Listening to the American Voter

In an era of shoddy and shallow political polls, there is one gold standard: the National Election Surveys from the University of Michigan. One of the nation's premier analysts of public opinion, David RePass, has found in their treasure trove of contemporary and historical data, innovative and penetrating ways of using voters' own words to understand their motivations and election choices. Listening to the American Voter will go alongside the classic The American Voter as essential reading for all who study, do research and write about American elections and voters. Norman Ornstein, Resident Scholar, The American Enterprise Institute David RePass recognizes that the key to understanding voting is paying attention to how voters think about the election. Thus, in Listening to the American Voter, he uses the open-ended comments of ANES respondents to develop a model for measuring the importance of the attitudes that voters had in mind when making their decisions. RePass's creative examination of presidential voting yields significant new analysis of the 2016 election as well as fresh insights into the dynamics of elections past and future. Herbert Weisberg, Ohio State University (Emeritus) This work is a cornucopia of fresh, striking insights about how voters choose their presidential candidates. Employing quality data and several creative analytical techniques, RePass discovers the four key factors shaping presidential voting decisions: attitudes toward the major party candidates, issue concerns of the moment and party identification. Anyone seeking an explanation of presidential election results from 1960 through 2016 should read this book. Steven Schier, Carleton College Contemporary political behavior researchers have largely ignored a huge trove of data on the beliefs and preferences of the American public, namely, the vast reserve of answers to the open-ended survey questions in the American National Election Studies. Rather than force voters to shoehorn their positions and evaluations into fixed response categories, the open-ended questions allow them to respond in their own words. RePass carefully analyzes these data, showing what things mattered and how their importance varied over different elections, sometimes contradicting previous interpretations along the way. I hope that this welcome effort will motivate younger researchers to turn their attention to this too long ignored collection of data. Morris P. Fiorina, Stanford University and Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution