The partisan heuristic in low-information elections

Much literature has focused on the influence of partisan information on voter decision making. In this article, we attempt to gain a better understanding of this effect by comparing the survey responses of vote-choice questions that provide party labels and those that do not. We show that less educated survey respondents are substantially less likely to express a vote preference when party labels are not available to them. In addition, we also find evidence that those who can state a vote intention in nonpartisan races are less able to link their candidate choice to their party identification. We conclude by demonstrating that, when surveys do not provide partisan cues, the small number of respondents who are willing to state their vote intentions and the large number of those who appear to be guessing create great difficulties for pollsters trying to predict election results.