The USA: The 1990 Congressional Campaign

Abstract

Discussions of American election campaigns focus typically on the presidency. In this chapter we focus on congressional elections. As elections to legislative chambers they are more directly comparable to the parliamentary elections that are the concern of most of the other chapters of this volume. Each presidential election involves either a sitting president or does not, a vitally important contextual variable that, due to the constitutional limitation on presidential re-election, is often known years in advance. While this is true also for individual congressional seats (except that there are no limits to congressional service with some members serving for thirty years or more), each overall congressional election involves a mix of incumbent re-election bids and open seats. In contrast to the idiosyncratic nature of presidential elections in which the personalities, policies and records of two national candidates receive massive news coverage, congressional elections are the aggregation of many races most of which receive little individual media attention. As a result, in contrast to the highly individual nature of a presidential election, an election of the Congress, in which the effects of individual candidates and constituency circumstances can be expected to ‘average out,’ has the potential to be a contest between parties rather than simply between individual candidates and so is a better venue for assessing the role of party organisations in the campaign process and, perhaps, also for assessing trends in party support.

In researching this chapter the following were interviewed: Deb Amend, assistant campaign director, NRCC; Anita Dunn, communications director, DSCC; John Grotta, director of voter programmes, NRSC; John Maddox, director of the campaign division; NRCC.