AP – Elections and Campaigns

Enduring questions

• How have primaries and general election campaigns changed over the past century and a half?

• What matters most in deciding who wins presidential and congressional elections?

• What are valence issues, and why do average citizens tend to vote retrospectively?

• Do elections really make a difference in what laws get passed?

Presidential vs Congressional Campaigns

• People tend to vote in heavier numbers in presidential races than congressional (off-year elections)

• Differences:– 1. Presidential races are more competitive than those

for the House of Representatives; in a presidential race, the winner gets usually less than 55% of the two-party vote; a typical House incumbent wins with over 60% of the vote. What is an incumbent? Most years, over 90% of all House incumbents are reelected – in 1988 and 1998, over 98% retained their seats!!

Differences (continued)

• 2. Low voter turnout in House races during off-years – around 36% of the voting age population – and this means that candidates must be appealing to the more motivated and partisan voters

• 3. Members of Congress get credit for doing things for their constituents that a president cannot – bridge building, a dam, highway construction. They visit their districts regularly and send letters to their constituents.

Differences (continued)

• 4. A candidate for Congress can deny that he/she is responsible for “the mess in Washington” – even incumbents. Incumbents tend to denounce the very Congress they are a part of. Presidents cannot get away with this, and rightly or wrongly, , he is often held responsible for whatever has gone wrong, not only in government, but in the nation as a whole.

Coattails

• What is meant by coattails?

• At one time, popular presidential candidates could help congressional candidates in his own party, but there has been a sharp decline in the value of presidential coattails. Some political scholars doubt that they even exist any more.

Running for president

• Journalist David Broder has spoken about “The Great Mentioner” – this is a first step – to be mentioned as someone of presidential caliber

• How?– Ronald Reagan traveled the country making speeches for

General Electric– Name recognition – John Glenn was a famous astronaut prior

to declaring for the presidency in 1984– Being identified with a major piece of legislation – former

Senator Bill Bradley was known as the architect of the Tax Reform Act of 1986

– Once mentioned, some spend 4-6 years running for the office

Money

• One reason running takes so long is money – it takes a long time to build the necessary money and campaign organization.

• Here, PACs play a large role in raising money• PAC = Political Action Committee (a committee

of a corporation, labor union, or other special interest group – they can give up to $5,000)– An example of a PAC would be EMILY’s list. This is a

PAC that gives large amounts of money to liberal, pro-abortion women candidates. EMILY = Early Money is Like Yeast (the rationale is that getting early money to the candidates, they will stand a better chance)

Organization

• Raising and accounting for money requires a staff of fund-raisers, lawyers, and accountants. Also needed is a press secretary, travel scheduler, pollster, advertising specialist, direct-mail company and a large number of volunteers.

Strategy and themes

• Questions– What tone should the campaign have?– What theme can I develop?– What should be the timing of the campaign?– Whom should you target?

Primary vs General Campaigns

• To win the nomination, you must mobilize political activists who will give money, do volunteer work, and attend local caucuses.

• To motivate them, you must be more liberal (to the left) if you are a Democrat and more conservative (to the right) of you are a Republican

Two kinds of campaign issues

• Position Issue: One in which the rival candidates have opposing views on a question that divides voters – for example, in the 2000 election, G.W. Bush wanted people to put some of their Social Security money into private savings accounts. Al Gore opposed it.

• Valence Issue: Which candidate seems most closely linked to a universally shared view – in 1968 Richard Nixon seemed to be more supportive of anti-crime measures than his rival; in 1984 Ronald Reagan seemed more closely identified with a strong economy than Mondale.

Kinds of elections

• General Election: Vote for the candidates who were chosen in the primary

• Primary Election: chose candidates

– Closed primary: have to be registered with that party to vote

– Open primary: any one can vote

– Blanket primary: vote for all candidates of a party

– Runoff primary: election to decide a tie

• In 1981 the Supreme Court ruled that political parties, not state legislatures, have the right to decide how delegates to national conventions are selected – in this case, the state of Wisconsin could not retain an open primary if the national Democratic party objected (Democratic Party v La Follette, 1981)

Television, Debates and Direct Mail

• Once, political campaigns involved parades, big rallies, “whistle-stop” train tours and shaking hands outside factories and near shopping centers.

