CHAPTER 9

Parties and Elections

The view from abroad

Two parties are too few Money buys power Campaigns and fundraising never end Advertising demeans the democratic process The Electoral College is an undemocratic anachronism

What the founders thought

Many of the founders had serious misgivings about political parties, associating them with division and strife But parties emerged immediately, the Federalists and Anti-federalists being the first party-like coalitions The Republican and Democratic parties have dominated the American scene since the mid19th century

Major realignments in the party system

After the Civil War, the Republican Party was the party of abolition and the North, the Democratic Party of the defeated South 1896, the Republican Party under its candidate William McKinley came to be seen as the party of industry, business interests, sound money, protectionism, the cities, and the North. Under William Jennings Bryans leadership, the Democratic Party stood for the interests of the southern and midwestern farm states, and for rural America versus urban America

The New Deal Coalition

1932, urban workers, blacks, and Jews and Catholics combined with the Solid South, whose support of the party had not wavered, became the New Deal coalition that swept Franklin Delano Roosevelt into the White House and gave the Democrats firm control over both houses of Congress

The Right Nation?

Some commentators have argued that the center of gravity of American politics has shifted to the right over the last generation, and that the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked the significant beginning of another party realignment Erosion of the New Deal Coalition; abandonment of the Democratic Party by southern voters This conservative tilt has meant that both parties engage in a competition for an increasingly large segment of the electorate that responds favorably to either fiscally or socially conservative messages and policies Others argue that the parties and the electorate have become increasingly polarized

Are two parties too few?

Two-party dominance is fundamentally due to the American electoral system that does not reward votes for minor parties and their candidates Third-party or independent candidates for the presidency have seldom received more than a fraction of the popular vote Figure 9.1 shows the extent of the main parties control of Congress since 1932

Criticisms
Two parties are too few to represent the vast range of interests that exist in American society. By discouraging the emergence of serious third party candidates the American electoral system, critics charge, denies an adequate voice to interests and values that would be represented in a multi-party system The Republican and Democratic parties are far more similar than different when it comes to crucial issues, particularly on matters of corporate power, the environment, and national security. The two-party system is, according to critics like Ralph Nader, really a one-party system masquerading as competition

What the criticisms overlook

Each party is, in fact, a broad coalition of interests and values that often cohabit uneasily The voting behavior and ideological leanings of lawmakers within the same party can be wideranging (see National Journal ratings, Box in text) The existence of multiple caucuses within Congress operates as the broad equivalent of a multi-party system in terms of providing organization and expression to a diversity of interests and ideas that could not be represented by two disciplined political parties

Candidate selection process

The decentralized method through which the parties candidates for office are chosen increases lawmakers independence and permits the representation of a greater range of interests and ideological views within each party in Congress Open and closed primary elections

Campaigning I: Money
The best democracy that money can buy? The amounts of money spent on election campaigns are without parallel Barack Obamas 2008 presidential campaign established broke all records for money raised and spent American (private and public money) v. European model (public money), with Canada somewhere in between

Money, cont
Election finance rules, www.opensecrets.org (Center for Responsive Politics) Political Action Committees (PACs) Matching funds 527 groups and issue ads What the courts have said about issue ad spending and the First Amendment (see box in text) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/poli

Campaigning II: media

Michael Barone: You might have been able to cover the 1980 presidential campaign in five rooms. But you could not cover the 2004 presidential campaign in 100 rooms. The political media have moved from centralized command-and-control toward a more decentralized networking model Old v. New media

Media, cont
Political advertising: the dominant role of television The shrinking sound-bite Targeting key markets Genres of political ads: www.livingroomcandidate.org The Persuaders, at Frontline www.pbs.org

Campaigning III: mobilization

Key role played by party activists Primaries and caucuses: see Table 9.1 The Electoral College: http://www.cspanclassroom.org/pdf/2012_electoral_map.p df Party activists tend to pull the party and its choice of presidential candidate in the direction of the partys more extreme ideological elements: see Figure 9.2

Mobilization, cont
Importance and methods of getting out the vote Republicans in 2004; Democrats in 2008 The rediscovery of retail politics

The American voter

A divided electorate Democratic Party advantage in number of party identifiers, but a large independent share of voters (see Figure 9.3) Weakening of some elements of the New Deal coalition (see Figure 9.4 and Table 9.2) The Gender Gap Class: working-class identifiers prefer the Democrats (see Figure 9.5)

Voting, cont
Hispanics favor the Democrats, but there are divisions within the Hispanic community (see Figure 9.6) The median voter: but party activists seem to have become more polarized (see Figure 9.7)

Voting, cont
Retrospective voting: The electorate is, V.O. Key argues, an appraiser of past events, past performances, and past actions. It judges retrospectively; it commands prospectively only insofar as it expresses either approval or disapproval of that which has happened before. Table 9.3

Voting, cont
Voters assessments of national security, crime, or political corruption are among the issues that candidates often use to frame their opponents record and on which voters arrive at assessments of the past performance of a candidate and a party Valence and position issues

A last word on voting

Some of the classic analyses of voter choice in the United States argue that valence issues and retrospective voting are quite rational, within the bounds of limited voter information, and that, in V.O. Keys words, voters are not fools.