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In American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville Bernard-Henri Levy observes about the American electoral system:

[W]hat is at stake in the remaining [swing] states is persuading the minority of voters who will make the difference and who will inevitably choose based on local, irrelevant, and, especially, contradictory questions. (p.132)

This is intuitively plausible. A rational candidate will focus on those whose votes promise the greatest marginal return. A voter in a committed red or blue state has a zero marginal utility to the candidate. Only those voters count who can literally swing a state. But is it true that only their “local, irrelevant, and … contradictory questions” count? (Let’s assume that when Henri Levy says “irrelevant,” he means contingent.) That’s really an empirical question. How do presidential campaigns select national issues, which, if Henri Levi is correct, are being played for two or three highly localized audiences. Did the 2004 campaign (entirely? predominantly?) reflect the concerns of swing voters in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania? Did both camps spend significantly greater resources polling voters in those areas? And if so, were those local issues representative of what the average voter identified as a concern? I’d be interested in any empirical studies on these issues.

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