The “Surprised Loser” in U.S. Presidential Elections (1952-2012)

• In Event: Who Will Win? The Media’s Role in the Formation of Electoral Expectations

Abstract

Everyone loves a winner, and electoral losers received relatively little scholarly attention until 1983 when William Riker argued that instead of examining the winners, “the dynamics of politics is in the hands of the losers.” This observation set into motion studies that identified a winner-loser gap in terms of attitudes about the electoral process, the government, and democracy. Simply put, winners are happy with the outcome, losers less so, and this gap raised questions about the levels of support in the legitimacy of major democratic institutions. These studies often focused on either micro-level or macro-level explanations, as Anderson or his colleagues noted in their seminal work, Losers’ Consent, which identified a number of likely theoretical explanations for the winner-loser gap. Less success has been had, however, in identifying why losers behave the way they do. Here I raise a largely ignored but possibly fruitful theoretical approach to understanding why all losers are not necessarily the same. This approach examines the tendency by many to predict their own candidate will win, a concept known as wishful thinking. I argue that, when examining the losers of a political campaign, it is useful to consider not merely the losers, but in particular losers surprised by the electoral outcome (as compared to those who expected to lose), which may lead to even more negative attitudes about the democratic process and the subsequent government. Using ANES data of U.S. presidential elections from 1952 to 2012, I examine the prevalence of wishful thinking and how “surprised losers” may differ from “expected losers” and “winners” in terms of key institutional support variables. Special attention is paid to the role of news media exposure, as it may theoretically be argued to either decrease wishful thinking due to correcting poll information, especially among losers, or increase wishful thinking as people migrate to like-minded sources of news, which may mislead in terms of a candidate’s likely success at the ballot box. Finally, an in-depth analysis of 2012 is used to more deeply study these relationships.

Author

• Barry A. Hollander, U of Georgia