ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some simple models of voting behavior to simplify understanding the important decisions citizens make for multiple political races. Political science recognizes other factors that are at play in voter choices beyond party congruence. Broader considerations recognize sociotropic voting, a concept which stresses the state of the national economy as crucial in how one views the parties and politicians in power. In theory, voters are more likely to reward the party in power when the economy is going well and punish the incumbent party in power when the economy is going poorly. The method of observing the voting behavior of individuals by emphasizing what social and demographic characteristics they possess is the Columbia Model. When presidential candidates consider campaigning in states like California and New York, even though they are big Electoral College states, they often find that it is not worth the finite amount of resources they have to try and woo voters in these states.
