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Agenda 11-1-13. Questions regarding articles? Congressional Elections and Apportionment Discussion. Congressional Elections and Apportionment. Who’s Running?. The Incumbent. A person already holding office and running for re-election
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Agenda 11-1-13 • Questions regarding articles? • Congressional Elections and Apportionment Discussion
The Incumbent • A person already holding office and running for re-election • Incumbent House of Representatives have an 80-90% of being reelected • Senate is a little lower • Why? John Dingell 57 years, 319 days
Reasons Why Incumbents Win Incumbents… • stifle election competition. • have an almost two-to-one advantage in raising money over new candidates. • typically have an easier time gaining the financial support of Political Action Committees (PACs) and interest groups While the bigger spender does not always win, more funding, especially in the primaries, is a great advantage.
Other Reasons… • Free publicity • hold press conferences, making speeches in Congress, introducing bills, and junkets (trips) to their districts. • Franking Privilege • Send mail postage free • Credit claiming • stress their policy making record and emphasize their stands on new policy issues. • demonstrate how they have helped their constituents by introducing bills, voting for legislation, and bringing pork-barrel legislation—federal projects, grants, and contracts—to their districts.
Last Reason • use casework, • the direct consideration of a constituent’s problem, when trying to gain re-election. • For example, an incumbent might use his or her political connections to help an individual cut through the bureaucratic red tape on a personal issue, which would then result in good word-of-mouth publicity for the incumbent
Negatives of Incumbency • Scandals • major economic shift • A lasting change in the arrangement of political forces
Must appeal to the voters! • all congressional candidates must appeal to the more motivated voters, • only about 37 percent of the population vote in mid-term or off-year congressional • Those who do vote are usually party regulars, political activists, or those who might be strongly affected by the outcome. • As a result, candidates must appeal to partisan voters, those loyal to a specific party.
House and Senate Elections • 535 Representatives • 435 House of Representatives • 100 Senators • This # is not created by Constitution • 1929 Congress fixed its size at 435 members • 435 seats are then apportioned among the states every ten years, depending on the population of each state. • Representatives are elected every two years and can serve an unlimited number of terms.
CALCULATING APPORTIONMENT • Census – Determines population • Step 1: Automatically assign the first 50 seats • Step 2: Calculate a list of priority values. • Step 3: Assign the remaining seats in ranked order • The state with the largest priority value in the list is given the 51st seat (because the first 50 seats are automatically assigned); then the state with second largest priority value is given the 52nd seat. This process is continued for each consecutively descending priority value until the last (435th) seat has been filled.
The largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest and has 18 times as many electoral votes. This allows for Electoral College results that don't match the popular vote. To remedy this issue, the Electoral Reform Mapredivides the fifty United States into 50 states of equal population. The 2010 Census records a population of 308,745,538 for the United States, which this map divides into 50 states, each with a population of about 6,175,000.
House Elections • single-member districts • voters in each district elect one person to represent them. • House members represent relatively small constituencies • Allows them to communicate with residents on a regular basis.
Districts • marginal districts • House districts that typically have close elections. • These are areas where the winner gets less than 55 percent of the vote. • Safe districts • House districts in which the incumbents win with more than 55 percent of the vote are known as safe districts.
Senate Elections • Continuous body • Senators serve for six years with one-third of the Senate running for re-election every two years. In 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution required the popular election of senators. This changed the practice of state legislators appointing United States senators.
Senate Races • Costs for Senate races can run above five million dollars per candidate in a typical election, • average successful Senate campaign costing close to seven million dollars. • Incumbents are often able to gain national support for their campaign as opposed to the state or local support given to their challengers.
Senate Elections • Senators are elected at-large • they represent the entire state. This gives senators more diverse constituencies, so they often know fewer of their constituents than House members do. The combination of fewer elections and more diverse constituents results in a less personal connection between senators and their voters.
Open Seats • When there is an open seat in Congress, or the incumbent is not running for re-election, there is a great deal of competition between political parties. • If the support for each party in a district or a state is fairly even, each party will offer their strongest candidate and support that candidate with as many resources as possible. Since there is a near 50-50 split between the parties in the House and the Senate, the winner of the majority of open seats can dictate which party controls the chambers of the House and Senate
