Berlin...

You take it to mean something like, wow, this person must be important. People respect this person. And I don't know if you can, you probably can't make a one-to-one comparison with Trump's rallies, but at the very least, it gives him an air of being a celebrity. You're like, wow, all of these people are really excited about him. He must be important. He must matter. We should pay attention to him. And so I wonder if in a nationalized media environment,

Yeah.

Well, I think you're onto something there. I talk about this a little kind of theoretically in the book about like, well, how should we expect these to matter? We can't just focus on the people who are attending the rallies because most people who are going to be in the local area and kind of affected by this –

people are going to be influenced, it's really by hearing about it secondhand. It's probably by hearing about it on local media. So we know, for example, that local media is more trusted than the national media. We also know that it's more relevant to people. When the candidates come to a certain area, they're often talking about issues of local concern. I talk about Donald Trump when he went to Minnesota for a rally, and on both sides of the stage, there were trucks that had big logs on them. They were talking about logging, and he was focusing on things that he had done for the logging industry.

So that local commentary, that local flavor to these rallies and other events, that may be what's influencing people the most, the idea that someone has come to our area, not necessarily that you were there in person. Remember, too, that when it comes to people who attend the rallies, we tend to be talking about people who are already very much decided on who it is they're going to be voting for. So if these things are going to have an effect, there's really two options.

Those people who are rabid and attend these rallies for the most part, they're voting and they know they're going to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden, whoever it is. I'm more interested in the people who are getting it secondhand, as you're speaking to, through media coverage, basically. That's one group of people who could be affected. But another group would be basically what I call these downstream effects. Let's say that you have someone who's really on fire for Donald Trump and they attend one of these rallies. They were already going to vote. They're already going to vote for him.

One thing the rally might do is persuade them to get involved in the campaign. So as they go in, you know, this happens more and more now, I think it's pretty regular, actually, that their information, their contact information is going to be collected by the campaign when they sign up for tickets, maybe when they get through the door, they're going to be contacted to say, hey, do you want to volunteer for Donald Trump? Do you want to make phone calls? Do you want to knock on doors? And so you might have some people who, hey, they weren't at the rally, they didn't even catch it on the local news, or maybe just blew it off. But

But then someone comes to their door who is inspired by that. There might be these kind of second order effects, which are a lot harder to measure. And I provide some ideas in the book on how one could do that. I should say one more plug, too, for a lot of these questions about even the state level effects.

I'd encourage others who are interested in this. Other scholars are out there. Hey, go run some of these studies yourself. I've posted the data. There's really not a data set like this out there. I built it from scratch for this book, and it's up on my website, ChristopherJDevine.com. You can go there and download the data for yourself and run your own studies.

I mean, truly collecting every single campaign visit over four presidential elections. It's it's God's work, Chris. I don't know how you actually did it. It's a labor of love. But one thing that I found interesting in reading your book as well, talking about persuasion versus mobilization is I've been to these rallies, right? The folks that I talk to, there's no question in my mind who they're going to vote for or whether they're going to vote.

And in large part, especially when you go to a rally like, you know, I went to a rally in New Hampshire for Donald Trump in friendly territory. I've been to Biden events elsewhere, but some of the most like iconic, I would say Hillary Clinton events of 2016 were in big cities with celebrity acts, performers trying to draw people out and whatnot. Yeah.

When you talk to folks who are there, they're like, yes, they're like they're all in on it. They can tell you exactly the kinds of things that Trump will say on stage. They can tell you exactly the kind of commentary that you'll get from conservative talk radio or MSNBC or whatever it may be after the fact. And so it does intrigue me that candidates don't spend more time.

in unfriendly territory or in purple territory. And to give you an example of candidates still not doing this, I mean, so for example, right now, Vice President Kamala Harris is doing a tour of college towns where she's talking to folks about...

reproductive rights or abortion post-Roe, which is extremely playing to type, right? Kamala Harris is perceived as a liberal politician from California. We also know from political science research that women and women of color are perceived as even more liberal than they may be based on their voting records because of their identities. And she's also talking about an issue that is extremely associated with liberals in college towns, which

already vote overwhelmingly for liberals. And so I'm wondering, like, based on this analysis, are you sort of suggesting that the strategy that works better is like Kamala Harris says, I have a history as a prosecutor. I am going to present myself as a prosecutor and talk to people in suburbs who are worried about crime or go to the border and talk about securing the border, that playing not to type, that playing against type is actually how you accomplish something with these kinds of visits?

