Oh, the Places They’ll Go: A Geographic Analysis of Gubernatorial Campaigns

Abstract

Geography has long played a significant role in American electoral politics. Candidates engage in “retail politics” by visiting fairs, festivals, schools, churches, and businesses, to meet and greet potential voters. However, systematically understanding where candidates are actually going has plagued prior work due to small sample sizes and lack of data availability. Presidential elections have been used with success in previous scholarship, but there are few viable candidates to compare within a single cycle. Utilizing competitive gubernatorial elections, this work attempts to address these deficiencies by utilizing social media posts to track multiple candidates in real-time across the 2018 campaign cycle at the state level. The paper tests competing theories of candidate engagement regarding travel decisions: do candidates (1) focus their attention on their partisan base or (2) try to attract independent or “swing” voters? Following an original and intensive data collection effort, we identified location-specific information for over 4700 campaign stops made by major-party candidates across seventeen states. Our results lend support to candidates spending time with their respective bases of partisan support, with Republicans going to rural areas with non-college educated individuals while Democrats travel to urban counties with a more diverse electorate.