Politics and Elections

Last Hurrah Thesis

machine politics died with FDR reforms

Religious Commitment Gap

relgious white support for dems has gone down, white non-religious support for dems is high

Sun and Moon Party

Samuel Lubell: party that sets the agenda is the sun party, says yes. Moon party reacts to the sun party, tries to stifle the sun party agenda.

Donald Warren

Studied middle American radicals, grass rotots rights that don't feel represented by elitist, corporatist Republicans. Roots of Trump

Free Labor Ideology

The free labor ideology of the nineteenth century was grounded in the beliefs that Northern free labor was superior to Southern slave labor. The key factor that made this system unique was "the opportunity it offers wage earners to rise to property-owning independence." [1] It was this free labor ideology and not the republicanism of the Revolutionary War era that caused slavery to be problematic by the time of the Civil War. This ideology was comprehensive—it had economic, social, moral, and political aspects. All facets of the theory need to be explored in order to fully understand how and why slavery became such an important issue. -Free labor became the center of the Republican ideology in 1852, with the foundation of the Republican Party. It was the result of the economically expanding, enterprising, and competitive society of the early nineteenth century By the 1840s, the wage-earning labor class was defined as the entire North. It was made up of those men who owned their own farms, worked their own soil, were educated, and most importantly, were independent. Free labor ideology drew few distinctions between classes. A laborer was a craftsman, a merchant, a small businessman, or a farmer. Northern society offered opportunities to all who sought them, and enabled most to achieve independence and property. -suspicion of wealth and the upper class Northerners believed this economy would lead to a more equal distribution of wealth, rather than aid the development of an upper class. They resented and were insensitive to the plight of the poor, because they believed this condition was due to a lack of efforts to better themselves The economic superiority of free to slave labor became a major part of their argument against slavery. The conservative Bostonian Robert Winthrop remarked, "the South is, upon the whole, the very poorest, meanest, least productive, and most miserable part of creation..." [7] Republicans noted intricate statistical comparisons between the North and South, and free states took the lead in population growth, manufacturing, property values, agriculture, railroads, canals, and commerce. [8] These comparisons proved that slave labor was an inefficient failure Northerners may have had many different beliefs about race, abolitionists, nativism, politics, and many other issues, but they were united in their belief in the free labor ideology. With the election of Abraham Lincoln, Americans could uphold a Republican president whose beginnings were in a simple log cabin. He said, "I am not ashamed to confess that 25 years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man's son!" [23] But Lincoln claimed his belief in the improvement of his condition, which any free man could have had, was what gave him hope. The free labor system allowed this. Lincoln stated that lack of hope, energy and progress in the South was what divided the nation due to slavery.

Sundquist the Realignment of the 1850s

-After the KansasNebraska bill was enacted, its enemies in Michigan called a state convention, held in July, and nominated a fusion ticket on a platform devoted wholly to that "relic of barbarism," slavery. The new fusion party expressly postponed consideration of the matters of "political economy or administrative policy" that had traditionally divided Whigs from Democrats. The Free-Soil party of Michigan dissolved the day the fusion party (which afterward took the name Republican) was formed, and the Whigs did the same three months later. The fusion candidates were victorious in November. -The opposition to the Democrats— whether Whig, Republican, KnowNothing, or fusion— won smashing victories in the elections of 1854 and the spring of 1855. The new Republican party swept Michigan for the first Democratic defeat in more than a decade, and won in Wisconsin, while the anti-Nebraska candidates carried Ohio and the People's party was victorious in Indiana. Fusionists elected a majority of the legislature in Douglas's home state of Illinois. -What constitutes a crosscutting issue depends on the rationale of the original alignment. To the Democrats and the Whigs, who had been unified around their respective positions on domestic economic policy, slavery was a crosscutting issue that threatened party unity, and so when it arose the parties' established leaders did their best to straddle it. Leaders of the Know-Nothing party, formed on nativism, also sought to straddle slavery. The Republican party, however, had been brought into being on the slavery issue; so to it the other issues— economic questions, nativism, prohibition— were crosscutting. And the Republican leaders, who were a polar force on the one issue, acted as moderate centrists on the others, striving in the accustomed way of centrist leaders to straddle and suppress them. -As the state Republican parties convened in 1856 to form a national party and nominate a presidential ticket, they were faced with the same necessity. To form a popular majority in the North they would have to appeal to the nativists yet not alienate the immigrants, particularly the Germans, who they believed could be lured into the Republican party as a bloc on the free-soil issue. And having the free-soil vote of the upper North assured, they also needed to appeal to the more moderate sentiment of the border North— New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the southern sections of the Ohio River states. -The platform was devoted chiefly to Kansas-Nebraska and related safe and established antislavery issues but included planks on a few matters with strong regional appeal on which the North was agreed— a central railroad to the Pacific and river and harbor improvements

