A leading political scientist, Jon Krosnick, has spent 30 years
studying how voters choose one candidate rather than another, and says that in
states where the margin of victory was narrow, elections were won because a
candidate was listed first on the ballot paper, and that includes Donald Trump’s
election as US President.
At first sight this seems to make little sense. Are voters really so
easily swayed? Most of them are not and vote for the party they usually do. But
a minority are swayed because of a human tendency to lean towards the first
name listed on the ballot, which has caused increases on average of about three
percentage points for candidates, across many elections. And candidates whose
last names begin with letters picked near the end of the lottery have it tough,
never getting the advantage that comes from being listed first on the ballot.
Political scientists call this the primacy effect. It has the biggest
impact on those who know the least about the election they are voting in. You
are more likely to be affected if you are feeling uninformed and yet feel
obligated to cast a vote - or if you are feeling deeply conflicted between two
candidates. When an election is very close the effect can be decisive, such as
the 2016 election in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Some states always list parties in the same order. Some allow the
state's officials to make a new choice each time. Some put the party that lost
in the last election at the top of the ballot. Some list alphabetically.
Of the numerous cases where the primacy effect is thought to have
influenced the result of an vote, one is Hillary Clinton’s unexpected January
2008 win over Barack Obama in the New Hampshire primary to elect the Democratic
Party's presidential candidate. Her name was at the top of a long list. Obama's
was near the end.
Source: BBC website: Did Trump win because his name came first in keystates? Published on 25 February 2017
