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Module 2 - Chapter Eight
Campaigns and Elections: Deciding Who Governs
| Dye Textbook: Overview |
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Dye’s chapter eight focuses on several related dimensions of our political system: who are candidates/politicians and how do they run, who are the voters, and why do either bother to get involved in politics.
From the perspective of a politician, running for office with the expectation of winning a seat means several things:
These factors and others stimulate individuals to take the plunge into campaigns and elections.
What is required to take this plunge?
R
unning for office is unbelievably time-consuming. You probably need little convincing that running for national office is very time-consuming so let’s instead look at someone running for County Council in Anne Arundel County. A successful candidate might knock on 2,000 doors, attend dozens of local events (parades, fund-raisers, community meetings), spend time developing positions on issues, practice their "stump speeches," go to candidate forums, think about campaign issues like where to put up legal (and often, illegal) signs, what the signs should look like, what other campaign materials should look like, to whom it should be sent, and organize a team to assist with all of the above. The candidate will have to plead for money (unless rich and self-financing), test friendships (by asking for time and money from "friends" and relatives), and ignore his/her immediate family members non-campaign oriented needs for perhaps a year! ALL THIS TAKES MORE TIME THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE (I know because I did it!).
E
ver wonder how much it costs to mail campaign literature to voters? How about the cost of a cable TV spot? An ad in the Capital or the Sun?Let’s use the example of campaign literature such as a flyer.
Each single sheet, double-sided flyer you want to mail will cost you about three to twenty cents to print, depending on complexity, colors, paper quality, and size. Even with a bulk mail permit, it’s going to cost you about twenty cents to mail it. Naturally, you will have to pay to acquire the mailing list of voters and print labels which have to be affixed to the flyer (you might just pay a mailing company to do some of this…). Let’s estimate that your flyer will cost you 35 cents to mail.
How many will you mail? Let’s say your district has about 60,000 residents. Some of those will not be of voting age (about 25% - thus a total of 45,000 voting age residents). Some will not be registered voters (perhaps another 25% - now a total of 33,750).
AND REMEMBER, YOU NEED TO MAIL BOTH IN THE GENERAL AND THE PRIMARY ELECTIONS!
Mailings during the primary:
Okay, let’s say that 50% of the registered voters have registered in your party (16,875). Will you mail to all of them? YES, but only if you enough money. One mailing will cost you about $6,000. How many times should you mail? It depends on the quality of your competition (how viable is your opponent, how many times will he/she mail?). Let’s say you will do three mailings: that's $18,000.
How about TV spots? (Add another $4,000 for production and airtime). How about newspaper ads? (Add another $2,000). Are you going to do any polling? Focus groups? (Add another $1,500 for ‘research’). If you don’t have enough money to send something to everyone, you will have to cut down on the number of mailings, or just mail to those who have voted in previous primary elections – information provided on the voter registration sheets which you also bought….
How much have we spent thus far? $25,500, assuming three mailings to all eligible voters in your party. And guess what – that was just for the primary! Now the general requires that you double your effort as you must reach out to those NOT in your party!
In 1994, Thomas Redmond (who lost in 1998 running in District 3, the Pasadena area) spent over $100,000 to run for County Council, a job that pays less than $30,000 a year. Sounds like he should have paid for law school – at least the economic returns would have been clearer! That was a high total for a County Council race, but you could certainly see how costs could run up very easily.
- Friends and Family
A
s I implied above, to run for office you need lots of supporters. Friends, especially friends who have lots of other friends (and especially RICH friends), are essential. They will help with the door-to-door effort, wave the signs on the side of the road, and talk up your candidacy. They will attend your endless fund-raisers, and get others to come (or at least donate money). They will put your signs on their lawns and help you find other sign locations, and help you them when vandals bring them down.Family is even better, especially a very large extended family that lives close-by. They can act in the same manner as your friends, plus they may have the benefit of sharing your last name, thus increasing their own social status (unless you do something immoral or wrong, in which case they will disown you!).
OTHER FACTORS: See Dye’s list e.g., political entrepreneurship, temperament, communications skills, constitutional requirements, etc.
Dye also mentions other factors relevant to running and holding office. You should have some understanding of incumbency, campaign strategies, campaign financing, the nature of campaigns for a large race like President. I elaborate a bit on presidential campaigns below.
Presidential Elections
Presidential elections symbolize "on-years;" state and local elections usually occur in "off-years." Thus in Maryland, state and local elections were held in 1998, 2002 and will be held in 2006. Presidential elections were held in 2000 and 2004.
Presidential elections tend to be lavishly financed events orchestrated for the mass media. In our TV-addicted culture, a great deal of the money spent goes for TV ads, while direct mail is more rarely used. Perhaps as a result, voters are more energized and turnout in greater numbers than during state and local elections (often despite the fact that state and local governments have a much greater impact on their daily lives!).
Presidential elections usually involve both a primary election (unless there is a dominant candidate without opposition from within his/her party, as was the case with Clinton in 1996 and Bush in 2004) and a general election. Candidates with a primary contest have a central paradox to confront: how to appear sufficiently "pure" to primary supporters (who are more ideological and want clear stands on "litmus-test" issues like abortion, gun control, vouchers) while appearing sufficiently moderate during the general election.
Negative ads usually work in opposite ways in primary and general elections. During the primaries, negative ads try to depict opponents as too conciliatory or "wishy-washy" and unworthy of voter consideration; during the general elections, opponents want to depict others as too extreme and unable to provide the moderation needed to bring the country together.
Presidential candidates in competitive primaries are held hostage to the sequencing of state primary elections. They must do well in the earliest primaries to avoid being rejected out-of-hand. Thus, politicians will spend a lot of time in Iowa and New Hampshire hoping to increase their name recognition in the two states with the earliest elections (although the Iowa affair is a less "pure" election than in New Hampshire and is sometimes circumvented by candidates lacking support in Iowa). Failure to do sufficiently well in these two states spells an early end to a campaign (as money tends to dry up very quickly).
From 1952 until 1992, no one had been elected President without a victory in
New Hampshire first. Bill Clinton broke that record in 1992, winning the
Presidency after finishing a close second in the Democratic primary here.
Former Senator Bill Bradley, in 2000 the only declared opponent to Vice President Al Gore
for the Democratic nomination for President, needed to do well enough in New Hampshire or simply "pack-it-up." How well
was well enough? That depended on expectations: if Gore
was expected to win in a landslide (say 75% to 25%), but only mustered a 60% victory, Bradley’s forces
would be invigorated and continue to other states.
(Perhaps ominously, Gore won, but only by a 54% to 46% margin, perhaps spelling
out the lackluster support he would receive later in the general election).
Some states, like California, have moved up the time of their primaries to fall not long after New Hampshire. This means that candidates would have to have a LOT of MONEY available very early in the campaign for BIG MEDIA markets (where the only hope of voter contact is via TV).
The general election is somewhat different since all states vote on the same day. The dynamics of the Electoral College will make candidates concentrate on those states with the largest number of electoral college votes in which they have a competitive race. This means that candidates will ignore states where their polling shows them hopelessly behind; they will spend less (if not ignore) states where they seem securely ahead. Since the Electoral College votes are (with only two exceptions in Nebraska and Maine) "winner-take-all," what is crucial is winning in competitive states (where polling shows the margins of difference between the Democratic and Republican candidates as five percent or less). A 51% victory gains the winner all the Electoral College votes.
Here are the results from the 2000 elections: Blue states were won by Gore, red by Bush.
Here are the state by state breakdowns for the 2000 elections.