-Campaigning and Governing: A Conspectus Hugh Heclo

-Although the two necessarily relate to each other, good reasons exist to think that campaigning and governing ought not to be merged into one category. Common sense tells us that two different terms are necessary, because we know that promise making is not promise keeping, any more than effective courtship is the same thing as well-working marriage. -The essential issue, therefore, comes down to this. The more that campaigning infiltrates into governing, the more we may expect the values of a campaign perspective to overrule the values of a steersman perspective. Rather than maintaining a balance, it means shifting the weights on the scales of the public's business from a longer to a shorter time horizon, from collaborative to adversarial mindsets, from deliberation and teaching to persuasion and selling. Those are serious shifts in the rules of the game for any self-governing people. They are especially serious for a people whose whole constitutional system of representation presupposes the distinction between campaigning and governing. How could that happen? -The first feature is a venerable concern of political scientists—the decline of political parties. That is a more complex subject than it first appears, since in some respects America's two national parties are stronger than they were fifty years ago. Where parties have become much weaker is at the level of political fundamentals—generating candidates for office and being able predictably to mobilize blocs of people to vote for them. Since politicians cannot count on loyalties from party organizations, voting blocs of the New Deal coalition, and individual voters, after the 1950s politicians have had every reason to try to become the hub of their own personal permanent campaign organizations. Typically, American politicians now rise or fall not as "party men" but as largely freewheeling political entrepreneurs. -A second feature creating the permanent campaign is the rise of a much more open and extensive system of interest-group politics. In the name of good government and participatory democracy, barriers between policymakers and the people were dismantled. Open committee meetings, freedom-ofinformation laws, publicly recorded votes, televised debates, and disclosure and reporting requirements symbolized the new openness.-With a host of political agendas in play and a declining ability of political parties to create and protect political careers, politicians as a whole became more subject to interest-group pressures and more obliged to engage in continuous campaigning. -A third feature is the new communications technology of modern politics. The rise of television after the 1940s was obviously an important breakthrough in personalizing direct communication from politicians and interest groups to a mass public. Candidates for office could move from retailing their appeals through party organizations to direct wholesaling with the voting public.-communication must be of a kind that translates into audience shares and advertising dollars. That has meant playing up story lines that possess qualities of dramatic conflict, human interest, immediacy, and strong emotional value. The easiest way for the media to meet such needs has been to frame the realities of governing in terms of political contests. -The fourth feature underlying creation of the permanent campaign is what we might call new political technologies. At the same time as changes in parties, interest groups, and electronic media were occurring, the twin techniques of public relations and polling were invented and applied with ever growing professional skill in the public arena. Together, they spawned an immense industry for studying, manufacturing, organizing, and manipulating public voices in support of candidates and causes. The cumulative result was to impart a much more calculated and contrived quality to the whole political process than anything that prevailed even as recently as the 1950s. -The fifth factor in the creation of the permanent campaign amounts to a logical consequence of everything else that was happening. It is the ever growing need for political money. It turns out that most of what political marketing does resolves into spending money on itself—the consultants—and the media. Hence, after the 1960s, an immense new demand grew for politicians and groups to engage in nonstop fund-raising. Even if the people managing the new technologies—media, polling, and public relations—were not in profit-oriented businesses, the new forms of crafted politics would have cost huge amounts of money to create and distribute

Theda Skocpol Who Owns the GOP?

