Trim 1/2 in off the top of all covers Front edge of spine-----------8.875in from the front edge of the paper. Trim small here ----- Trim large here --- Job Name:2251904 Date:15-05-26 PDF Page:2251904pbc.p1.pdf Color: Magenta Yellow Black *Small covers trim to (14.625 x 9.4) *Large covers trim to (18.875 x 11.4) The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, established in 1943, is a publicly supported, nonpartisan, research and educational organization. Its purpose is to assist policy makers, scholars, businessmen, the press, and the public by providing objective analysis of national and international issues. Views expressed in the institute's publications are those of the authors and do not neces­ sarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEI. Council of Academic Advisers Paul W. McCracken, Chairman, Edmund Ezra Day University Professor of Busi­ ness Administration, University of Michigan Robert H. Bork, Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Public Law, Yale Law School Kenneth W. Dam, Harold J. and Marion F. Green Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School Donald C. Hellmann, Professor of Political Science and International Studies, University of Washington D. Gale Johnson, Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Provost, Llniversity of Chicago Robert A. Nisbet, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute Herbert Stein, A. Willis Robertson Professor of Economics, University of Virginia James Q. Wilson, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Harvard University Executive Committee Herman J. Schmidt, Chairman of the Board Richard J. Farrell William J. Baroody, Jr., President Richard B. Madden Charles T. Fisher III, Treasurer Richard D. Wood Edward Styles, Director of Publications Program Directors Periodicals Russell Chapin, Legislative Analyses AEI Economist, Herbert Stein, Editor Robert B. Helms, Health Policy Studies AEI Foreign Policy and Defense Thomas F. Johnson, Economic Policy Studies Review, Robert J. Pranger and Donald C. Hellmann, Sidney L. Jones, Seminar Programs Co-Editors Marvin H. Kosters/James C. Miller III, Public Opinion, Seymour Martin Government Regulation Studies Lipset, Ben J. Wattenberg, Co­ Editors; David R. Gergen, Jack Meyer, Special Projects (acting) Managing Editor W. S. Moore, Legal Policy Studies Regulation, Antonin Scalia and Murray L. Weidenbaum, Rudolph G. Penner, Tax Policy Studies Co-Editors; Anne Brunsdale, Managing Editor Howard R. Penniman/Austin Ranney, Political and Social Processes William J. Baroody, Sr., Robert J. Pranger, Foreign and Defense Counsellor and Chairman, Policy Studies Development Committee UNSAFE AT ANY MARGIN UNSAFE AT ANY MARGIN INTERPRETING CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS THOMAS E.MANN American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research Washington, D.C. Thomas E. Mann is an assistant director of the American Political Science Association. Distributed to the Trade by National Book Network, 15200 NBN Way, Blue Ridge Summit, PA 17214. To order call toll free 1-800-462-6420 or 1-717-794-3800. For all other inquiries please contact the AEl Press, 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036 or call 1-800-862-5801. ISBN 0-8447-3322-9 AEI Studies 220 Second printing, April 1980 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 78-20335 (0 1978 by American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Washington, D.C. Permission to quote from or to reproduce materials in this publication is granted when due acknowledgment is made. The views expressed in the publications of the American Enterprise Institute are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, advisory panels, officers, or trustees of AEL Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1 The Traditional View of Congressional Elections 1 Reasons for Reassessing the Traditional View 3 The DSG District Surveys 5 Summary 7 DETERMINANTS OF VOTING IN CONGRESSIONAL 2 ELECTIONS 11 The Stokes and Miller Thesis 11 The Problems of Saliency and Incumbency 15 The Nation, the District, and the Voter 19 The Determinants of Change 22 3 PUBLIC AWARENESS OF CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATES 25 Candidate Saliency 25 Candidate Image 37 Ideology 41 Issues 44 4 CANDIDATE IMAGE AND ELECTORAL CHOICE 49 A Brief Methodological Detour 50 Levels of Partisan Defection and Independent Voting 53 Candidate Saliency and Vote Choice 55 Reputation and Vote Choice 60 Candidate Preference and Vote Choice 63 Some Thoughts on the Development of Candidate Images 71 Changes over Time 75 ----------------------- ------- CANDIDATES AND ELECTION OUTCOMES 81 5 Perspectives on the 1974 and 1976 Congressional Elections 82 Candidates and Election Outcomes in Sample Districts 91 How Closely Do Electoral Returns Mirror the Distribution of Partisans? 