If you were managing a political campaign, what would you tell your candidate about the importance of the candidate's personal appearance to prospective voters? What specific advice would you give to the candidate about his or her personal

Question

appearance? How do voters use policy positions to help them evaluate candidates? To what extent are voters prepared to make policy-based voting decisions? What advice would you give your candidate about projecting his or her issue positions so as to be most successful with voters? Voters also make decisions after evaluating various candidate qualities. Based on research by Miller, Wattenberg, and Malanchuk, what three elements of a candidate's personality would you try to project to voters? Evaluate how well Barack Obama and Mitt Romney projected these personality traits.

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

An ideal response will:
1, Note that voters are more likely to support candidates who are attractive. Therefore, the campaign manager should stress the importance of good grooming and a proper haircut and attire in order to highlight the candidate's best attributes.
2, Describe how citizens use policy issues to evaluate candidates. When voting on the basis of issues, voters will often select the candidate whose policy positions most closely resemble their own policy positions.
3, Note that voters only know enough about their own policy positions and those of the candidates to make policy-based voting decisions two-thirds of the time.
4, Provide reasonable advice about how a campaign should project a candidate's policy positions. For example, candidates may want to take issue positions that are most proximate to the voters to which the candidate hopes to appeal. However, if the policy is controversial, candidates may wish to be ambiguous about their policy position in order to avoid alienating voters.
5, Describe the three elements of a candidate's personality that are most likely to sway voters: integrity, reliability, and competence. Voters like candidates who are honest and hold high moral values. They want candidates who are dependable and predictable. Finally, voters want candidates who they believe to be competent to get the job done.
6, Evaluate how well Barack Obama and Mitt Romney presented themselves as having integrity, reliability, and competence. While students' evaluations will vary, many will conclude that Obama portrayed considerable integrity and reliability, although they may question his competence given that the economy did not recover as quickly as anticipated during his first term. Many will conclude that Romney projected considerable integrity. However, Romney was not as strong in projecting reliability, as his policy positions were sometimes vague and had changed considerably since his time as Massachusetts governor. There is likely to be considerable variation in evaluations of Romney's competence, as some will praise his success in the business world as evidence of his competence, while others will claim that Americans were ill equipped to measure his competence as president given his relatively short political résumé.