GOVT

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GOVT

• CHAPTER 9
• CAMPAIGNS ELECTIONS

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Learning Objectives
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HOW WE ELECT CANDIDATES
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Types of Elections

• The general election is a regularly scheduled
  election held in even-numbered years on the
  Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
• A special election is held at the state or local
  level when voters must decide an issue before the
  next general election or when vacancies occur by
  reason of death or resignation.

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Types of Ballots

• Since 1888, all states have used the Australian
  ballot a secret ballot that is prepared,
  distributed, and counted by government officials
  at public expense.
• Most states use the party-column ballot which
  lists all of a partys candidates in a single
  column under the party label.
• Other states use the office-block ballot, which
  lists together all of the candidates for each
  office.

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Conducting Elections Counting Votes

• All local government units, such as cities, are
  divided into smaller voting districts, or
  precincts.
• An election board supervises the polling place
  and the voting process in each precinct.
• Representatives from each party, called poll
  watchers, are allowed into each polling place to
  make sure that the election is being run fairly
  and to avoid fraud.

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Presidential Elections and the Electoral College

• When citizens vote for president and vice
  president, they are voting for electors who will
  cast their ballot in the electoral college.
• The electors are selected during each
  presidential election year by the states
  political parties.
• Each state has as many electoral votes as it has
  U.S. senators and representatives. There are
  three electors from the District of Columbia.
• The candidate who receives the largest popular
  vote in a state is credited with all of that
  states electoral votes (a winner-take-all
  system).

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The Electoral College, cont.

• In December, after the general election, electors
  meet in their state capitals to cast their votes
  for president and vice president.
• A candidate must receive more than half of the
  538 electoral votes available. Thus, a candidate
  needs 270 votes to win.

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The Electoral College, cont.

• If no presidential candidate gets an electoral
  college majority (which has happened twice in
  1800 and 1824), then the House of Representatives
  votes, with each state delegation casting only a
  single vote.
• If no candidate for vice president gets a
  majority of electoral votes, the vice president
  is chosen by the Senate, with each senator
  casting one vote.

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HOW WE NOMINATE CANDIDATES
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Party Control Over Nominations

• Beginning in 1800, members of Congress who
  belonged to the two parties held caucuses to
  nominate candidates for president and vice
  president.
• The caucus system collapsed in 1824 it was
  widely seen as undemocratic.

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The Party Nominating Convention

• In 1832, both parties settled on a new method of
  choosing candidates for president and vice
  president - the national nominating convention.
• Those who attended the convention were called
  delegates, and they were chosen to represent the
  people of a particular geographic area.
• Delegates were typically appointed by local party
  officials, who gained their positions in ways
  that were less than democratic.
• Corruption in nominating conventions led
  reformers to call for a new way to choose
  candidates the primary election.

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Primary Elections

• An election in which voters go to the polls to
  decide among candidates who seek the nomination
  of their party.
• In a direct primary, voters cast their ballots
  directly for candidates.
• In an indirect primary, voters choose delegates,
  who in turn choose the candidates.
• The major parties use indirect primaries to elect
  delegates to the national nominating conventions
  that choose candidates for president and vice-
  president.

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Open Closed Primaries

• Closed primary only party members can vote to
  choose that partys candidates, and they may only
  vote in the primary of their own party.
• Open primary voters can vote for a partys
  candidates regardless of whether they belong to
  that party.

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NOMINATING PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES
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Presidential Primaries

• Most of the states hold presidential primaries,
  beginning early in the election year.
• In some states, delegates are chosen through a
  caucus/convention system other states use a
  combination of primaries and caucuses.
• Iowa is an early caucus state, while New
  Hampshire traditionally holds the first primary.
  

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Primaries The Rush to be First

• In 1988, a group of southern states created a
  Super Tuesday by holding their primaries on the
  same day in early March.
• The practice of front-loading primaries has
  gained momentum over the last decade.
• The rush to be first was particularly notable in
  the year or so preceding the 2008 presidential
  primaries.
• By 2007, about half the states had moved their
  primaries to earlier dates. Many states opted for
  February 5th, or Super-Super Tuesday as the
  date for their primaries.

