Presidential candidate visits rarely garner votes

President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump have already made campaign visits to Wisconsin, but how will voters respond at the polls?

Christopher Devine is an associate professor at the University of Dayton andWe're here to ask for your vote: How presidential campaign visits affect voters.Morning Edition host Alex Crow spoke with him about whether such visits are important.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Alex Crow: Biden and Trump and many of their surrogates have been campaigning in Wisconsin. Do these visits actually have an effect on getting more people to vote?

Christopher Devine: Well, we don't see much evidence that campaign visits actually sway votes. If you look at the period from 2008 to 2020, which of course includes the famous 2016 when Hillary Clinton didn't visit Wisconsin, you don't see much evidence that they win the vote by county, and you don't see a change in turnout in general.

There are a couple of exceptions: John McCain and Barack Obama. There's some evidence that they actually gained more votes in 2008 — less than a percentage point per visit — but that's a big deal, especially in potentially close states like Wisconsin.

But there's no clear evidence that visiting candidates like Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton, in other states in 2016, really helps. There's one notable exception: when they visit more competitive counties — counties where the vote was split last time — where neither candidate won by more than 10 percentage points.

There is certainly evidence that candidates including Clinton and Trump (both times) and even Biden in 2020 did in fact persuade some voters in those counties, so overall it doesn't have much of an effect, but if you go to the right places it could make a difference.

AC: You've mentioned 2016 a few times. That year is pretty infamous in Wisconsin. Hillary Clinton didn't visit. Do you know why she didn't visit and if that translated into a lack of enthusiasm from Wisconsin voters?

CD: It's worth noting that Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the first candidate not to visit Wisconsin since 1972, though she didn't visit there at all. And while I don't think her visits were particularly helpful to the public, she did visit Pennsylvania quite a bit.

So those who say she lost the entire election because she didn't visit Wisconsin are really exaggerating. Even if she had won Wisconsin, she would have needed Michigan and Pennsylvania. She went to both, especially Pennsylvania, and didn't win there either.

I think her failure to visit voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere, or her limited visits, was a signal that she wasn't taking them seriously. I think it reinforced the impression, fairly or not, to people across the country that the Clinton campaign took victory for granted, that she thought she had it all figured out, and that she wasn't taking Donald Trump very seriously. I think that was actually a very damaging message to people.

AC: Both President Biden and former President Donald Trump have been here multiple times campaigning. Why are they here, and do these campaign visits really matter?

CD: I don't think any candidate is going to make the mistake of not visiting Wisconsin in the near future. But I also think that visiting is important. It's unlikely to sway the vote, but let me say this — Clinton is probably a good example. If one candidate is visiting and your opponent is visiting and you don't visit, it creates an opportunity for the other side to control the local information environment and basically get your message across locally while the other side is silent.

So the effect of these visits may not be so much on vote numbers, but on negating any advantage that other candidates may have, without giving that advantage away entirely to them.

AC: If you look back at the 2020 election around the time of the pandemic, it was very different than it is now. Democrats were campaigning mostly virtually, and we thought that this might be what the future might look like. Now we're back to in-person visits, and Donald Trump is holding rallies. So what does the future of campaign visits look like?

CDThere were some innovations in the 2020 campaign out of necessity, at least on the Democratic side; Republicans did things differently. But you have to point out Joe Biden. He was labeled as being in his basement during the 2020 campaign. He was out of his basement by June. His travels were reduced, but by the fall he was making a significant number of campaign visits.

In 2020, he campaigned more than Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, but not much behind Donald Trump. He went out and did small events, so it seemed like a departure from what we normally associate with election events. That's a trend that will continue.

If Biden doesn't, the attacks against him will return, and the perception will strengthen, fair or not, that he is too old to run for office. If he can't run a normal campaign, maybe he can't run for office. Biden will want to fight that perception by traveling to Wisconsin and other states on the campaign trail.