Campaigning
By Gil Troy
The Encyclopedia of U.S. Political History, published by Princeton University Press, forthcoming
Campaigning for office is one of American democracy’s most defining acts—yet many find campaigns unruly, distasteful, and demeaning. Most elections are shrouded in some mystery; even in the age of polling, surprises sometimes occur. But, especially in presidential campaigns, the complaints about campaigns being too long, expensive, demagogic, frilly come as regularly as America’s distinctive, scheduled election days, albeit more frequently.
The word campaign originated in the seventeenth century from the French word for open field, campagne. With contemporary soldiers fighting sustained efforts, often on the wide country terrain, the term quickly acquired its military association. The political connotation emerged in seventeenth-century England to describe a lengthy legislative session. In nineteenth-century America campaign was part of the barrage of military terms describing electioneering: as the party standard bearer, a war horse tapping into his war chest and hoping not to be a flash-in-the-pan—a cannon that misfires –mobilized the rank-and-file with a rallying cry in battleground states to vanquish their enemies.
American politicians needed to conquer the people’s hearts because popular sovereignty has been modern Anglo-American government’s distinguishing anchor since colonial days. In elitist early America, the ideal candidates stood for election; they did not run. Wooing the people was considered too ambitious, deceitful, undignified; passivity demonstrated the potential leader’s purity. This posture lingered longest at the presidential level, and it continues to feed the national fantasy for disinterested, virtuous candidates wafting into the presidential chair by acclamation, rather than the stereotypical grubby, aggressive, blow-dried, weather vane politicians slithering into office today.
There are more than 500,000 elected offices in the United States, ranging from tree warden to president. Most are elected directly to serve locally. While senatorial, gubernatorial and presidential campaigns require “wholesale” campaigning to mobilize blocs of voters, the typical campaign is a “retail,” mom-and-pop, door-to-door operation pressing the flesh. This contact enables American citizens to meet, assess, scrutinize those who aspire to lead them. Even in today’s high-tech, television-saturated age, the July Fourth meet-and-greet county picnic or the Election Day get-out-the-vote drive by carpooling neighbors more typifies campaigns than big-budget multistate advertising buys during quadrennial presidential elections.
While presidential campaigning commands most Americans’ attention, often setting the tone for campaigns at all levels, the presidential election remains indirect. As many Americans only first realized in 2000, when Al Gore won more popular votes than George W. Bush but lost the presidency, voters choose slates of electors, organized state by state, and pledged to vote for particular candidates when the Electoral College meets. This filtering of the people’s voice reflects the Founding Fathers’ fears of “mobocracy.” The Electoral College today orients campaign strategy toward a few voter-rich, swing states. In 1960 Vice President Richard Nixon vowed to campaign in all 50 states. He lost, narrowly. Many Republicans grumbled that Nixon wasted precious resources fulfilling that imprudent pledge.
Campaigns are legitimizing and unifying democratic rituals, linking the leader and the led in a historic, tradition-rich rite of affirmation. Ultimately, campaigns involve the mystical alchemy of leadership and the practical allocation of power, cleanly and neatly. America’s winner-take-all elections designate one winner, with no power sharing or booby prizes for losers. Campaigns also offer a clear narrative trajectory, with all the plots and personalities culminating on one day, when the people speak. As a result, the history of campaigning, on all levels, is a history of vivid clashes, colorful personalities, defining moments. Presidential campaigning history includes President John Adams clashing with his own vice president, Thomas Jefferson, in 1800; Republican Wide Awakes marching through northern cities before the Civil War; Grover Cleveland winning despite the mockery of “Ma, Ma, Where’s my pa, gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha” in 1884; William Jennings Bryan’s valiant, superhuman speechifying in 1896; John Kennedy’s elegance during the 1960 televised debates; Ronald Reagan’s stirring Morning in America 1984 campaign; the geysers of baby boomer idealism that the honey-smooth Bill Clinton tapped in 1992; George W. Bush’s Karl Rove-engineered, play-to-the-base strategy in his 2004 re-election and Barack Obama’s 2008 mix of redemptive “Yes We Can” uplift and an impressive ground game mixing old-fashioned grassroots politics with cutting edge netroots outreach.