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Caucuses

• An alternative to the primary system, the caucus
  is a party convention held at the local level
  that elects delegates to conventions at the
  county or congressional district level.
• These mid-level conventions then choose the
  delegates to the state convention, which finally
  elects the delegates to the national party
  convention.
• Twelve states choose national convention
  delegates through caucuses four states use
  caucuses to allocate some of the national
  convention delegates and use primaries to
  allocate the rest.

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National Party Conventions

• National conventions, held in late summer, are
  unique in Western democracies.
• Delegates adopt the partys platform and nominate
  the presidential and vice-presidential
  candidates.
• At one time, the conventions were often giant
  free-for-alls. As more states opted to hold
  presidential primaries, however, the drama of
  national conventions diminished.
• Today, convention activities are highly staged
  events.

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THE MODERN POLITICAL CAMPAIGN
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Responsibilities of the Campaign Staff

• Raise funds
• Get media coverage
• Produce and pay for political ads
• Schedule the candidates time effectively with
  constituent groups and potential supporters
• Convey the candidates position on the issues
• Conduct research on the opposing candidates
• Get the voters to go to the polls

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The Professional Campaign Organization

• With the rise of candidate-centered campaigns,
  the role of the political party in managing
  campaigns has declined.
• Professional political consultants now manage
  nearly all aspects of a presidential candidates
  campaign.
• Political consultants generally specialize in a
  particular area of the campaign, such as
  researching the opposition, conducting polls, or
  developing advertising.

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The Professional Campaign Organization, cont.

• At least half of the budget for a major political
  campaign is consumed by television advertising.
  Media consultants are pivotal members of the
  campaign staff.
• In recent years, the Internet has become a
  political playing field that is in some ways more
  important than any other.
• Internet fundraising grew out of an earlier
  technique, the direct mail campaign. Now, email
  messages can be sent at almost zero cost.

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Fund-raising on the Internet

• Internet fund-raising grew out of an earlier
  technique, the direct mail campaign.
• The cost of direct mailing, though, is well over
  a dollar, whereas the cost of each email message
  is essentially zero.
• In the 2004 presidential campaign, Howard Dean
  focused on collecting donations over the
  Internet.
• His campaign had raised about 50 million by the
  time he ceded the nomination to John Kerry.

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Fund-raising on the Internet, cont.

• Barack Obama took Internet fundraising to a new
  level during his 2008 presidential campaign.
• The Obama campaign recruited as many supporters
  as possible to act as fundraisers, soliciting
  contributions from friends and neighbors.
• In August 2008, the Obama campaign set a record,
  raising 66 million, the most ever raised in one
  month by a presidential campaign.
• Most of the 2.5 million people who donated to
  Obamas campaign had been contacted through the
  Internet.

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Targeting Supporters

• In 2004, President Bushs chief political
  adviser, Karl Rove, pioneered a technique known
  as microtargeting, which involved collecting as
  much information as possible about voters in a
  giant database and then filtering out various
  groups for special attention.
• This technique is entirely Web-based and uses
  information about peoples online behavior to
  tailor the advertisements that they see.
• This technique raises privacy concerns, and both
  Congress and the Federal Trade Commission have
  held hearings on the practice.

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Support for Local Organizing

• As with fund-raising, Obama took Web-based
  organizing to a new level his campaign used
  existing sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
• On YouTube, Obamas videos were viewed 50 million
  times, compared with McCains 4 million.
• Obamas own Web site, My.BarackObama.com,
  eventually racked up over a million members.

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WHAT IT COSTS TO WIN
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The Federal Election Campaign Act

• The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) was
  passed by Congress in 1971 in an effort to halt
  and prevent abuses in the ways that political
  campaigns were financed.
• The act restricted the amount that could be spent
  on mass media advertising, including TV.
• The act also limited the amount that candidates
  and their families could contribute to their own
  campaigns and required disclosure of all
  contributions and expenditures of more than 100.

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FECA Amendments in 1974

• Amendments that were passed in 1974 did the
  following
• Created the Federal Election Commission (FEC)
• Provided public financing for presidential
  primaries and general elections
• Limited presidential campaign spending
• Required disclosure of contributors and how funds
  were spent
• Limited contributions by individuals and groups

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Buckley v. Valeo

• In Buckley v. Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court
  declared unconstitutional a provision of the 1971
  act that limited the amount that each individual
  could spend on his or her own campaign.
• The Court held that this is protected by the
  First Amendment a candidate has a First
  Amendment right to engage in the discussion of
  public issues and vigorously and tirelessly to
  advocate his own election.

