Evaluating the Impact of Vice Presidential Selection on Voter Choice

We update and extend work by Wattenberg and Grofman (1993) and Wattenberg (1995) on the consequences of vice presidential selection for voter choice in U.S. presidential elections by offering a simple quantitative model that allows us to measure both potential and actual effects of differences between vice presidential and presidential preferences. We model the impact of vice presidential selection as a weighted average of the differences in voting behavior between those with differing combinations of presidential and vice presidential preferences and the size of the pool of voters who exhibit such preferences.