Why Campaigns Are Important In Presidential Elections

In American politics, campaigns are a significant key to the democratic process. Every November Americans go out to vote in local, state, and national elections; while every four years Americans elect a President to lead their nation. Much debates surrounds the importance of presidential elections and much goes into studying if these campaigns and elections matter. One key event of presidential campaigns are visits presidential hopefuls make to places. Campaign visits unarguably take up much of a candidates time due to the time it requires to travel to different places across the country. To the average American, campaigns visits are important because they allow the American people to get first-hand experience with the people they are given the choice to vote for.
However, many of these studies have overlooked an important aspect of the campaign visit itself. Studies like the ones done by Daron Shaw and James Gimpel realizes that campaign visits appear to sway public support to one candidate or to another; however, they fail to control for what the candidate said at the event. (1 - 18) There is a chance that how a candidate presented themselves and what they said can possibly effect public support and how the candidate does in an election. Different candidates have different abilities when it comes to campaigning and what they say is important . (Herr 4; Wood 5) There is a large gap in political science about the quality of the candidates themselves who are running for office. It is important to see if the candidate itself matters because it can influence if the campaign visits itself is important. More specifically, we will look to see how the quality of the candidates effected the outcome of the presidential election of 1996 between Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican Bob