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The Rise of PACs

• The FECA allows corporations, labor unions, and
  special interest groups to set up national
  political action committees (PACs) to raise money
  for candidates.
• PACs can contribute up to 5000 per candidate in
  each election, but there is no limit on the
  amount of PAC contributions during an election
  cycle.

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Skirting the Campaign-Finance Rules

• Contributions to political parties were called
  soft money one of the loopholes in the federal
  laws.
• The FECA and its amendments did not prohibit
  individuals or corporations from making
  contributions to political parties.
• Contributors could make donations to the national
  parties to cover the costs of party activities
  such as registering voters, printing brochures,
  advertising, and holding fund-raising events.
• Soft dollars became the main source of campaign
  money in the 2000 presidential race.

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Skirting the Campaign-Finance Rules, cont.

• Another loophole in the federal laws was that
  they did not prohibit corporations, labor unions,
  or special interest groups from making
  independent expenditures expenditures for
  activities that are not coordinated with those of
  a candidate or political party.
• These groups could wage their own issue
  campaigns, as long as they did not say to vote
  for a particular candidate.

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The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002

• The new law banned the contributions to national
  political parties known as soft money.
• It also regulated campaign ads paid for by
  interest groups and prohibited any issue advocacy
  commercials within thirty days of a primary
  election or sixty days of a general election.
• The 2002 act set the amount that an individual
  can contribute to a federal candidate at 2,000
  and the amount that an individual can give to all
  federal candidates at 95,000 over a two-year
  election cycle.
• Individual contributions to state and local
  parties cannot exceed 10,000 per year, per
  individual.

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Constitutional Challenges to the 2002 Law

• In December 2003, the Supreme Court upheld nearly
  all clauses of the act in McConnell v. Federal
  Election Commission.
• In 2007, however, the Court held that restricting
  all TV ads paid for by corporate or union
  treasuries during a particular timeframe amounted
  to censorship of political speech.

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Independent Expenditures After 2002

• A major attempt to exploit loopholes in the 2002
  act was the establishment of 527 independent
  committees.
• During the 2004 election cycles, 527 committees
  spent about 612 million to advocate positions.
• By 2008, 527 committees began to decline in
  relative importance due to the creation of the
  501(c)4 organizations.
• A 501(c)4 could, according to some lawyers, make
  limited contributions directly to campaigns and
  could conceal the identity of its donors.
• A ruling on the legality of this technique has
  yet to be issued.

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The Closeness of Recent Elections
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The 2000 Presidential Elections

• In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote by 540,000
  votes but on election night, the outcome in
  Florida was deemed too close to call.
• There was a great deal of controversy over the
  types of ballots used, and some of the counties
  in Florida began to recount ballots by hand.
• The issue that ultimately came before the US
  Supreme Court was whether manual recounts of some
  ballots and not others violate the Constitutions
  equal protection clause.

Here, Florida officials attempted to see if the
chads in the voting punch cards had been
clearly punched or not.
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The 2004 Presidential Elections

• The 2004 presidential election was another close
  race, with President Bush defeating Democratic
  challenger John Kerry by just 35 electors.
• In contrast to the situation in 2000, though,
  Bush won the popular vote in 2004 by a 2.5
  percentage point margin.

• The elections were decided by the closely
  contested vote in Ohio, which had early on been
  viewed as a battleground state a state where
  voters were not clearly leaning toward either
  major candidate leading up to the elections.

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The 2008 Presidential Elections

• At times during the campaign, the presidential
  contest appeared to be close but the financial
  panic that struck on September 15 tipped the
  elections decisively in Obamas favor.
• Obamas popular vote margin over John McCain was
  about 7.2 percentage points, nearly a 10 point
  swing to the Democrats from the elections of
  2004.
• With approximately 52.9 of the popular vote,
  Obama was the first Democrat to win an absolute
  majority (over 50) of the popular vote since
  Jimmy Carter did so in 1976.

• While the results of the 2008 election did not
  constitute a landslide, if the voters in 2012
  believe that Obamas presidency has been a
  success, he may win a true landslide that year,
  as Reagan did in 1984.

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POLITICS ON THE WEB

• www.commoncause.org
• www.fec.gov
• www.opensecrets.org
• moneyline.cq.com/pml/home.do
• www.vote-smart.org
• www.4ltrpress.cengage.com/govt