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Political scientists have assumed that dividing the electorate into issue publics, on the basis of salient issues, leads to a better understanding of the relationships between issues and both candidate evaluations and electoral choice. This portrait accords nicely with the description offered by pluralists of the operation of the electoral arena. Our data suggest that, at least in 1972, the portrait is flawed. Using a variety of multivariate techniques we show that salience fails to sharpen the impact of issues and that electoral choice was, fundamentally, a question of candidate images.T his article tries to determine whether the division of the electorate into issue publics improves our ability to predict and understand electoral choice and candidate evaluations. We are concerned about this question because elected officials make