From Policy to Personality: How Americans Evaluate Presidential Candidates, 1984–2020

This study examines how American voters’ articulated standards for evaluating presidential candidates have changed over time. Using open-ended “likes” and “dislikes” from the American National Election Studies (ANES) from 1984 to 2020, I analyze the criteria citizens invoke and how broadly they evaluate nominees in their own words. I extend ANES’s likes/dislikes coding – which classifies responses into nine evaluative categories spanning policy, party, candidate traits, governance, and other considerations – to recent elections using new human labels and a BERT-based classifier, enabling consistent classification across the full time series. The analysis focuses on three dimensions of expressed evaluation: evaluative content, evaluative breadth, and cross-party evaluative overlap. The results reveal a long-run transformation in articulated electoral judgment. Personal qualities expand sharply to become the dominant evaluative dimension, while policy-based considerations – especially domestic policy – decline in relative prominence. At the same time, evaluative breadth contracts, with respondents articulating fewer distinct criteria per candidate even after accounting for respondent characteristics and interview mode. Finally, cross-party comparison narrows as shared evaluative standards decline and become increasingly concentrated in personal qualities rather than policy. A party-evaluation placebo shows that these patterns are not reducible to generalized open-ended survey fatigue. These patterns indicate that contemporary articulated candidate evaluation is thinner, more personalized, and less anchored in shared programmatic benchmarks, suggesting a narrowing foundation for commensurable electoral accountability in American presidential elections.