Volume 16, Issue 2

Students of American politics are indebted to Richard Fenno’s path-breaking work, Home Style , published four decades ago. But, given the book’s widespread acclaim, few have taken Fenno’s prescription to go back home with members of Congress to heart. In this essay, I echo Fenno’s call for scholars to become participant-observers of the political process while offering the modern “soaker and poker” a guide to the pitfalls and opportunities of pursuing such a research project. I respond to Fenno’s methodological treatise, written as the appendix to Home Style , focusing in particular on gaining access and how to remain publicly engaged while observing a competitive Senate campaign. I discuss how changes in American political culture create additional wrinkles for participant observation that must be considered, especially if scholars chose to remain engaged in public outreach. I conclude by addressing the need to consider carefully the ethics of engaging the political world we study, particularly in the light of the Stanford-Dartmouth experiment scandal rocking Montana in the weeks preceding the state’s 2014 judicial elections. We may not all do participant observation, but we should follow Fenno when considering the implications of interfering in the political world as we study it.

More than a year after his surprise victory, scholars continue to debate why Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election. Two explanations – economic anxiety and racial resentment – are commonly cited. Drawing on open-ended interviews with Trump supporters and observations at multiple Trump campaign rallies, we find that both explanations, as commonly presented, do not fully capture the dynamics underlying Trump’s support. Rather than racial animosity or concern over their personal economic status, we believe that Trump’s supporters were primarily focused on what they saw as an increasingly biased political and economic system that no longer rewarded hard work and playing by the rules.

In this paper, we examine whether the nomination of Donald Trump for president affected decisions to run for Congress in 2016 in states with later filing deadlines. We theorize that the perception among potential candidates that Donald Trump would be a weak nominee had the potential to entice high-quality Democratic candidates (defined as those who have previously held an elective office) to run for Congress as it became increasingly clear that Donald Trump would be the Republican presidential nominee. We also examine an alternative hypothesis that the impending Trump nomination enhanced political amateurs’ perception they could win in 2016, enticing them to run for Congress. Using a novel dataset from PredictIt, we find support for the second hypothesis, with more political amateurs running as the Trump nomination became more likely. These findings suggest that Donald Trump’s nomination had important consequences that went beyond the presidential race.

Hillary Clinton’s failure to visit the key battleground state of Wisconsin in 2016 has become a popular metaphor for the alleged strategic inadequacies of her presidential campaign. Critics who cite this fact, however, make two important assumptions: that campaign visits are effective, in general, and that they were effective for Clinton in 2016. I test these assumptions using an original database of presidential and vice presidential campaign visits in 2016. Specifically, I regress party vote share on each candidate’s number of campaign visits, at the county level, first for all counties located within battleground states, and then for counties located within each of six key battleground states: Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The results of this analysis do not clearly support either of the assumptions made by Clinton’s critics. In general, none of the presidential or vice presidential candidates – including Clinton – significantly influenced voting via campaign visits. However, Clinton is one of only two candidates – along with Mike Pence, in Ohio – whose campaign visits had a significant effect on voting in an individual state. Specifically, Clinton’s visits to Pennsylvania improved the Democratic ticket’s performance in that state by 1.2 percentage points. Also, there is weak evidence to suggest that Clinton might have had a similar effect on voting in Michigan. It is unclear from this evidence whether Clinton also would have gained votes, or even won, in Wisconsin had she campaigned in that state. But two conclusions are clear. First, Clinton’s visits to Democratic-leaning battleground states did not have the “backfiring” effect that her campaign reportedly feared. Second, Donald Trump did not win in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or Wisconsin as a direct result of his campaign visits to those decisive states.

