A Model of Primary Voter Behavior

This article develops and tests a model of voter behavior in a primary election. The model integrates several schools of thought that have tried to explain voter behavior; it is tested by predicting the behavior of respondents based on the model, and then validating the results with the actual behavior of the respondents. Results obtained here provide a prediction rate of 90 percent correctly classified. The article then compares the explanatory and predictive power of the model to models that use demographic and political involvement data. A significant part of political marketing is candi-dates spending of money and time to promote themselves during an election. Thus it has become increasingly important to understand why voters be-have the way they do, rather than merely conduct polls that indicate who is going to vote for whom and by what margin one candidate will win or lose an election; only by understanding voter behavior will candidates be able to spend their time and money