• Today, TV is a major factor. There are two ways to use television – by running paid advertisements and by getting on nightly news broadcasts. In the language of campaigners, short TV ads are called spots, and a campaign activity that appears on a news broadcast is called a visual

TV debates

• 1st was Kennedy and Nixon in 1960• In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson refused to

debate Barry Goldwater

• Debate missteps: Gerald Ford in 1976 erroneously implied that Poland was not part of the Soviet bloc – for days the press dwelt on this. In 1980 Ronald Reagan said that trees cause pollution.

1960 debate

1976 debate

2004 debate

Direct Mail and Internet

• “The List” – list of political contributors

• Internet – In 2000 John McCain and Bill Bradley raised lots of money via the Internet. They both lost, but the Internet as a means of accessing money is here to stay

• In 2004, Democrat candidate Howard Dean raised far more money than his opponents by use of the Internet

Campaign Finance Rules

• Following the 1972 Watergate break-in of the Democratic headquarters by men hired by President Nixon’s campaign staff, it was revealed that many individuals and corporations had been making illegal contributions –to both parties.

• To prevent these abuses, Congress created the FEC (Federal Election Commission) in 1974, which set restrictions on political spending.– Individual contributions could not exceed $1,000 to any

candidate in any election per year or $20,000 per year to a national party committee or $5,000 to a PAC (political action committee)

Hard money and soft money

• Hard Money: donations given to a candidate directly

• Soft Money: donations given to the party in order to avoid Federal Regulations

Effects of the 1974 reforms

• 1. Vast increase in the amount of money spent by special interests – PACs have grown from several hundred in 1977 to over three thousand in 1998 with spending increasing from $25 million to over $200 million

• 2. Control of campaign money has shifted away from the political parties and toward individual candidates

• 3. The reforms give an advantage to the wealthy candidates• 4. The reforms give an advantage to candidates with strong

ideological appeal – abortion, gun control, death penalty, school prayer, etc

• 5. Candidates who start late in a campaign are penalized, because fund-raising takes a long time. Incumbents know this, so they spend their time in office accumulating a huge war chest

• 6. The reforms help incumbents and hurt challengers

Buckley v Valeo (1976)

• Brought about by a New York senator

• Question: Did the limits placed on electoral expenditures by the FEC and related provisions of the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and association clauses?

Buckley v Valeo (1976)

• 2 conclusions by the court:– 1. Restrictions on individual contributions to political

campaigns and candidates did not violate the First Amendment since the limitations “enhance the integrity of our system of democracy” by guarding against unscrupulous practices

– 2. Restriction of independent expenditures in campaigns, the limitation on spending by candidates from their own personal or family resources, and the limitation on total campaign expenditures did violate the First Amendment.

McCain-Feingold Bill

• Banned “soft money”• Doubled the amount of “hard money’ that

individuals could contribute to state parties for use in federal campaigns – from $5,000 to $10,000

• Strengthened the current ban on foreign contributions

• More timely disclosure of independent expenditures

McCain-Feingold Bill

• Sounds good, but no sooner did it take effect, interest groups found a loophole – a specific section in the U.S. Tax Code: these are called 527s (named after the section from the tax code)

Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission (2010)

• The United States Supreme Court held that the First Amendment prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation. The principles articulated by the Supreme Court in the case have also been extended to for-profit corporations, labor unions and other associations.

Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission (2010)

• The United States District Court for the District of Columbia held that §203 of BCRA applied and prohibited Citizens United from advertising the film Hillary: The Movie.

Citizens United V. Federal Election Commission (2010)

• The Supreme Court reversed this decision, striking down those provisions of BCRA that prohibited corporations (including nonprofit corporations) and unions from making independent expenditures and "electioneering communications"

527s

• A 527 group, named after a section of the United States tax code, is a tax-exempt organization that is created primarily to influence the nomination, election, appointment or defeat of candidates for public office. Although candidate committees and political action committees are also created under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, the term is generally used to refer to political organizations which are not regulated by the Federal Election Commission or a state elections commission and not subject to the same contribution limits as PACs.

