Surrogate-in-Chief: Did Bill Clinton’s Campaign Visits Help (or Hurt) Hillary Clinton in 2016?

In this article, we examine the role that campaign visits by spouses and surrogates play in modern presidential campaigns. Specifically, we analyze the strategy and effectiveness of Bill Clinton’s campaign visits in 2016. Given the former president’s widespread name recognition and reputation as a legendary campaigner, we argue that he represents an ideal test case for determining whether the spouse of a presidential or vice presidential candidate can influence vote choice, via campaign visits. Our analysis indicates that Bill Clinton was, in fact, very active on the campaign trail in 2016 – making nearly as many visits as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. However, Bill Clinton mostly followed in Hillary Clinton’s footsteps on the campaign trail, giving him little opportunity to win over voters that she could not reach. His campaign visits also had no discernible effect on county-level voting, generally, in the 10 states to which he traveled. Yet, when we examine the effect of Clinton’s visits within states, we find that he had a positive and statistically significant effect on Democratic vote share in the battleground state of Florida. He had no such effect in the two states to which he traveled most often, however (North Carolina and Ohio). Overall, we find very limited evidence that campaign surrogates – and candidate spouses, specifically – can influence vote choice via their campaign visits. We discuss the implications of these findings for future research on the role of campaign surrogates, and their relevance to the 2020 presidential campaign.