Change and Continuity in the 2016 and 2018 Elections

John Aldrich, Jamie L. Carson, Brad T. Gomez, David Rohde

• Verlag: CQ Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781544356754
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Thema: Campañas políticas y elecciones

Since its first edition in 1980, Change and Continuity has been known for offering the best analysis and explanation of voting behavior in the most recent election and setting those results in the context of larger trends and patterns in elections studies. This top-notch author team meticulously and accessibly explains the National Election Studies data and analyzes its importance and impact.Known for its current scholarship and excellent use and display of data, the text covers the most recent presidential and Congressional elections, voter turnout, and the social forces, party loyalties, and prominent issues that affect voting behavior.The 2016 and 2018 Edition will include new material on the congressional elections 2018 and an updated conclusion reflecting on what those results mean for the future of American politics.

Part One The 2016 Presidential Election

Chapter One The Nomination Struggle

Presidential nomination campaigns are the contests through which the two major political parties in the United States select their presidential nominees. As they have done since 1832 (Democrats) and 1856 (Republicans), the delegates who are chosen to be seated at the national party conventions do the actual selecting. However, since about 1972, both parties have used public campaigns for popular support as a way of selecting and/or instructing most delegates to the convention on how they should vote. Many people think of these primary contests as formal elections, just like those in general elections in the fall. Whereas presidential primary elections are, indeed, run by the government, they are actually designed solely to help each political party select delegates to choose its presidential nominee, and that applies only to the roughly half of the states that use primary elections to select or instruct their delegates.¹ States that use the alternative means, caucus or convention procedures, instead of primaries (see what follows) do so without involving the government at all. Presidential nominations are thus a mixture of public and private selections, and they are conducted at the state level only, even though their ultimate outcome is to select the two major parties’ nominees for the only national offices that Americans elect.

In this, America is nearly unique. In almost no other country have the leaders of the major political parties’ leaders ceded so much control over candidate selection to the general public. While now and then there are primary elections run by political parties in other nations, they are rare, typically isolated to one or a few parties, and are often used only once or twice before being discarded. American nominations, on the other hand, have run this way for Democrats and Republicans since the 1970s and have become entrenched in the public’s and the political leaderships’ minds. It would be very difficult for a party to nominate someone the public did not support at near or actual majority levels in the primary season. The leadership has, in that sense, ceded its control over its own party to the general public.² In turn that has empowered the media who seek to inform the public and the many activists, supporters, and financial donors of the presidential nomination campaigns who provide the wherewithal for most candidates to have any chance of reaching the public to win their support.

The 2016 campaigns in many respects were like all of those since the 1970s, that is, in the era of the “new nomination system,” as we call it. As we shall see there were perhaps a surprising number of similarities between the two campaigns of 2016 and their predecessors. Most people, however, when they speak of 2016, talk with wonder about specific and individual aspects of the campaigns regardless of the similarities to other contests. They ask “How could someone like Donald J. Trump win the Republican nomination?” and (if they disliked the outcome) “Why couldn’t Republican leaders prevent his nomination?” On the Democratic side the question more often seemed to be “Why didn’t Hillary R. Clinton win nomination more easily and quickly instead of appearing unable to reach out to larger numbers of Democrats?” or (if the outcome was viewed as negative) “How could the party fail to nominate someone more at the heart of the Democratic Party and end up with someone who so epitomizes the ‘establishment’ in this anti-establishment year?” As we will see the answers to these questions are that the two parties’ campaigns largely unfolded in replication of the many and well-established continuities established since the empowering of the public and consequent loss of party leadership control over nominations. But it is the unique properties of the two winners, especially in comparison to their major party opponents, that made the two campaigns unlike previous ones and in sometimes very important ways.

In short, reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought about a new form of nomination campaign, one that required public campaigning for resources and votes. The new nomination system has shaped many aspects of all contests from 1972 onward, and we examine the similarities that have endured over its more than forty-year existence. Each contest, of course, differs from all others because of the electoral context at the time (e.g., the state of the economy or of war and peace) and because the contenders themselves are different. And in the new nomination system, the rules change to some degree every four years as well. The changes in rules and the strategies that candidates adopt in light of those rules combine with the context and contenders to make each campaign unique.

