Candidates have incentives to present themselves as strong partisans in primary elections, and then move “toward the center” upon advancing to the general election. Yet, candidates also face incentives not to flip-flop on their policy positions. These competing incentives suggest that candidates might use rhetoric to seem more partisan in the primary and more moderate in the general, even if their policy positions remain fixed. We test this idea by measuring ideological moderation in presidential campaign language. Using a supervised two-stage text analysis model, we find evidence that presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012 use more ideologically extreme language during primary campaigns, and then moderate their tone when shifting to the general election, with troubling implications for representation and accountability.

Recent scholarship in political science identifies emotions as an important antecedent to political behavior. Existing work, however, has focused much more on the political effects of emotions than on their causes. Here, we begin to examine how personality moderates emotional responses to political events. We hypothesized that the personality trait need for affect (NFA) would moderate the emotions evoked by disturbing political news. Drawing data from a survey experiment conducted on a national sample, we find that individuals high in NFA have an especially vivid emotional response to disturbing news—a moderating relationship that has the potential to surpass those associated with symbolic attachments.