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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 candidates' spending of money and time to promote themselves during an election. Thus it has become increasingly important to understand why voters behave 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 most wisely. The purpose of this article is to develop and test a predictive model of voter behavior in a primary election.Sociologists have stressed that an individual's affiliation with groups of people in his/her social environment serves as the key determinant of his/her voting behavior (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944). Political scientists have focused on the influence of party affiliation and past voting behavior (Campbell et al. 1960). In addition, Newman (1981) has suggested a number of consumer approaches for predicting and explaining voter behavior. In formulating our model we developed a number of cognitive beliefs that may come from a number of sources, including the voter, word-of-mouth communication, and the mass media. We were interested in using the cognitive beliefs to predict and explain behavior, adding to the contributions of the sociologists and political scientists by using marketing-related domains to study primary voter behavior, and then comparing our model results to results generated from demographic and political involvement data.

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