Well, that's a great question. I hadn't thought about it quite in that context. I will say, by the way, as a note, there's very little analysis in the past. There's one other study that kind of did this in the 1980 campaign, but mine does break down not just the counties they go to, the states they go to, but also the venues. So how often do they go to college campuses? One interesting...

The thing I find, for example, is that you'd think that it was always the case that Democrats are going overwhelmingly to colleges specifically and Republicans were avoiding it. If you go back to 2012, it was about even between the campaigns going to colleges. It's really like we hear about the diploma divide when it comes to the Trump administration.

phenomenon, his brand of politics, that's where you start seeing it as 2016, that he really stayed away largely from college campuses, him and Mike Pence. Democrats, Clinton and Kaine, largely went to college campuses, much more so than we'd seen in the past. I think it was like a third of their visits were there. So, you know,

To what you're saying, Galen, I think there is some risk in that of playing to type. The pattern we do see with campaigns is that really across the board, they've been more focused on mobilization. This is actually beyond campaign visits. There's a great book, Bases Loaded by Costas Panagopoulos, that goes into this, documenting that in the last 20 plus years, campaigns just generally have focused more on mobilization. The lessons learned from the Bush campaigns in 2000, 2004, for example. So

It doesn't surprise me that that's the strategy being followed by Kamala Harris and the Biden campaign. I think we expect to see much the same from Donald Trump and whoever his vice presidential candidate is. They'll probably play more to the base. But I think they should at least give a lot more thought to what you're describing. Again, I haven't really thought that through. I think that's a reasonable inference.

But it also speaks to the larger messaging strategy. It's not just about where you go. There has to be some synergy between the message that you're trying to get across and the places you're going in order to try to get that message to voters. What you're describing about Kamala Harris could reframe her candidacy in some way, could help her appeal to people who are not already in the Democratic camp. And reinforcing that through campaign visits could be a good way of achieving that. Right, because one of the things that I think about...

what makes an effective politician electorally is that you can frustrate people's perceptions of yourself and the party that you're from, right? The way that you bring more people into the tent is when they say, oh, that person, you know, they don't follow their party hook, line, and sinker because neither of the parties are particularly popular in America. And frankly, politicians aren't either. So if you played a type as a politician and you played a type as a member of a party, you're really narrowing your appeal. But somebody who...

can sort of criticize their own party and sort of, even from an identity perspective, cut across expectations. Like this is something that Obama was pretty famous for doing. I think it's something that Reagan did as well. Bill Clinton is known for doing. Like the young gun, who's also from the South, who has like a mix of conservative and liberal policies. And so all of a sudden people can pull from that

what they want. And they can sort of, you know, if you have a couple of things that are attractive enough to them to vote for you or to cross the aisle or even just be persuaded as an independent, that that's how you get an electorate that a coalition that is larger than 45%.

Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned Bill Clinton. That's who I was thinking of as you were starting to describe that. And one thing I describe in the book, you know, in the last 50, 60 or so years, we pretty much have the same type of campaign when it comes to campaign visits. They get in the airplane, the private jet, they fly wherever in the country they want because they can go to many states per day, parts of states, all that kind of stuff. You pretty much have the formula in place. It's changed very little in the last number of decades. Yeah.

