Voter Ideology and Candidate Positioning in the 2008 Presidential Election

Although classic Downsian theory predicts that candidates should converge to the ideological position of the median voter in the electorate, American elections generally feature major party candidates who offer divergent policy positions. Employing a survey and statistical estimation technique that allows for the estimation of the ideological position of candidates on the same scale as the distribution of voter ideology among voters, the author characterizes the actual degree of candidate divergence in the 2008 presidential election looking at the estimated stances of Barack Obama and John McCain. The results reveal that these candidates took positions that were closer to, and likely even more extreme than, the positions of their partisan and primary constituencies than to the nationwide voter median.