-Drawing on public records, newly unearthed documents, and hundreds of interviews, it recounts decades of far-right efforts to reshape U.S. politics, culminating in the recent construction by the multibillionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, of an "integrated political network" fueled by donations from hundreds of wealthy conservatives -Drawing on public records, newly unearthed documents, and hundreds of interviews, it recounts decades of far-right efforts to reshape U.S. politics, culminating in the recent construction by the multibillionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, of an "integrated political network" fueled by donations from hundreds of wealthy conservatives -The last two-thirds of Dark Money vaults from the 1970s and 1980s into the Obama era. After making early and sustained investments in generating conservative ideas through the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and grants to academics, the Kochs moved on to offer funding for organizations to sell free-market policies and help elect cooperative politicians. In 2003, the Kochs started to host twice-yearly "seminars," that is, donor summits to educate wealthy conservatives about free-market politics. -Spreading ideas and building moral solidarity among wealthy conservatives have always been important to the Kochs. As Mayer aptly puts it, "the Kochs . . . succeeded in persuading hundreds of the other richest conservatives in the country to give them control over their millions of dollars in contributions." They are collective goods providers for the wealthy right, which depends on everyone, including the Kochs themselves, believing that their cause is a moral crusade. -"Obama's election," she writes, "stirred such deep and widespread fear among the conservative business elite that the conference was swarmed, becoming a hub of political resistance." Every six months Koch strategies have been updated—to fight Obamacare, win midterm elections in 2010, wage the "mother of all wars" for the presidency in 2012, and learn from defeat to prepare for renewed victories in 2014 and 2016. At each conclave donors compete with one another to pledge big money that the Kochs and their political associates can deploy without public footprints. -But the price for getting Koch resources is accepting their ultrafree-market policy agenda, which in many respects is not popular with voters who the GOP also needs to win competitive national and statewide elections. -We learned that grassroots Tea Partiers were far from disciplined libertarian followers of ultra-free-market advocacy groups. Local Tea Party groups met in churches, libraries, and restaurants, and collected small contributions or sold books, pins, bumper stickers, and other Tea Party paraphernalia on commission to cover their modest costs. They did not get by on checks from the Koch brothers or any other wealthy advocacy organizations -Today's Republican Party is being revamped and torn asunder from contradictory directions. Almost all GOP candidates and legislators, even most presidential aspirants, espouse freemarket, anti-government ideas like those pushed by the Koch network. But these honchos are not necessarily carrying voters with them. Many centrist voters do not want to cut education or gut the Environmental Protection Agency, while many right-wing voters care most about stopping immigration, outlawing abortions, and cutting back on what they view as government largesse for the poor. The core Koch agenda of bashing unions, slashing taxes for the rich, blocking environmental protection measures, and dismantling Social Security is not the top priority for many conservative voters

Bentele and O'Brien Why State Restrict Voter Access

-Exclusionary reforms are nearly universally enacted for partisan advantage, a temptation enabled by state responsibility for the administration and regulation of elections -The geographic distribution of this activity is widespread and does not concentrate overwhelmingly in battleground states or any particular region. -politifcal parties have not democratic incorporation under tight. election margins. Rather, we argue that the Republican Party has engaged in strategic demobilization efforts in response to changing demographics, shifting electoral fortunes, and an internal rightward ideological drift among the party faithful. -Our finding that legislative developments in this policy area remain heavily shaped by racial considerations is strongly resonant with the historical relationships between race, voter restrictions, and federalism often viewed as hallmarks of American political development -in criminal justice, voter restrictions and social welfare policy, racial threat and myths are particularly salient, and the character of state-level legislation is particularly responsive to the racial composition of states. We view restrictive voter-access legislation as an additional layer of barriers reducing electoral access for minority and lower income voters. -election contests can be won by bringing more voters to the polls or by deterring the voters who support the opposition from casting their ballots. In other words, by voter mobilization or by voter suppression. The take-away is that in a two-party system both parties have faced incentives to selectively suppress the vote, and both have done so. -In response to a changing electoral environment, the GOP has become the central driver of restrictive changes to election laws and the primary perpetrator of a wide range of suppression efforts -In sum, where African-Americans and poor people vote more frequently, and there are larger numbers of non-citizens, restrictive-access legislation is more likely to be proposed. -In sum, these findings suggest that over the 2006-2011 period, states that increased their share of Republican legislators, elected a Republican governor, or became more competitive in the electoral collegein the presence of aRepublican majority in the state house were more likely to pass restrictive voter legislation -We suspect that when a party's platform or rhetoric reduces the possibility of building electoral coalitions and bringing in new voters, while representing the interests of a demographically shrinking base, this alone increases the incentive to engage in voter suppression

Mann and Orenstein Fixing the Party System

-First, we should moderate politics by expanding the electorate, higher turnout would pull more citizens with less-fixed partisan views and ideological commitments into the electorate. Near universal voting would virtually eliminate the parties' incentive to diminish the turnout of those likely to support their opponent and mobilize their strongest supporters. -Second, we should reduce the presumed bias against moderate voters and candidates by altering how votes in the election are converted into seats in government. Most obviously, we should reduce the gerrymandering of legislative districts that produces more lopsided constituencies for the two parties. Another is to replace closed primary elections that favor ideologically skewed candidates with open or semi closed primaries. Finally, instant runoff voting, where voter can rank their candidate prefernces and electoral arrangements that provide a degree of proportional representation offer some promise of reducing polarization. Moving away from winner take all. -Third, we should break the polarizing dynamic of the parties through changes in campaign fundrasising and spending rules and practices. The most promising methods are to mobilize large numbers of small doners and to enforce the transparency and genuine independence of super PACs and their non profit affiliates.