Clinton in 92, less than 96, Clinton and Gore, really, they mixed up that strategy. They tried something a little different, and it was very successful, and that was doing bus trips. For that matter, in 2000, Al Gore and Joe Lieberman, along with their wives, they did this riverboat trip up to Mississippi. And in both those cases—

Again, I think it reinforced a message here, especially with Clinton. He's trying to run more of a populist campaign, depending on the stage of the campaign. Al Gore was doing the same. They're trying to run a more populist campaign. And part of that message was reinforced by going to those areas that weren't usually visited during a campaign, getting away from the airport, basically, and going through some different areas where people wouldn't usually see a candidate. Actually, Joe Biden did a little of this. And coming back from the first debate in Cleveland last time around 2020, he did a series of Amtrak stops.

along the way between Cleveland and his home in Delaware. One thing that's useful about that, just tying to some other things that we've been discussing. So I mentioned before Harry Truman's whistle-stop tour, his campaigning in 1948. When I think about where we are today, this goes to what you were saying about, hey, the people that are in attendance at these rallies, come on, they've already made up their minds, right?

Think about the contrast to Harry Truman rolling in on his train, the whistle stop tour. It comes through town. It stops, you know, sure, it's going to stop at some big cities. Sometimes he would, in fact, leave the train and go to give a speech at some big arena in Los Angeles or Chicago or something like that. But a lot of these places were, you know, pretty small whistle stops, as they were called. And who could come and attend that event, hear him speak?

Anybody who wanted to be physically present, there was no, as far as I know of, there was no one checking you out at the door, giving you a ticket. You know, you didn't have to apply through the party, let's say, as is the case with some of these events today, is that you need to kind of go to your local Republican committee or Democratic committee and ask them for tickets, apply for them. If you want to get into a Trump rally or a Biden rally, it's more restricted than

And so I think that's one reason why there is some evidence, for instance, that Harry Truman's campaign visits really did help. Thomas Holbrooke has some great analysis of this. The 1948 campaign really did seem to be influenced by these campaign visits. But I think that's partly because they were able to reach people that you're just not going to reach today because the campaigns so tightly choreograph these events.

And if you want to get in, you know, if there's really much of a demand for getting in, you're going to have to think ahead. You're going to have to apply in advance. You're going to have to go ask for tickets. It's harder to just show up. I think that's one reason why perhaps campaign visits are less influential now than they were in the past. So we're talking about, you know, cutting across stereotypes or balancing, which gets us to the topic of the vice presidency.

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Again, that's GiveWell.org to donate or find out more. Campaign stops are not the first sort of conventional wisdom or set piece of American elections that you have challenged. You look at the vice presidency in your book before this and you see that it's not the first sort of conventional wisdom or set piece of American elections that you have challenged.

And you came to a similar conclusion, which is that they might not matter all that much. Give me your hypothesis, your thesis for the role that vice presidential picks play.

Yeah. And I have to say, you know, there is a connection between these. Often what I'm trying to do is take on the conventional wisdom, not because it's all wrong, but it's just, if we are going to believe it, we should have good evidence of it. You know, elections are mostly structured by these fundamental factors, the economy, presidential approval, all the other stuff that we talk about so much, the campaign visits, the vice presidential pick, they matter, but on the margins. And it

in particular circumstances. So to get more directly to VP candidates, and this is based on my book with Kyle Kopko, it's called The Running Mates Matter. We really look at three different types of effects that if a VP candidate is going to influence voters, how would that be? And basically what we conclude is, look, there aren't a lot of people out there who are literally voting to elect a vice president. And what I mean by that is voting against their presidential preference

because they really want this person, Mike Pence, Kamala Harris, whoever it is, to be vice president. There's usually not, especially as things get more partisan, this disconnect between who you prefer for president, who you prefer for vice president in terms of their party. Where vice presidential candidates really matter is in shaping our perception of who we are voting for, the presidential candidate. It really tells you something about that person. We call this an indirect effect of the VP choice. It tells you something about their political profile, their priorities, the way they'd run an administration,

