The National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES) examines a wide range of political attitudes about candidates, issues and the traits Americans want in a president. It also has a particular emphasis on the effects of media exposure through campaign commercials and news from radio, television and newspapers. Additionally, it measures the effects of other kinds of political communication, from conversations at home and on the job to various efforts by campaigns to influence potential voters.
Joining the NAES team for the 2008 presidential election was Richard Johnston, a political scientist and expert on public opinion and voting. Johnston served as co-director of the National Annenberg Election Survey with Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Diana C. Mutz. In May 2009, Johnston rejoined the faculty of the department of political science at the University of British Columbia.
The NAES concluded another successful presidential campaign cycle with the completion of the final wave of the Internet panel survey on January 31, 2009. The telephone portion of the survey was completed on November 12, 2009 with a post-election panel. In total, NAES completed interviews with 57,967 adults in the United States by telephone prior to Election Day, and 3,768 were re-interviewed during the post-election telephone panel phase. The online panel survey completed 95,464 interviews across the five waves beginning in October 2007. While the telephone and panel surveys generally consisted of different questions, both surveys measured beliefs, attitudes, intentions and behaviors relevant to the 2008 presidential campaigns.
Since the completion of the survey, members of the NAES team have been analyzing the data for books, research articles and doctoral dissertations. This summer (2009) the data team will go through the process of cleaning and documenting the 2008 NAES for public release on the APPC website in spring 2010.
To give the NAES endowment the opportunity to rebuild, that survey will not be conducted in 2012 but will resume in 2016. We anticipate that the 2008 data set will be available to scholars in February 2010.