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This paper examines the role of racial attitudes in accounting for the decrease in Obama's vote percentage among whites from 43% in 2008 to 39% in 2012. Studies of voting in 2008 emphasized the impact of racial attitudes. Racial resentment is found not to have increased, and Romney's improved showing over McCain was concentrated among those with very low and neutral resentment levels. Racial attitudes are found to be significant for vote direction again in 2012, but with less of an impact than in 2008, though there was an additional effect of racial attitudes on turnout in 2012. The most important change was that Obama lost the vote boost he had received in 2008 from the economic issue, not benefiting as much as he had then from negative evaluations of Bush's economic performance. Thus, the decline of Obama's vote percentage among whites in 2012 was due more to economic evaluations than to racial attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The procedure developed by The American Voter () to understand determinants of the electoral decision first demonstrated the importance of short-term forces as vote components. Using a similar categorization scheme of these components from the National Election Studies, this paper examines the importance of these short-term forces in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, augmenting the basic components model by developing summary measures of the combined impact of these forces as well as analyzing the vote components for political independents. The authors conclude that, in comparison with the 1952 and 1956 elections, these short-term forces were relatively mild in these two recent elections and that, despite the conventional wisdom, the way in which short-term forces affected Independents did not impact the outcome of the elections generally. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The articles in this special section analyze the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. While the election has been referred to as historic, voting data instead emphasize its underlying stability. The articles in this section explore four broad themes in the raised in the election: issues, media, candidates, and pluralism. Together, these papers help examine the implications of stable voting patterns electing a candidate favoring disruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the recent rise in extremely negative feelings towards presidential candidates? Using the American National Election Studies survey data from 1984 to 2016, we show that negative feelings towards presidential candidates have grown steadily in recent elections, with unusually large numbers of zero ratings on candidate thermometers in 2004, 2012, and, especially, 2016. Such evaluations are primarily reserved for candidates of the other party and shown to be strongly related to partisan polarization. Importantly, however, candidate traits have long played and continue to play major roles in candidate evaluations, though their effects vary by year. Indeed, the unprecedented number of the most negative scores in 2016 appears due more to increases in negative perceptions of candidate leadership, competence and empathy than to polarization. Clinton and Trump are just as much to blame for the public's animosity as the rising tide of polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Symposium on voting in the 2012 U.S. presidential election emphasizes the effects of racial attitudes. While voting was highly polarized along racial and ethnic lines in 2012, the Symposium articles agree that racial attitudes were not the dominant factor in the election. The articles show that racial attitudes had a wide range of effects on the election, affecting attitudes toward the Democratic Party, toward Barack Obama as a person, toward Mitt Romney, and toward the Tea Party, with heightened effects among Hispanic voters, but racial resentment does not explain the drop in Obama's support among whites from 2008 to 2012. As in 2008, race was only a subliminal issue in the 2012 election. Racial resentment still exists among some whites, but its effect was smaller than expected during a recession. Still, racial attitudes should be expected to continue to affect voting in the post-Obama era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]