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Chapter 14: The Campaign Process
I Roots of Modern Political Campaigns
No political campaigns are the same; the players change, the political landscape evolves, and
even the rules change from time to time.
Most electoral contests are similar in structure, consisting of some form of nomination campaign,
and a general election.
A The Nomination Campaign
1. Nomination campaign—the part of a political campaign aimed at winning a primary
election.
2. The nomination campaign begins as soon as the candidate has decided to run—
sometimes years prior to the official announcement—and it ends at the party convention.
3. During the nomination campaign the candidate targets the leaders and activists who
choose nominees in primaries or conventions.
4. Party leaders are concerned with electability, while party activists are often ideologically
and issue oriented, a candidate must appeal to both bases.
5. The nomination campaign is a critical time for gaining and maintaining an aura of
support, both within the party and with the larger electorate.
6. A danger in the early nomination campaign is to try and appeal too much to the party and
move to far to the right or the left and appear too extreme to the electorate.
B The General Election Campaign
1. General election campaign—the part of a political campaign aimed at winning a general
election.
2. Candidates must seek the support of interest groups and a majority of voters and decide
on the issues they will emphasize.
3. When courting interest groups a candidate seeks both money and endorsements.
4. Candidates try to avoid controversy in their selection of slogans and some openly eschew
ideology.
5. The clever candidate tries to find a slogan that cannot be lampooned easily.
6. A variety of issues influence candidates’ positions and core issues, including personal
conviction, party platform, and experience in a certain area.
7. Candidate also use public opinion polling to gauge whether the issues that they care about
are issues that the voters care about.
II The Key Players: The Candidate and the Campaign Staff
1. Most observers agree that the most important aspect of any campaign is the quality of the
candidate and the attributes of the campaign team.
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A The Candidate
1. Candidates run for office for any number of reasons, including personal ambition, the
desire to promote ideological objectives or pursue specific public policies, or simply
because they think that they can do a better job than their opponents.
B The Campaign Staff
1. Paid staff, political consultants and dedicated volunteers work behind the scenes to
support the candidate.
2. Collectively they plan general strategy, conduct polls, write speeches, craft the
campaign’s message, and design the strategy for communicating that message in the form
of television advertisements, radio spots, Web sites, and direct mail pieces.
Volunteer Campaign Staff
1. Volunteers are the lifeblood of every national, state, and local campaign.
2. Voter canvass—the process by which a campaign reaches the individual voters, either by
door-to-door solicitation or by telephone.
3. Get out the vote (GOTV)—a push at the end of a political campaign to encourage
supporters to go to the polls.
The Candidate’s Professional Staff
1. Campaign manager—the individual who travels with the candidate and coordinates the
many different aspects of the campaign.
Key paid positions in addition to the campaign manager:
2. Finance chair—a professional who coordinates the fund-raising efforts of the campaign.
3. Pollster—a professional who takes public opinion surveys that guide political campaigns.
4. Direct mailer—a professional who supervises a political campaign’s direct mail fundraising strategies.
5. Communications director—the person who develops the overall media strategy for the
candidate, blending free press coverage with paid TV, radio, and mail media.
6. Press secretary—the individual charged with interacting and communicating with
journalists on a daily basis.
7. Internet Team—the campaign staff that makes use of Web-based resources to
communicate with voters, raise funds, organize volunteers, and plan campaign events.
8. Fund raising remains the most valuable use of the Internet by political campaigns.
Candidate’s Hired Guns
1. Campaign consultants—a private sector professional who sells to a candidate the
technologies, services, and strategies required to get the candidate elected.
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2. Media consultants—a professional who produces candidates’ television, radio, and print
advertisements.
III Coverage of the Game: The Media’s Role in Defining the Playing Field
1. What voters actually see and hear of the candidate is primarily determined by the paid
media, free media, and the new media.
2. Paid media—political advertisements purchased for a candidate’s campaign.
3. Fee media—coverage of a candidate’s campaign by the news media.
4. New media—New technologies, such as the Internet, that blur the line between paid and
free media sources.
A Paid Media
1. Positive ad—advertising on behalf of a candidate that stresses the candidate’s
qualification, family, and issue positions, without reference to the opponent
2. Negative ad—advertising on behalf of a candidate that attacks the opponent’s platform or
character.
3. Contrast ads—ad that compares the records and proposals of the candidates with a bias
towards the sponsor.
4. Spot ad—television advertising on behalf of a candidate that is broadcast in sixty, thirty,
or ten second duration.
5. Inoculation ad—advertising that attempts to counteract an anticipated attack from the
opposition before the attack is launched.
B Free Media
1. Candidates have little control over what advertisements are run (paid media), they have
little control over how journalists will cover their campaign and convey it to voters.
C The New Media
1.
2.
3.
4.
Candidate are more able to reach voters more quickly than at any other time in history.
One plus of the new media is a candidate’s ability to employ a rapid response.
The first use of the internet in national campaigning came in 1992.
The newest internet tools are social networking sites like facebook and myspace.
D Campaign Strategies to Control Media Coverage
In an effort to obtain favorable coverage, candidates and their media consultants use various
strategies to attempt to influence the press.
1. The campaign staff members often seek to isolate the candidate from the press, thus
reducing the chances that reporters will bait a candidate into saying something that
might damage his or her cause.
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2. The campaign stages media events: activities designed to include brief, clever quotes
called sound bites and staged with appealing backdrops so that they will be covered
on the television news and in the newspaper.