SUBHEAD: The First Three Historical Phases: The Republican, Democratic, and Populist Campaigns.
Just as earth scientists debate whether humans evolved gradually or through occasional leaps called punctuated equilibrium, political scientists wonder how campaigns developed. Historians traditionally focused on breakthrough campaigns pioneering particular techniques, celebrating 1840 as the first popular campaign that mobilized the masses and 1896 as the first mass merchandising effort organized bureaucratically. Historians also identified critical elections that realigned power, especially the 1800 revolution that empowered Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans, the 1828 Democratic Jacksonian revolution, the 1860 Republican antislavery revolution, the 1896 corporate Republican realignment, the 1932 Democratic New Deal ascension, and the 1980 conservative Republican Reagan Revolution.
In fact, campaigns evolved slowly, haphazardly, sometimes fitfully, responding to changing communication and transportation technologies, shifts in population and society, the parties’ rise and fall, and the presidency’s growth. Technological innovations, including the railroad, telegraph, radio, television, and even the Internet, created necessary but not sufficient conditions for change. Sometimes, traditionalists resisted: throughout the 1800s, editorialists and opponents repeatedly denounced candidates who stumped – mounted speaking tours – claiming they acted in an undignified—and unprecedented—way. Sometimes, innovations failed until politicians figured out how to adapt the technology. Citizens in a democracy get the campaign they deserve; interested, overall, in winning strategies, successful candidates offer unsentimental reflections of what works, despite what people wish worked or imagine worked in the past.
The history of presidential campaigning can be divided into four phases: the republican, democratic, populist, and electronic. The republican phase, reflecting the founders’ republican ideology, trusted the wisdom of the few and feared the passion of mobs while rooting government’s legitimacy in consent of the governed. Politics’ gentlemanly tone reflected the search for virtuous candidates who would neither conspire with cabals nor rabble-rouse demagogically. Campaigns emphasized the candidate’s suitability, as candidates functioned as icons, ideal representations of the perfect gentleman and leader.
Candidate, from the Latin word for white, candidus, evoked the white togas that represented Roman senators’ supposed purity. In that spirit, candidates were to stand for election and not run. Local campaigns were not always as sober as the group conceit hoped. The Virginia gentry standing for office “swilled the planters with bumbo.” Decades before the Populist and Progressive movements instituted the secret, “Australian” ballot, Election Day became a raucous Sadie Hawkins day. On this day, grandees, sitting at the polls as people voted, asked their social inferiors for help, thanking them with libations. This momentary egalitarianism reflected the essential links between equality, liberty, and democracy.
Still, the ideal republican candidate was George Washington. Reflecting his reluctance, he stayed on his farm in humble repose, awaiting the people’s call, before being elected unanimously. In 1792, he was re-elected without touring around begging for votes.
Embodying national virtue Washington was a demigod who set the bar unrealistically high for Americans—and his successors. As parties developed, as local candidates began campaigning, Washington’s passive silence became a straitjacket his successors tried wriggling out of, campaign by campaign.
The rise of political parties, the lifting of voting restrictions on white males, and the move from farms to factories triggered a democratic revolution. Local campaigns became increasingly hard fought. In 1824, 1828, and 1832 Andrew Jackson, the charismatic, controversial war hero who became an assertive president, brought a new personality-based mass excitement to the campaign. Jackson’s elitist Whig opponents copied, perfected, and outdid the Jacksonian Democrats’ mass appeal tactics in the 1840 campaign for William Henry Harrison. This Whig hijacking proved that the democratic sensibility had become all-American.