527s

• A 527 group is permitted to be exempt from federal expenditures. Anyhow, these unregulated contributions are frequently abused. Because 527 organizations are not regulated by the Federal Elections Commission, they may not make expenditures to directly advocate the election or defeat of any candidate for federal elective office.

527s

• Many 527s are run by special interest groups and used to raise unlimited amounts of money to spend on issue advocacy and voter mobilization. The line between issue advocacy and candidate advocacy is the source of heated debate and litigation.

527s

• Examples of 527s include Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Texans for Truth, The Media Fund, America Coming Together, the Moveon.org Voter Fund, the Progress for America Voter Fund, and the November Fund.

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What decides an election?

What decides an election?

• 1. Party• 2. Issues – especially the economy• 3. Prospective voting – this means “forward looking”;

casting our ballots for the person we think has the best ideas for handling these matters

• 4. Retrospective voting – involves looking into the past and then voting for the party that we like based on how they handled things in the past. This one is crucial – in 1980, Ronald Reagan was voted in because voters wanted an alternative to Jimmy Carter – those who voted for Reagan based on his philosophy were voting prospectively

What decides an election?

• 5. The Campaign

• 6. Finding a winning coalition

Election Outcomes

• Party Realignments – three examples are clearest: 1860, 1896 and 1932

• 1860 – divided over slavery

• 1896 – the divisive issue was economic

• 1932 – realignment was based on depression

Current shifts

• The South tends to be more Republican than Democrat – from 1972-1996, the South was more Republican than the nation as a whole. The proportion of white southerners describing themselves as “strongly democratic” fell from more than one-third in 1952 to about one-seventh in 1984

• Also, in the South, there has been an increase in independents

Electoral map of 2004

Popular election 2004 by county

Party decline

• The proportion of those who identified with one of the political parties has declined from 1960-1980

• With this, there has been an increase in split-ticket voting• In 1988 more than half of all House Democrats were

elected in districts that voted for George Bush for president. The ticket splitting was the greatest in the South

• In the 19th century, ticket-splitting was almost unheard of – voters were given a ballot by the party of his choice (this is called the party column or “Indiana” ballot

Party Decline

• The “Indiana” ballot was replaced around the turn of the century by progressives. The replacement was the Office-bloc or “Massachusetts” ballot, which listed all the candidates running for a specific office

Election trivia

Election trivia

• Only two men have been elected president by the House of Representatives after failing to win a majority in the electoral college?

Election trivia

• Only Democratic senator to be the running mate of a Republican presidential candidate?

Election trivia

• Candidates for president who received more popular votes than his opponent, but was not elected?

Election trivia

• Only person to serve as vice president and president without having been elected to either position?

Election trivia

• Person who won the most popular votes – 61.7%?

Election trivia

• President who won the most electoral votes – 525?

Election trivia

• First woman to run for national office on a major-party ticket?

Example of partisan characterizations

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterizations

Examples of partisan characterization

Examples of partisan characterization

Examples of partisan characterization

Examples of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

Example of partisan characterization

If animals could do political ads – “Cynthia McKinney eat your

heart out”

If animals could do political ads-”Politics bores me”

If animals could do political ads- “Bribery is highly effective”

If animals could do political ads’”home heating costs are going up”

If animals could do political ads- “stretching the truth in an

election is inevitable”

If animals could do political ads’”Politics

makes strange bedfellows”

If animals could do political ads-”We’re gonna lick the opposition good this year!”

If animals could do political ads – “Trust me”

If animals could do political ads – “End global warming”

If animals could do political ads- “Happy days are here again”

Sleeping Giant

• Reference to the Hispanic vote

• Where is the Hispanic vote concentrated?

• They represent what percent of the votes?

Election slang

• October Surprise– 1988– 2000– 2004– 2008

A contemporary interpretation of “We shall Overcome” AKA border entrepreneurship