Smidt Polarization

-Greater clarity of party differences makes it easier for Americans to recognize the consequences of candidate differences and reduce ambivilance and indecision in voting. This makes voters more reliable in which party they support over time. These dynamics are especially consquetial for voters who otherwise lack partisan attachments and are most likely to switch their support, like indepdents and the less aware -there has been an unprescendented decline in "floating voters", more loyal party supporters and less detached voters. -growing recognition of diffrences between party has enabled polarization. -gains in party support are not a function of polarization in voters' attitudes but simply an increase in recognition of party differences. -floating voters have gained greater recognition of issue differences, enabling them to identify the policy consequences of their vote more clearly. This information stabilizes party support by reducing voter uncertainty over which party or candidate is the lesser of two evils or strengthening a voters resolve to equivocate between considerations others perceive as conflicting. -polarization has also converted voters who lack clear party attachements into stable supporters by clarifying each party's association and agreement with other social identities and group attachements. Polarization has strenghthend cues from socioeconomic groups by making opinions with in these groups more homogenous. -clarity likely reduces the tendency of voters to be ambivalent or undecided in their candidate support. By seeing the consequences of their vote choice more clearly, voters are better able to hold a set of candidate evaluations that are consistent and homogeneous with their values and identifications, making them less ambivalent or indifferent and less likely to waver in their support.

Seth Masket Its Time to Make the Case for Stronger Parties

-In a recent post at Mischiefs of Faction, Julia Azari argued that we need to re-think the way we talk about parties. Political scientists have been arguing for generations that parties serve a important public good and that party leaders should be afforded some deference in picking good nominees. The public, meanwhile, has largely bought into the Progressive Era narrative that parties are, at best, a necessary evil and that they need to be run democratically. They feel that the people should be in charge of deciding whom parties nominate. As Azari notes, scholars are not winning this debate. Maybe we should stop hitting our heads against the same wall over and over again and think about this in a new way. -To which I say, possibly. However, I'd like to suggest that this year, more than any other in recent memory, is the time to make an affirmative case for undemocratic political parties. This is because this year, more than any other in recent memory, is demonstrating the downside of letting the people decide. -The parties have long histories of quietly saving the republic. In any given election, there's often some half-crazed demagogue who thinks he'd make a good president and who makes populist appeals to gin up support. The parties are usually quite skilled at keeping that person off the ballot, even if they think they could win with him. They use their control of party machinery, money, endorsements, campaign expertise, and other key resources to steer voters away from such candidates and toward people whom they view as good for the party and the country. This mostly occurs behind the scenes; by the time voters notice what's going on, the election has boiled down to just a handful of candidates. -The Republican Party very much failed this task in 2016. By being unwilling or unable to concentrate its support behind a champion, it allowed a wealthy populist with little fealty to party principles to put together a winning campaign. The party has remained divided in its opposition to Trump, essentially allowing a factional candidate to cruise to victory. -This is a hugely important moment for advocates of strong parties, in that it shows the costs of party weakness. Trump is what happens when parties get out of the way and defer to the people. -It would definitely not be a democratic outcome. And it would definitely not be universally praised. But it would be a useful reminder that parties and governments are not the same thing, and that an undemocratic version of the former can be vital to the health of a democratic version of the latter.