The nineteenth-century democratic campaign mobilized the masses through their partisan identities. Politicking became the national pastime. Election days were mass carnivals, culminating months of pamphleting, marching, orating, editorializing in party newspapers, and neighbors bickering. The party bosses dominating the system sought loyal soldiers more than virtuous gentleman. The primary ability parties prized at the time was “availability,” seeking pliant, appealing, noncontroversial candidates. Rather than lofty, passive icons, candidates were becoming actors, sometimes speaking, sometimes stumping, always following the party script. During this time, acceptance letters became increasingly elaborate policy statements, fitting the candidate’s views to the party platform, rather than simple republican expressions of virtuous reluctance to plunge into politics.
While party bosses picked most local candidates, the national parties mounted elaborate quadrennial conventions to nominate a standard bearer and define the party platform. These colorful, often rollicking affairs were way stations between republican elitist politics and today’s popular politics. Party bosses lobbied behind the scenes to select candidates and set agendas, but the conventions’ deliciously democratic chaos reflected America’s drift away from hierarchical politics.
Seeking loyalists, these conventions nominated last-minute dark horses, like James Knox Polk or James Garfield; undistinguished party hacks like Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce; war heroes like Lewis Cass, deemed a doughface because he could mold himself to appear sympathetic to the North or the South; and relatively uncontroversial, low-profile compromise candidates like Abraham Lincoln. A one-term Whig congressman in a party dominated by the antislavery titans, William Henry Seward and Salmon Chase, Lincoln followed the textbook strategy during this phase: “My name is new in the field, and I suppose I am not the first choice of a very great many. Our policy, then, is to give no offense to others—leave them in a mood to come to us if they shall be compelled to give up their first love.”
As democratization, urbanization, industrialization, and the communications revolution intensified, American politics became more populist, and the presidency became more central. In this populist phase, candidates were more independent of party and more nationalist in orientation. The quaint gentlemanly postures vanished as candidates stumped, whistle-stopped, and prop-stopped on trains, planes, and automobiles. Candidates needed to demonstrate their popularity and their potential to lead the nation. The best candidates were master orators with just a tinge of demagoguery who could move thousands listening in person and millions of newspaper readers and, eventually, radio listeners. After Franklin Roosevelt made America into a superpower and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue America’s central address, Americans no longer sought mere actors but superheroes who could dominate their parties, the campaign, the presidency, and the national news cycle.
Presidential candidates stumped more and more intensely throughout the nineteenth century, and the acceptance letter developed into an elaborate notification ceremony featuring a candidate’s address. In the 1880s and 1890s, torn between the tradition of passivity and pressures to be more active, James A. Garfield and other candidates mounted Front Porch campaigns, staying at home but greeting huge delegations of supporters from across the country who came to pay homage. Still, the 1896 campaign became one of those historical moments to consolidate and advance various innovations. William Jennings Bryan’s elaborate 18,009 mile, 600-speech, 27-state rear-platform campaign ended the charade that candidates did not stump for themselves. William McKinley’s front porch campaign, whereby he greeted over 300 delegations consisting of 750,000 visitors from 30 states at his Ohio home, genuflected toward the past. Meanwhile, McKinley’s campaign manager, Mark Hanna, mounted a modern campaign. Recognizing the growing overlap between consumerism and politics, he organized dozens of special-interest groups, deployed hundreds of speakers, raised millions of dollars, and distributed hundreds of millions of pamphlets.
Subsequently, the charismatic, candidate-centered campaigns of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt presented the candidate as poised to master what Theodore Roosevelt called the “bully pulpit.” By 1948 even the mild-mannered Harry Truman felt compelled to run an aggressive, “Give ’em hell” Harry campaign crisscrossing America, despite the fact that he, following Franklin Roosevelt, was also dominating the airwaves thanks to radio’s spread in the 1920s and 1930s.
By 1952 the heroic Dwight Eisenhower also campaigned actively and cut campaign commercials on the new medium of television. “Eisenhower Answers America” offered short, staged televised interactions between the general and “the people”<m->all-American types Eisenhower’s advertising wizards selected from the queue at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. Between takes Eisenhower muttered: “to think that an old soldier should come to this.”