The Trump presidency was almost wholly unexpected, and remains an enigma. What are its purposes? Why has the president chosen a combative leadership style? This paper argues that the Trump presidency was born in the decades long failure of the Republican-Democratic-conservative consensus regarding the premises of “good” public policy. Trump’s surprise victory set off a maelstrom of vitriolic opposition to his presidency, by any means necessary, that forced Trump to choose between “fight or flight.” He chose to fight – not only because it is a deeply embedded element of his psychology, but also for strategic reasons associated with the basic reconstructive purpose of his presidency that I characterize as “ the Politics of American Restoration. ” Paradoxically, Trump – a president given to rhetorical excess and serial inexactness, wants to restore the public’s trust in government. And he wants to bring Americans together around his restorative vision while engaged in mortal political conflict with the supporters of the policy paradigms he wishes to displace. Whether and how it is possible to resolve these core paradoxes are central to the question of whether this unprecedented presidency can be successful.

Hoping to insulate their contests from national politics, thirty-six states hold their gubernatorial elections in national midterm election years. Many scholars have assessed whether presidential evaluations nevertheless have an effect on these races, though findings have varied. We offer a new approach to examining this question, relying on underutilized state-level presidential approval data preceding 143 gubernatorial races across six national midterm election cycles. Accounting for the effects of state ideology, gubernatorial approval, campaign spending, state economic performance, and incumbency, we report that presidential approval has a positive and significant effect on the performance of the presidential party in gubernatorial races. The substantive effects are modest, though still potentially meaningful. In the primary specification, an additional six points of presidential approval is associated with about one additional point of gubernatorial vote share.

This article investigates the relationship between Congressional GOP roll call votes on the Voting Rights Act reauthorization (VRARA) in 2006 and the GOP response to Shelby v. Holder in 2013. Why did the GOP support the VRARA in 2006 and the Shelby decision in 2013 that effectively nullified the VRA? The analysis presented here will demonstrate that the ideological position of the GOP – opposition to the VRA – was the same in both situations. Because Congress was a politically dangerous place for the GOP to oppose the VRA in 2006, it widened the scope of the conflict and helped facilitate the evisceration of Section 5 by the Supreme Court, instead of attempting to achieve that goal in Congress.

Super PACs, 501(c)4 social welfare organizations, and 501(c)6 professional associations are now major spenders in House elections. What remains unclear is how the strategic expenditure choices of these respective outside interest groups impact the competitive position of non-incumbent candidates running for the House – specifically do their advertising expenditures undermine or augment the expenditures made by the campaign. Using the Wesleyan Media Project datasets of 2012 and 2014 in combination with campaign finance data in a series of models, I find early television advertising expenditures by the aforementioned 501(c) dark money organizations diminish the effectiveness of non-incumbents’ campaign expenditures – both on television advertising and in general – whereas super PACs’ early television advertising expenditures have no significant impact on campaign spending. A comparison of 501(c) dark money organizations’ and super PACs’ advertising choices in 2012 and 2014 reveals these differential effects likely relate to legal constraints leading 501(c)s, and not super PACs, to devote more resources toward policy advertisements early in the general election cycle. I argue this choice by 501(c) s makes it difficult for non-incumbents’ campaigns to shape the policy agenda early in the race leading the campaign’s expenditures on television advertising and the campaign’s total disbursements to be less effective in terms of improving the candidate’s competitiveness.

For decades US senators have maximized their limited resources to juggle policy, party politics, and constituents, but the rise of social media sheds new light on how they make these strategic choices. David Mayhew’s seminal study of Congress (1974) argues that lawmakers engage in three types of activities – credit claiming, advertising, and position taking, but equally important is understanding how lawmakers make strategic choices among these activities. Senators’ limited resources and attention forces them to prioritize and make trade-offs among these activities, and new media platforms, like Twitter, offer a window into that decision-making process. This article examines what influences senators’ decisions to publicly communicate these activities on Twitter. By using senators’ daily Twitter activity in 2013 and 2015 as a measure of their individual agenda, I find that senators are most likely to prioritize position-taking activities. Women and committee leaders allocate the most attention to policy positions, but attention to policy may come at a cost. When senators do choose to prioritize policy through position taking, they often make trade-offs that lead to decreased attention to advertising and credit claiming. These activities and the choices among them not only have implications for lawmakers’ behavior in Congress, but also the type of representation and information constituents can expect from their elected leaders.