Who Ran

A first important regularity of the nomination campaign is that when incumbents seek renomination, only a very few candidates will contest them, and perhaps no one will at all. In 1972, although President Richard M. Nixon did face two potentially credible challengers to his renomination, they were so ineffective that he was essentially uncontested. Ronald Reagan in 1984, Bill Clinton in 1996, George W. Bush in 2004, and Barack Obama in 2012 were actually unopposed. They were so, in large part, because even a moderately successful president is virtually undefeatable for renomination. Conversely Gerald R. Ford in 1976 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 each faced a most credible challenger.³ Ford had great difficulty defeating Reagan, and Carter likewise was strongly contested by Democratic senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts.⁴ Of course Obama was ineligible to run for a third term in 2016, and so there was no incumbent running in either party. President Trump may well run for reelection in 2020 or perhaps join the few incumbents who chose not to run for reelection even though eligible, such as Harry S Truman in 1952 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968.

The second major regularity in the nomination system concerns the contests—such as those in 2016—in which the party has no incumbent seeking renomination. In such cases a relatively large number of candidates run for the nomination. For our purposes we count candidates as “running” if they were actively campaigning on January 1, 2016 (or entered even later, although none did this time). That definition means that there were twelve major candidates who sought the Republican Party’s nomination in 2016. There were actually quite a few more in 2015—by most counts seventeen—although that means that five were sufficiently “defeated” (or at least believed their chances of winning were too remote) so that they dropped out before January 1, 2016.⁵ By our counting procedure there were three Democratic candidates in 2016.⁶ Thus, in this section, we will be considering fifteen major party contenders. The numbers are higher on the Republican side and lower on the Democratic side than usual but not substantially out of the ordinary in either case.

Since 1980 there have been thirteen campaigns in which there was no incumbent seeking a major party’s nomination, and the number of major candidates that were in the race as the year began varied remarkably little: seven in 1980 (R); eight in 1984 (D); eight (D) and six (R) in 1988; eight in 1992 (D); eight in 1996 (R); six (R) and two (D) in 2000; nine in 2004 (D); eight in both parties’ contests in 2008; eight in 2012 (R); in addition to the twelve Republicans and three Democrats in 2016. Thus most such races featured at least six candidates. Only 2000 (D) and 2016 (D) had noticeably fewer, whereas 2016 (R) had a third more candidates running than the next most crowded field (2004, D).⁷ We will discuss why there were fewer candidates in those two races, but note that both had larger numbers of declared candidates before our January 1 date for counting (as did most other races).

The three candidates on the Democratic side were: Hillary Clinton, who most recently served as secretary of state in the Obama administration;⁸ Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont; and Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland. The large number of Republicans was somewhat unusual in that the list included three candidates who had held no previous political office experience and very unusual in that such candidates (such as Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina in 2016) generally fare poorly, whereas Trump went on to win the nomination and election. There were also three incumbent senators (Ted Cruz, TX; Marco Rubio, FL; and Rand Paul, KY), two incumbent governors (John Kasich, OH; and Chris Christie, NJ); three former governors (Jim Gilmore, VA; Jeb Bush, FL; and Mike Huckabee, AR), and a former senator (Rick Santorum, PA). See Table 1-1 for these and other details we will discuss shortly. We have so far illustrated two regularities: few or no candidates will challenge incumbents, but in most cases many candidates will seek the nomination when no incumbent is running. In this 2016 is not particularly exceptional.

A third regularity is that among the candidates who are politicians, most hold or have recently held one of the highest political offices. This regularity follows from “ambition theory,” developed originally by Joseph A. Schlesinger to explain how personal ambition and the pattern and prestige of various elected offices lead candidates to emerge from those political offices that have the strongest electoral bases.⁹ This base for the presidential candidates includes the offices of vice president, senator, governor, and of course, the presidency itself. Note that even with a large number of contenders, there were no sitting members of the U.S. House who chose to run for the presidential nomination in 2016. House members do not have as strong an electoral base from which to run for the presidency, and they may well have to abandon a safe House seat to do so. As a result few House members run, and fewer still are strong contenders. The most prominent exception to the strong electoral base of ambition theory—Trump having had no experience in politics—will be at the center of our account of the unique features of his victory.