SUBHEAD: THE FOURTH PHASE: THE ELECTRONIC CAMPAIGN
The television revolution ushered in campaigning’s electronic era. Most local candidates could not afford to broadcast television commercials, but the need for state, national, and some local candidates to raise big money favored entrepreneurial candidacies. Party discipline and loyalty faded as state primaries nominated most candidates. At all levels, outsiders could defy the bosses. Independent gunslingers with enough popularity could win the nomination, inherit the party apparatus, and run. Movie stars could become California governors, billionaires could become New York City mayors. Losers then frequently faded into the sunset and winning candidates emerged less beholden to party powers. Media mastery, rather than virtue, loyalty or oratory became prized, as candidates frequently traded on celebrity. Campaigns were no longer quests to emphasize a candidate’s iconic virtue but to project an appealing image. In this electronic era, smooth-talking salesmen such as John Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton dominated.
Television debates offered some of the turning points in presidential campaigns, including when a tanned, confident John Kennedy bested a sweaty, shifty Richard Nixon in 1960, when Gerald Ford stumbled and declared Eastern Europe “free” even though Soviets still dominated in 1976, and when Ronald Reagan laughed off Jimmy Carter’s criticisms in 1980, chuckling, “There you go again.” Television commercials offered equally powerful defining moments: 1964’s pro-Lyndon Johnson “Daisy” commercial suggesting Republican Barry Goldwater might blow up the world, 1984’s “Morning in America” commercial praising Ronald Reagan’s America as paradise recovered, and 1988’s “Willie Horton” commercial maligning Michael Dukakis for furloughing a murderer who then raped and murdered again.
Most recently, some politicians welcomed the computer age as heralding a fifth, virtual era of campaigning. But in the first few national election cycles, the Internet and blogosphere extended the reach of the electronic campaign without yet fully transforming it. Barack Obama exploited the Internet as a fundraising and friend-raising tool, raising unprecedented amounts from a huge base of small donors. Still, most of his $600 million war chest came from big money sources. The revolution will happen, gradually, haphazardly.
Meanwhile, many of the historic conundrums surrounding campaigning persist. Are voters fools, do voters make what scholars called “low information rationality” decisions like choosing a toothpaste brand, or are they seriously assessing a job applicant’s potential to lead in the world’s superpower? Why is voter turnout at all levels so low: does it reflect America’s stability or Americans’ disgust with politics? What is the role of money in politics: are campaign costs and donor influence out of control, or are costs reasonable, considering that Procter & Gamble’s advertising budget of $6.8 billion in 2006 puts into perspective the estimate $4.3 billion spent during the 2008 campaign to select the leader of the free world? Do Americans seek a president who can be king or prime minister, or could the criteria for those two different jobs be combined? And do America’s greatest leaders win campaigns<m>or if not, why not?
Questions and grumbling continue<m->and will continue, considering how important the process is, and how messy. Still, American campaigns remain magical, from the contest for the most common to the highest office in the land. Leaders trying to converse communally with thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions face daunting challenges. But the lack of violence during campaigns, the remarkable regularity through prosperity and depression, through peace and war reveal the system’s buoyancy. And the fact that even after the contested presidential election of 2000, most Americans accepted the declared winner as legitimate speaks to the Constitution’s continuing power. That a document cobbled together hastily in the horse-and-buggy age of the 1780s still works today is a miracle most Americans take for granted, but that every campaign affirms, no matter how much mudslinging, grandstanding, and promiscuous promising there may be.
See also campaign consultants; campaign laws and finance; elections and electoral eras; Internet and politics; political advertising; radio and politics; television and politics.
Further Reading
Paul Boller, Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes: The Way to the White House (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging The Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
Alexander Keyssar The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Richard P. McCormick, The Presidential Game: The Origins of American Presidential Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Joe McGinniss, The Selling of the President (New York, Penguin, 1988).
Nelson Polsby and Aaron Wildavsky with David A. Hopkins, Presidential Elections – Strategies and Structures of American Politics, 12th ed. (Lanham, Md: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
Gil Troy, See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
Theodore H. White, The Making of the President 1960 (New York: Signet, 1967).
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