Eldersveld and Walton Jr. Parties in Society

-Modern political systems are highly complex, made up of huge bureaucracies, many interest groups, and a mass public larger than ever before due to extension of the right to vote. If such systems are to be governed effectively, means must be developed to bring the scattered parts together, to lubricate th system. -The political aprty is one major type of linkage structure, perhaps the central one. It provides a basis for interaction and cohesion within legislatures like Congress and between legislative and executive leaders. A party also provides cooperation between national, state and local institutions and leadership. -Second, a party is also a forum in which interest groups can present their views about governmental policies as well as press for particular types of candidates for offices. This make the party an areans for the development of compromises by interest groups and a agent in created interest group coalitions working for particular goals. -Third, a party constitutes a medium or channel for communciations linking citizens, organizational leaders and government officials. Parties bring the citizens in contact with government and are used by leaders to communicate with the public. -in a democracy there are multiple centers of power and constant negotiations between them are necessary in order to make decisions. Parties provide a major arena for combat among conflicting interests and an arena for bargaining, negotiation and resolution First Image of Party: First image of party is a group seeking political power by winning election. This view focuses on elections and the struggle for office. Second image of party: a group that represents social interests and is a coalition of interests seeking community actions. Parties are apparatuses of communal action linked to the groups making up the community, responding to and processing their demands and thus translating social reality into political reality. Third Image of Party: a group communicating an ideology to the public and competing with other parties on ideological terms. Each party must differentiate its position from other parties in order to attract votes. Parties develop ideologies and issue positions in relation to voter preference patterns on issues. Author's definition of party: a party in a democracy is a group that competed for political power by contesting elections, mobilizing social interests and advocating ideological positions, thus linking citizens to the political system.

Schlozman and Rosenfeld The Paradox of Hollow Parties

-Party politics in 21st century America presents a paradox. Our polarized age is unquestionably also an era of partisan revival. In the mass electorate, party identification predicts voting behavior better than any time since the dawn of polling. In government, intraparty discipline and interparty antagonism have reached unprecedented levels, placing severe strains on the very functioning of a Madisonian system of separated powers and triggering just the kind of chronic, rolling crisis in governance that motivates conferences such as this one. The national party organizations have become financial juggernauts even in a regulatory landscape that offers powerful incentives for political money to flow elsewhere. American parties are strong. -And yet, even as the party divide defines the sides in America's political war, parties feel weak. They seem inadequate to the tasks before them—of aggregating and integrating preferences and actors into ordered conflict in American politics, of mobilizing participation and linking government to the governed. Even prior to 2016, signs had abounded of a brittleness in the capacity of parties and party leaders to influence the political scene and a lack of legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary voters and engaged activists alike. This year's extraordinary political developments should upend any settled consensus that all is well in the party system. American parties are weak -The solution to this paradox, we argue, lies in the reality that today's parties are hollow parties, neither organizationally robust beyond their roles raising money nor meaningfully felt as a real, tangible presence in the lives of voters or in the work of engaged activists. -Partisanship is strong while parties as institutions are top-heavy in Washington, DC, and undermanned at the grassroots -If the "Party Period" of the 19th century featured organizationally robust and locally rooted parties that aggregated participation into meaningful and distinct policy agendas only poorly, the situation has now reversed. Our new Party Period features a grand clash of ideology and interests but parties that are hollowed out and weakly legitimized. And much as 19th century Americans were said to have lacked "a sense of the state," Americans in the contemporary era of party polarization can be said to lack a sense of party 1. Less Grassroots Mobilization 2. Less party nomination blocking power 3. Withered State Party organizations, local stuff, nationalzation of state parties in service of the DNC 4. Less clear alternative party platforms, no one knows what parties really stand for now.

La Raja Why Super PAC's

-The nature of campaigns has indeed changed, with increasing amounts of money being spent by nonparty groups rather than candidates and parties. But Firestone and others misdiagnose the underlying source of this change, and vastly overstate the flow of money in 2012 compared to previous elections. -In fact, for all the talk about the surge of money in this election, it appears from initial estimates that less money was spent in this election than in the previous one. -The severe constraints on party organizational fundraising, precisely during a period of intense divisions between the parties, has led to a surge in campaign ads by non-party (but party aligned) groups. Super PACs exist primarily because partisans have the motive and means to create party-like structures to offset constraints on party committees. But the campaign finance rules constrain coherent, party-based organizing to such an extent that partisans have sidestepped the rules to create organizations such as Super PACs. -This shows that party organizations remain central players, but that total party funding is flat (and possibly declining). In contrast, non-party spending on media has surged. Spending started rising steadily in the aftermath of the BCRA, and this year increased exponentially. -The groups with the greatest incentive to establish permanent Super PACs are the ideological factions in the respective parties. -Unless the rules are adjusted to move regulations in the direction of a party-centered system, it seems logical to conclude that the campaign environment will become more dominated by a narrow band of interest groups that are adept at electioneering and whose policy preferences will whet the polarization pervading American governing institutions