92 CONCLUSIONS 101 6 Summary 101 Implications 102 The Future 106 APPENDIX: The Democratic Study Group Congressional District Surveys 109 ------ --------------- INDEX 115 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My indebtedness to others for help in bringing this book to publica­ tion is substantial. Richard Conlon, David Cooper, and numerous Democratic candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives made possible the congressional district surveys analyzed herein. Warren Miller, John Kingdon, Albert Cover, and Jerome Clubb, all of the Uni­ versity of Michigan, made valuable contributions to this work in its formative stage. Norman Ornstein, Howard Penniman, and Claudia Winkler each played an important role in its revision and publication. Finally, I am indebted to Evron Kirkpatrick and Sheilah Mann, without whom this book would never have been initiated, much less completed. 1 Introduction The Traditional View of Congressional Elections The major conclusion of the study reported in this book is that con­ gressional elections are local, not national, events: in deciding how to cast their ballots, voters are primarily influenced not by the President, the national parties, or the state of the economy, but by the local candi­ dates. This thesis runs counter to the prevailing view, particularly of midterm congressional elections. In every midterm congressional election but one during the past hundred years, the President's party has lost seats in the House. Scholars have explained the loss as a reaction not to the performance of the government at the time of the elections, but to the outcome of the presidential contest two years earlier. Angus Campbell, in particular, developed a subtle theory of "surge and decline": in presidential years the winning party acquires an advantage in turnout and party preference that disappears in the subsequent midterm elections.1 Members of the House elected on the strength of their party's presidential candidate are vulnerable when forced to stand for reelection alone. In recent years many scholars have turned to the view long held by politicians and journalists that midterm elections are referendums on the performance of the President and especially on his handling of the economy. Edward Tufte in his Political Control of the Economy has developed a statistical model that accurately predicts the standard­ ized vote loss of the President's party in any given midterm election from the yearly change in economic conditions and in presidential 1 Angus Campbell, "Surge and Decline: A Study of Electoral Change," in Elec­ tions and the Political Order, Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller, and Donald Stokes, eds. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966). 1 popularity.2 Since according to Tufte the economy almost always per­ forms less well in midterm than in presidential years, and since a Presi­ dent is more likely to be punished for bad times than rewarded for good, the President's party loses ground in midterm elections. The magnitude of this loss at the national level depends upon how badly the economy is doing and how unpopular the President is. But this is only half the picture. How do changes in the national vote translate into changes in seats? From a national perspective, the rate at which votes translate into seats depends upon two factors: the number of districts that are marginal and the uniformity of the national vote change (or swing) across districts. 50, for example, if the national swing in a midterm election is six percentage points in favor of the Democrats, the number of seats that shift to the Democratic party is a function of (1) the number of Republicans who carried their districts in the prior election by margins of less than six percentage points and (2) the extent to which the national swing of six percentage points is present in each of these marginal districts. (In fact, the national swing is never uniform across districts i evidence that strong national tides favoring one party are magnified in districts thought to be safe for the other party is presented in Chapter 4.) This is where the famous and increasing "advantage of incum­ bency" comes into play. Traditionally over 90 percent of incumbents running for reelection win. 5ince the mid-1960s, their margin of vic­ tory has increased significantly and the number of seats falling in the marginal range has declined. First-term incumbents have done espe­ cially well-on the average over the last decade, five or six percentage points better than the national swing. Moreover, they have retained their advantage even in adverse years. In 1976 only two members of the post-Watergate Democratic class of 1974 lost their seats, although many of them had been elected in traditionally Republican districts. The orthodox view, then, combining surge and decline, the refer­ endum theory, and the increasing advantage of incumbency, would be that in 1978 we can expect the traditional loss of seats by the Presi­ dent's party to be partly offset by the insulation of incumbents from the ravages of national forces. As David Broder put it, "the 1978 elec­ tion may give us the best test yet of the capacity of modern, publicity­ conscious, service-oriented incumbents to beat the historical odds against their own political survival."3 But is this the whole story? 2 Edward Tufte, Political Control of the Economy (Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press, 1978).