3. Campaign staff and consultants have cultivated a technique termed spin—they put
forward the most favorable possible interpretation for their candidate ( and the most
negative for their opponent) on any circumstance occurring in the campaign, and they
work the press to sell their point of view or at least to ensure that it is included in the
reporters’ stories.
4. Candidates have found ways to circumvent the news media by appearing on talk
shows such as Oprah and Larry King live, where they have an opportunity to present
their views and answer questions in a less critical forum.
5. Candidate debates—forum in which political candidates face each other to discuss
their platforms, records, and character.
6. The face to face presidential debate did not occur until 1960 and did not become a
regular part of presidential campaigns until 1980s
7. In most cases debates do not alter the course of a presidential election but rather
increase knowledge about the candidates and their respective personalities and issue
positions, especially among voters who had not previously paid attention to the
campaign.
IV Rules of the Game: Campaign Finance
1. Successful campaigns require a great deal of money.
2. Between the Democrats and Republicans nearly 2 billion dollars was raised in the 2008
elections.
A The Road to Reform
1. 1907 the Tillman Act prohibited corporations from making direct contributions to
candidates for public office.
2. The Corrupt Practice Acts (1910, 1911, 1925), Hatch Act (1939), and the Taft-Hartley
Act (1947) all attempted to regulate the manner in which federal candidates finance their
campaigns and to some extent limit the corrupting influence of campaign spending.
3. 1970’s Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) and its later amendments established
disclosure requirements, established the Presidential Public Funding Program, which
provides partial public funding for presidential candidates who meet certain criteria, and
created the Federal Election Commission (FEC), an independent federal agency tasked
with enforcing the nation’s election laws.
4. March 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA)
5. The Supreme Court’s ruling in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission (2003) means
that federal government is now regulated by the federal government under the terms of
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the BCRA which supplanted most of the provisions of the Federal Election Campaign
Act.
6. The BCRA outlaws unlimited and unregulated contributions to parties, known as soft
money, and limits the amounts that individuals, interest groups, and political parties can
give to candidates for president, US senator, and US representative.
7. The goal of all limits is the same: to prevent any single group or individual from gaining
too much influence over elected officials, who naturally feel indebted to campaign
contributors.
8. Soft money—virtually unregulated money funneled by individuals and political
committees through state and local parties.
Individual Contributions
1. The maximum allowable contribution under federal law for congressional and
presidential elections was 2,300 per election to each candidate in 2007-2008, with
primary and general elections considered separately.
2. Individuals in 2007-2008 were also limited to a total of $108,200 in gifts to all
candidates, political action committees, and parties combined per two year election cycle.
3. These limits will rise at the rate of inflation in subsequent cycles.
Political Action Committee (PAC) Contributions
1. When interest groups such as labor unions, corporations, trade unions, and ideological
issue groups seek to make donations to campaigns, they must do so by establishing
political action committees.
2. Political action committees—federally mandated, officially registered fund raising
committee that represents interest groups in the political process.
3. Under the current rules a PAC can give no more that $5,000 per candidate per election
and $15,000 each year to each of the units of the national parties.
4. PACS have influence disproportionate to that of individuals because donations from a
small number of PACs make up such a large proportion of campaign war chests.
5. Read pg 512-513.
Political Party Contributions
1. In competitive races, the parties may provide 15-17 percent of their candidates’ total war
chests.
Member to Candidate Contributions
1. In congress and in state legislatures, well-funded, electorally secure incumbents often
contribute campaign money to their party’s needy incumbent and non-incumbent
legislative candidates.
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Candidates’ Personal Contributions
1. Buckley v. Valeo (1976) the Supreme Court ruled that no limit could be placed on the
amount of money candidates can spend from their own families’ resources since such
spending is considered a First Amendment right of Free Speech.
Public Funds
1. Public funds—donations from the general tax revenues to the campaigns of qualifying
presidential candidates.
2. Only presidential candidates (and a handful of state and local contenders) receive public
funds.
3. Matching funds—donations to presidential campaigns from the federal government that
are determined by the amount of private funds a qualifying candidate raises.
V The Main Event: The 2008 Presidential Campaign
A The Party Nomination Battles
B The Democratic and Republican Conventions
C The Debates and the General Election Campaign
D Election Results and Analysis
VI Toward Reform: Campaign Finance and the 527 Loophole
1. Hard money—legally specified and limited contributions that are clearly regulated by the
Federal Election Campaign Act and by the Federal Election Commission
2. The most significant unintended result of the BCRA in 2004 was the emergence of
political entities known as 527 political committees—the numbers come fomr the
provisions of the Internal Revenue tax code that establish their legal status.
3. 527 political committees—nonprofit and unregulated interest groups that focus on
specific causes or policy positions and attempt to influence voters.
4. According to the tax code 527s may not directly engage in advocacy for or against a
candidate, but they can advocate on behalf of political issues.
5. 501(c) (3) committees—nonprofit and tax-exempt groups that can educate voters about
issues and are not required to release the names of their contributors.
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Key Terms:
Campaign consultant, campaign manager, candidate debate, communications director, contrast
ad, direct mailer, finance chair, 501(c) (3) committees, 527 political committees, free media,
general election campaign, get out the vote (GOTV), hard money, inoculation ad, Internet team,
matching funds, media consultant, negative ad, new media, nomination campaign, paid media,
political action committee (PAC), pollster, positive ad, press secretary public funds, soft money
spot ad, voter canvass.