Polls and Elections: Revisiting Midterm Visits: Why the Type of Visit Matters

Presidential travel is designed to close the gap between the institution and the public (Ellis 2008). Elections present a formal occasion for presidents to travel (King and Ragsdale 1998; Kernell 2007), and several studies have analyzed why presidents travel during midterm elections (Eshbaugh-Soha and Nicholson-Crotty 2009; Hoddie and Routh 2004; Sellers and Denton 2006). Presidential midterm visits can have a positive effect on presumptive nonvoters, although there is a less substantial effect for supporters (Cohen, Krassa, and Hamman 1991). Yet, as much as these works and others have demonstrated why and how presidents strategically visit certain locations, these studies treat all presidential visits equally. This may cause us to miss important determinations of presidential travel. It may be the case, for instance, that the factors predicting a presidential visit for a "rally" are different from a visit for a fundraiser. Our goal, using public speech data from The American Presidency Project, is to analyze varying types of presidential visits during midterm elections from 1954 to 2010. We argue each is unique with respect to presidential midterm campaigning activity. Midterms and the Variables that Matter Prior studies on midterm election visits focus on three key predictive variables: Electoral College votes in each state, presidential approval, and the competitiveness of key races in a given state (governor, House, and Senate). First, the number of Electoral College votes a state possesses is of considerable importance to the likelihood of a presidential visit. Analyzing these total votes is one method of capturing the president's individual electoral goals during midterm elections, since presidents attempt to buttress their own future reelection potential (Eshbaugh-Soha and Nicholson-Crotty 2009). The logic for the inclusion of Electoral College votes in these studies is that larger states (those allocated more electoral votes) are more likely to attract official visits from the president than those states with smaller Electoral College vote allocations (Doherry 2010; Sellers and Denton 2006). The payoff for presidential visits under such conditions is that the president can set the stage for his own reelection by shoring up support for himself in a state that possesses a greater number of Electoral College votes. In terms of statistical impact, Doherty (2010) found more Electoral College votes to have a strong effect on visits to states for non-fundraising-related presidential events. Similarly, Sellers and Denton's (2006) negative binomial model found the number of Electoral College votes had a significant impact on the probability of a visit, though it is associated with a weak coefficient. A second variable suggests that presidential approval has an effect on the president's midterm campaigning behavior. Prior research suggests that, to further his individual electoral concerns, the president will make midterm visits to states if he is popular nationally (Hoddie and Routh 2004; Sellers and Denton 2006; see Hill, Rodriquez, and Wooden 2010 for an analysis of presidential general election travel). Here, presidents strategically use their limited visitation resources to only campaign where their personal popularity can have an additive effect on the outcome of local races (Abramowitz 1985; but see Cohen 2007 for an opposing finding from the 2006 midterm elections). Extrapolating from this rationale, scholars have utilized presidential approval in several ways. For example, Hoddie and Routh (2004) interact presidential approval with the number of competitive elections in a state. This interactive relationship was statistically significant, although most significant for competitive House elections. Similarly, Sellers and Denton (2006) operationalize presidential approval by utilizing each president's national public approval during the third quarter of the midterm election year using Gallup Poll ratings, a measure that produced positive statistically significant results. …