Week 8- Constitutional: Campaigns and Elections

Directions: View the video below (rough transcript provided) and then take the 10-question quiz. There is no time limit and you may attempt the quiz up to two times. Your highest score will be recorded.

Talking Points

• This week’s Weekly Constitutional is going to be a long one, folks, so stay with me as we explore campaigns and elections in the United States.
• Campaigns in the United States are unique in that running for office requires an individual effort. When a candidate decides to run for office, he or she must raise money and appeal to voters on the basis of his or her personality, character, values, embarrassing photos, and...lastly….his or her stance on the issues. This is not the case in most European countries where running for office is a party matter and voters vote for a party, not a person.
• Now, I’m sure it goes without saying that not all campaigns are created equal. Presidential and Congressional campaigns are quite different in that Presidential races are more competitive, with narrower margins of victory. There are other differences. Presidents are limited to two terms, so there isn’t really an incumbency advantage. Presidents have national power, but little local power and they tend to be held accountable for everything that flows from the nation’s capital.

• Meanwhile, Congressmen can take credit in their home states and districts for grants, projects, programs (what we call “pork”) and constantly remind their constituents of these achievements. Congressmen can also more easily detach themselves from the capitol and campaign against the Washington insiders.

• Now, what you did before running for office matters. If you were, say a member of Congress running for president, you would likely stress your sponsorship of significant and popular legislation. If you used to be a Governor, you would likely stress how great things were in your state when you were in charge. I would say that the advantage goes to former Governors who don’t have messy legislative records that can be picked apart by their opponents.

• Remember: there are two important parts to a presidential campaign. First you have to win your party’s nomination. Then you have to win the nation’s approval. The first part is called the primaries. The second part is the general election.

• If you want to win your party’s nomination, you have to appeal to the party activists and political elites, who tend to be more ideologically extreme than rank and file Americans. So to get their nod, you have to look like you’re really, really liberal if you’re a Democrat or really, really conservative if you’re a Republican.  

• This, of course, presents a problem because the party activists hardly represent the American electorate in general. Therefore, as a presidential candidate, you must be conservative or liberal enough to get nominated in the primaries, but mainstream enough to hold on to moderate voters in the general election.

• So when primary season is over and the national conventions have been held, we see a great race to the middle as general election campaigns begin and the candidates compete to appear the most moderate.

• Now, as you know, the White House is not won by the candidate with the most votes. Rather, it is won by the candidate with the most electoral votes. Because most of our 50 states are solidly red or blue, presidential campaigns do not invest a lot of resources in all 50 states. Instead, they focus their money and attention on purple states, which we lovingly refer to as battleground or swing states.

• Very sophisticated campaigns, such as the 2012 Barack Obama re-election campaign, take that a step further, using big data, analytics, and very targeted polling to determine how they’re doing, where they are doing it, where they are moving. In other words, it’s not enough to know that 51% of likely Florida voters support your candidate. Rather, you need more granular analysis of voter subgroups in the state so that you can microtarget your message and your strategy. That, my friends, is the new gold standard of presidential campaigns.

• All right, let’s switch gears and talk about money, or, more specifically, campaign finance -- the financing of campaigns. At the federal level, campaign finance law is enacted by Congress and enforced by the Federal Election Commission or FEC. Although most campaign spending is privately financed, public financing is available for qualifying candidates for President of the United States during both the primaries and the general election.

• Now, are you ready for this figure? In 2012, over six billion dollars was spent on congressional and presidential campaigns. SIX BILLION DOLLARS. Contrary to what that six billion dollar figure suggests, we do have campaign finance laws and limits, meant, of course, to reduce the influence of money on our political process [Huge ridiculous laugh]. But seriously, we do.

• However, I am not going to spend 20 minutes going through all of those laws and limits because (A) you can Google them and (B) they mean very little in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Citizens United v. FEC, in which the Court ruled that corporations have the same free speech rights as people and therefore the federal government cannot restrict their political expenditures, which have long been viewed as a form of political speech.

• So here’s what you need to know about campaign finance in the United States: The Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, that by donating to a political candidate, PAC, or interest groups, a person (or corporation or labor union) is exercising their right to political speech. They have also ruled that the federal government cannot limit independent expenditures, that is, money that goes towards electioneering efforts that ARE NOT COORDINATED with a campaign.

• However, the Federal Election Commission can absolutely limit how much individuals and organizations may contribute directly to political campaigns and political parties. Got it? Yeah, that’s okay. Me neither.

• All right, let’s spend like 30 seconds talking about elections themselves. Congress has set a national election day. It’s very easy to remember. Are you ready? It’s the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. This does not necessarily mean the "first Tuesday" because the first day of a month can be a Tuesday.

• Just about everything else is left to the states: voter eligibility, voter registration, primaries, early voting, absentee voting, the running of each state's electoral college, and the of running of state and local elections….all of that is left to the states.

• In the United States, we say that we have presidential elections and midterm elections. Every four years, we have a presidential election, but every two years we have Congressional elections. So when we’re having Congressional elections but no presidential election, we call that midterm elections.

• Midterms are important and are usually viewed as a reaffirming or revoking a presidential mandate. In other words, if the president’s party does well in the midterms, the election is viewed as reaffirming his or her mandate from the American people to strongly pursue his or her agenda. If the president’s party does poorly in the midterms, well, then, the president loses his or her mandate.

• Listen, there’s tons more stuff you should probably know about campaigns and elections, but this video is already running way too long and my throat is starting to hurt, so go read a book or something. And...good luck on your quiz!