When they choose a vice president among all these options, Donald Trump could pretty much take anyone within the Republican Party. Largely, it's an individual choice. And so who they pick in these cases tells you a lot about who they are, and it might give you a reason to vote for them or vote against them. To give you something more concrete, Galen, think about the qualifications of the VP pick. Is this someone who clearly seems up to the job of being vice president or vice?

being president if necessary. That could be an issue. We saw that in 2008 that, and we show this, we document this statistically, that people who thought that Sarah Palin wasn't up to the job of being vice president,

they downgraded their assessment of John McCain's judgment and they were less likely to vote for him. Conversely, Joe Biden was largely seen as a responsible VP pick for Barack Obama, who of course was relatively inexperienced, especially in foreign policy at that time. And because people largely perceived Biden to be well-qualified to be VP, that improved their assessment of Barack Obama's judgment and made people more likely to vote for him.

Yeah, I mean, I think the way that this usually gets talked about in pundit circles is that a vice presidential pick can deliver a group of voters along some kind of geographic or demographic line. So voters in their home state will be more inclined to vote for the ticket or say a demographic group like Georgia.

women or voters of color or evangelical voters in Mike Pence's case, or that it will help shore up some ideological part of the party. So if you're a moderate, you pick somebody to the right or to the left of you to assure voters in those camps that you care about them, or just maybe they'll be attracted to that candidate altogether. I mean, have you found evidence for any of those three types of effects that vice presidential candidates can have?

Right. So we're thinking geographic, demographic, and kind of ideological is three big categories here. I'd say the strongest evidence is in terms of ideology. And this might matter more on the Republican side. Ideology tends to be more of an identifying factor within the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, where there's more of a coalitional type of approach. Group interest is sometimes called. There you might, for instance, see demographic.

matter more on the Democratic side, ideology more on the Republican side. I'll give you one example. We show looking at some panel data from past elections. So we're talking about the same people being interviewed over a period of time, including in our analysis before the VP pick and then after, later stages in the campaign. And we show that in 2012 when Mitt Romney, who was suspect to a lot of conservative Republicans, when he chose Paul Ryan as

really one of the leading conservative stars within the party, when he picked him as VP, we did see an uptick. And I don't mean just percentage-wise in polling. I mean, statistically controlling for prior preferences, we saw a significant increase among people identified as conservative wanting to support the ticket and actually eventually voting for Romney after Ryan's selection. Now, when we do the same thing for gender or religion,

Prior to 2020, by the way. So at that point, we've since done some other analysis I can speak to. But at that point, we couldn't factor in race, like Kamala Harris being a black woman running on the ticket. At that time, we didn't have that data to work off of. But at least when we looked at Sarah Palin, for example, did she...

increase support for the Republican ticket among women. You know, there we see no movement. We saw no change in kind of the predictive capacity of accounting for gender in our statistical models, no uptick in women's support for the Republican ticket. Even if you look back to Geraldine Ferraro in 1984, the first woman ever to be nominated on a major party ticket for the vice presidency. We go through some of the evidence there, surprisingly. I mean,

surprised us in some ways. There's just no evidence that she really helped bring women to the Democratic ticket that year. Same for Palin in 2008. Same for when it comes to evangelicals. Mike Pence, we find no evidence that he actually brought in more evangelicals to the ticket. What you might see is that some people who are eventually going to vote for that ticket might not want to say it at certain points, but whether it's the VP candidate that delivers that, I think it's easy to seize on that as the reason, but that might not have been the actual reason.