Table 1-1

Source: Compiled by authors.

a Information obtained from the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/65/election/2016-presidential-candidate.

b Information obtained from the Federal Election Commission, http://www.fec.gov/disclosurep/pnational.do—and various subpages from there; accessed March 20, 2016.

c Information obtained from OpenSecrets,org, https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/summ.php?cycle-2016&disp-C&type-P.

Most candidates in 2016, as in all earlier campaigns under the new nomination system, emerged from one of the strong electoral bases. Table 1-2 presents the data for 2016 and for all campaigns from 1972 to 2016 combined. More than two-thirds of the presidential candidates had already served as president, vice president, senator, or governor; another one in eight was a member of the U.S. House. In 2016 those ratios were largely true again, although no member of the House from either party was still a candidate as 2016 opened.¹⁰ Many of the presidents in the early years of the nation were chosen from the outgoing president’s cabinet (especially the sitting secretary of state) and other high level presidential appointees, but the cabinet is no longer a common source of presidential candidates, and the same is true for the nation’s many mayors.¹¹ About one in seven candidates run for president without ever holding any elective office. That percentage was a little higher in 2016 as one in four of the Republican candidates in 2016 (and no Democrats) had not held office previously. The big change, then, was not in the numbers but that one of those relatively politically untested contenders actually won the nomination in 2016, whereas few had left any visible mark at all on the contests in earlier years.

Table 1-2

Sources: 1972–1992: Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, 4th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2001), 522–525, 562. 1996: Paul R. Abramson, John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde, Change and Continuity in the 1996 and 1998 Elections (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1999), 13. 2000: CQ Weekly, January 1, 2000, 22. 2004: CQ Weekly, Fall 2003 Supplement, vol. 61, issue 48. The 2008–2016 results were compiled by the authors.

Source: Compiled by authors.

A fourth regularity, also consistent with ambition theory, is that of the many who run in nomination contests without incumbents, only a few put their current office at risk to do so. In 2016 only two senators, Paul and Rubio, were up for reelection. Paul withdrew on February 3, after the first contest of the campaign (the Iowa caucuses). Rubio said he would not run for reelection as a senator, but perhaps because the Florida senatorial primary was so late (August 30), he reentered the senatorial contest after withdrawing from the presidential race and won renomination and then reelection to the Senate.¹²

The Rules of the Nomination System

The method that the two major parties use for nominating presidential candidates is unique and includes an amazingly complicated set of rules. To add to the complication, the various formal rules, laws, and procedures in use are changed, sometimes in large ways and invariably in numerous small ways, every four years. As variable as the rules are, however, the nomination system of 1972 has one pair of overriding characteristics that define it as a system The first is that whereas delegates actually choose their party’s nominee, it is the general public, at least those who vote in the primaries and attend the caucuses, that chooses the delegates and often instructs them as to how to vote. The second characteristic is that the candidates, as a consequence, campaign in public and to the public for their support, mostly by heavy use of traditional media, such as television and newspapers, and, increasingly, social media, such as Facebook and Twitter. The dynamics of the technology of the media make campaigning in the media dynamic as well. Obama pioneered fund-raising and campaign contacting on social media in 2008 and 2012. Trump adroitly used the “free media” of television and newspaper coverage in lieu of buying campaign ads on them, and he pioneered the use of Twitter, especially, in 2016.

The complexity of the nomination contests is a consequence of four major factors. The first of these, federalism, defines the state as the unit of selection for national nominees and has been central to party nominations for nearly two centuries now. The second factor is the specific sets of rules governing primaries and caucus/convention procedures—established at the level of the national party in terms of general guidelines and then more specifically by state parties and/or state laws—these rules are at the heart of the nomination system of 1972. These rules govern delegate selection (and sometimes dictate instructions for delegates’ presidential voting at the convention). The third factor is the set of rules about financing the campaign, which are also the oft-revised products of the reform...