This week’s episode asks: Who are the voters? What guides their choices?

You might be forgiven for thinking that elections are like the Super Bowl. The contenders go back and forth. There is a compelling narrative — the underdog triumphs! The big lead is blown! Key moments get played over and over, including “game changers” where what seemed inevitable suddenly became impossible, and vice versa.

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This is how the news media often cover elections, especially with the rise of the Internet and social media. As John Sides and Lynn Vavreck noted in their book on the 2012 election, one journalist identified 68 episodes that were described as “game changers” that year. The term was used in the media almost 20,000 times in the 10 months before Election Day that November.

Nevertheless, the game itself — the actual gap between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney that year — didn’t move around much. That makes sense when we think about what we know about how people actually decide how they will vote. One key is how party identification shapes a voter’s worldview, as we saw in the 2016 election.

Still, certain issues do have a big effect on election results — and the most prominent is the economy. National economic performance is a very strong predictor of whether voters will be for or against the incumbent party. That shows us that voting is mostly retrospective. It looks backward at performance, rather than forward at campaign promises and party platforms.

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