So Donald Trump is going to pick a running mate at some point this year. Based on your research, what kind of candidate should he pick? So this is interesting. An interesting pick. I'll frame it this way. I think usually when we're talking about VP picks, it doesn't really matter whether the question is who should this person pick and who will they pick. I think those tend to go together. The candidates tend to act differently.

based on sound strategy to pick someone who's going to be appealing to voters and really help their campaign. I'm not sure that's the way it'll operate this time. I think what Donald Trump is looking for, first and foremost, from a VP candidate is not necessarily what voters, especially voters outside the Republican Party, independents, even Democrats, are necessarily looking for. The only way to read Donald Trump's reaction to Mike Pence's vice presidency is that he is looking for absolute loyalty,

what I frame sometimes as fealty or servility. Really, we're talking about normal loyalty not being enough. Think about Mike Pence from the time he was chosen in 2016. Remember Pence stuck by Trump during the Access Hollywood scandal through the campaign, through those four years. There was only one point at which

Pence departed from Trump, disagreed with him publicly, and that was on whether he could go outside of his constitutional responsibility and just return votes that were duly submitted through the Electoral College on January 6th. So I think Trump is looking back at that choice in 2024 and saying Mike Pence was a disaster.

From Donald Trump's point of view, Mike Pence was a disaster. And why? Because of that one thing, because Pence said no to him. So I think that the top criterion, really the controlling one, the one that allows anybody to even be considered, is whether they will absolutely say yes to Trump, no matter what he asks for. That could be someone like Vivek Ramaswamy, Trump.

Carrie Lake's gotten some talk, but she's in the Senate race, so I doubt that'll be the one. There are other people who might be Mike Pence-like, the people who are very loyal, but maybe not to the degree that Trump would want. I wonder if Tim Scott, for instance, fits that description. So there are a lot of people out there, but I think they're only going to really be seriously considered if Trump believes that they will follow whatever orders he gives them.

It's interesting that you say that because when people ask me, I describe the thing that Trump wants more than anything as to win the election and that he will pick whoever he thinks will help him win the election because the loyalty part doesn't matter if he doesn't win. And so I say, well, what did he do in 2016? He tried to balance the ticket with the quote unquote adult in the room, the state in steady hand, the more religious, the more dutiful, etc., etc.,

And so my guess would be that he would pick a similar character this time around, but I totally understand where you're coming from with that as well. You know, one thing I think people might differ on in his terms of reading Donald Trump is figuring out his sincerity when he says that he believes that he actually won the 2020 election.

If he really does believe, and I think he does believe, as far as I can tell, if he really believes that he actually won the 2020 election, he might conclude that he doesn't need the help. He could just kind of double down on who he was then, keep doing the same thing, and that he would win in spite of that, or because of it, I guess. So that kind of complicates judging how much he's going to factor in electoral politics. The other thing I'll throw in here, Galen, is thinking again about January 6th.

I don't know exactly what the date will be, but there will be an early January 2029. When if Trump has won the presidency in 2024, his vice president will be in the same role as Mike Pence was on January 6th, 2021. And I do think that Trump will have in mind, I think he'll be gaming this out somewhat and thinking about what will that person do when it comes to certifying the next election? Now, Trump is term limited. It's not going to be him.

But it matters to him whether it be a Democrat or Republican following him, not just in the normal way that it matters to all presidents in terms of their legacy carrying on their policies. But we know, as we're seeing right now, that a Democratic administration could pursue criminal charges against Trump at the federal level. A Republican administration might not do so. And so Trump has a lot at stake in terms of who becomes the next president. And when it comes to counting those votes, because the vice president is the one who officially certifies it according to the Constitution –

Of course, it just says they open and count the votes. But Trump's interpretation is that they have a lot of leeway to return votes if they're deemed by members of Congress to be not accurate. The vice president would have some influence there in terms of determining the next election. And that's one reason why I think Trump is going to really emphasize that

heightened loyalty, even servility, as I've described it, is he would want someone who, if he told them, do not count these votes, return those to the state somehow, or do something else that would help to ensure Republican administration, he would want someone who would say yes. All right. We're going to leave things there, Chris. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you. Yeah, it's a pleasure, Galen. Appreciate it.

Christopher Devine is a political science professor at the University of Dayton, and his new book is called I'm Here to Ask for Your Vote, How Presidential Campaign Visits Influence Voters. My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.