Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

• DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221076435
• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Date: 01 July 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

American Politics Research

2022, Vol. 50(4) 539–544

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221076435

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Whose Party is It?: Lame Ducks, Presidential

Candidates, and Evaluations of the Party

Joel Sievert

1

and Victor Hinojosa

1

Abstract

Presidents and presidential candidates serve as an important source cue for the mass public’s attitudes toward and evaluations of

the political parties. Our study evaluates these dynamics during the transition from a lame duck president, Barack Obama, to a

new party standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton. Our analysis takes advantage of the fact that the 2014 and 2016 Cooperative

Election Study (CES) and the 2012 and 2016 American National Election Study (ANES) surveys asked respondents to evaluate

both Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic Party. These data allow us to examine whether the transition from Obama to Clinton

changed the primary referent for public attitudes toward the Democratic Party. Our results provide mixed evidence about a

change in the relative importance of attitudes toward Clinton and Obama when the former became the nominee, and the latter

was a lame duck. While the public’s view of the connection between Obama and Democratic Party’s ideological prof‌ile

remained constant across time, respondents did update their affective assessments of the party in the face of a new party leader

once Clinton was the nominee.

Keywords

presidents, presidential candidates, political parties, elections, nationalization

Presidents and presidential candidates are an important

source cue for the public’s attitudes toward the political

parties (Jacobson, 2019;Nicholson, 2012). Presidential

politics can inf‌luence both beliefs about the party’s ideo-

logical positions (Brasher, 2009;Dancey et al., 2019;

Jacobson, 2019) and partisan polarization (Nicholson, 2012;

McLaughlin et al., 2020;Smidt 2020). Presidential politics is

also closely linked with vote choice and election outcomes in

both federal- and state-level contests (Sievert & McKee,

2019). Contemporary American party politics can therefore

be viewed as increasingly president centric.

Our study contributes to research on president-party

linkages by examining the transition between a lame duck

president, Barack Obama, and a new party standard-bearer,

Hillary Clinton. Our analysis uses the 2014 and 2016 Co-

operative Election Studies (CES) and the 2012 and 2016

American National Election Studies (ANES). Each of these

surveys asked respondents to evaluate Barack Obama, Hillary

Clinton, and the Democratic Party. The inclusion of these

questions across survey years allows us to compare the

relative weight given to attitudes toward Obama and Clinton

over time. According to prior research, the public’s attitudes

toward the Democratic Party should be more strongly cor-

related with ratings of Clinton when she is the nominee, while

the relationship between views of Obama and the party

should weaken over time.

Our study provides mixed support for this expectation. We

f‌ind evidence of this dynamic when we examine affective

evaluations toward the Democratic Party, but not for ideo-

logical ratings. We do, however, f‌ind that Independents are

more likely than committed partisans to update their beliefs

about the party’s ideological prof‌ile to account for a new

presidential nominee.

Presidential Pulse of Party Politics

Presidential politics can inf‌luence the public’s attitudes to-

ward the parties along two dimensions. First, evaluations of a

party’s ideological positions and policy reputations are in-

formed by presidential politics (Brasher, 2009;Dancey et al.,

2019;Jacobson, 2019;Nicholson, 2012). The positions

adopted by a candidate and a president’s governing decisions

can both inf‌luence the party brand. Both Obama’sand

Clinton’s public rhetoric during this period could inf‌luence

the Democratic Party’s ideological reputation. In his second

1

Texas Tech University, Luboock, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Joel Sievert, Texas Tech University, 113 Holden Hall, Luboock, TX 79409,

USA.

Email: joel.sievert@ttu.edu