Schlozman Trump and the Republcans

-Trump weaves a viscerally effective politics of us and them. Trump champions us ("we" know who "we" are). And he names his villains: Mexico and China, which steal jobs from us; the immigrants who commit crimes and take our jobs, and the Muslims who terrorize us. When Trump stands for American greatness, it means winning, however brutally, on our terms—and if we can't win, then we make deals, as we should have with Saddam and Qaddafi. -Trump's opponents have conspicuously failed to coordinate, even tacitly, in any strategy. Republican leaders hardly seem to know their own party. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, John Sununu, the state's former governor, and his wife were asked if they knew any Trump supporters. They could name only a neighbor down the street. Mitt Romney suggests voting tactically to stop Trump—but voters have little besides a hunch to guide them in choosing a candidate. -Since the 1980s, the Republicans have moved steadily rightwards, especially in Congress. As relative moderates in the party feared primary challenges from enforcers in the Ted Cruz vein, they became ever less willing to compromise. Yet even as compromise grew rarer, the core elements in the party remained: it is elite-led and growth-oriented, and its racism has largely stayed coded. Trump disrupts each element, reimagining '70s-era backlash politics for a meme-friendly, Islamophobic age. -Yet Trump is a wrecker not a builder. If Trump somehow ushers in a new era of deal-making, he would be the unlikely medicine to reduce the fever of polarization. If the hard-right elements in Trumpism triumph, presumably in close concert with the Freedom Caucus in the House and other pieces of movement conservatism currently more comfortable with Ted Cruz, then a constitutional system dependent on norms and not just rules faces real peril. -TRUMP EXPLOITS TENSIONS in the Republican coalition long in the making, rendered more acute as Trump's supporters see their wages stagnate and feel themselves the losers in what the sociologist Joseph Gusfield, in a study of temperance, once called "a concrete and very real struggle over the distribution of prestige in American society."

Schlozmen and Rosenfeld a new approach

-We take a different view, reviving the responsible party prescription of an issue-oriented politics centered on the robust efforts of parties with real integrative tissue and policy capacity. If our take on the modern era of strong partisanship and hollow parties paints a gloomier picture than what many party scholars offer, that may be because we retain a more ambitious vision for political parties in small-d democracy. We emphasize instead the distinct and intrinsic qualities that, attheir best, uniquely enable parties to mobilize popular participation, to integrate disparate groups, interests, and movements, and to foster meaningful choice and accountability in policymaking. -Yet if parties appear only as the sum of the groups that comprise them, then parties have no intrinsic features as parties. Party politics in the UCLA school's account is a game of engaged elites who, once formally nominated and elected by duped and distracted voters, then pursue relatively extreme agendas in office. 9 Little in this analysis, however, engages the relative strength or weakness of parties as they seek to facilitate agreement among their groups, or the capacity of parties to mobilize participation and popular sentiment, or the consequences of shifts over time in the legitimacy of parties as actors in the political system -But consider in 2016 some of the causes of that failure: party actors so terrified of backlash from voters or media-advocacy institutions within their own coalition that they neglected to offer endorsements or take other decisive action in the process; the fruitlessness of the elite signaling that did occur stemming from a collapse in legitimacy; and a massive and exploitable chasm between the respective priorities and agendas of the parties' policy demanders and rank and file GOP voters. These all highlight shortcomings in the theory of politics as a stable insider game among groups. They compel scholars to bring parties as parties back into the center of scholarship. -Modern party scholars have treated parties chiefly as dependent variables, the institutions created in response to other actors' needs and preferences. In doing so they have moved away from thinking of parties as distinct institutions in their own right. For all the genuine insights such an approach has yielded, treating parties as the end products of other actors' work—as vehicles for interests or office-winners for politicians—leaves parties' actual operations a black box while giving short shrift to the corrosive effects of popular disconnection from parties as tangible organizations and subjects of positive affinity -Our vision is "pro-party," meanwhile, in a more robust sense than the mere acceptance of the need for somebody to structure political choices—so why not parties? We emphasize instead the distinct and intrinsic qualities that, at their best, uniquely enable parties to mobilize popular participation, to integrate disparate groups, interests, and movements, and to foster meaningful choice and accountability in policymaking. -Strong parties are not simply weak parties with strong bank accounts, but formal institutions that effectively and continually engage with voters, activists, and politicians to formulate and then implement party program. -Like the new political realists, we think parties ought to control their nominations -The weakness of American parties as vehicles for generating and articulating policy agendas is an old story. The sturm und drang of campaign rhetoric and the lofty bromides of party platforms notwithstanding, the major American parties have been held to be comparatively lacking in coherent policy agendas or ideologies at least since the Party Period -Nevertheless, polarization creates a setting distinctly suited for parties in particular to build more robust participatory organizations. That means tapping into the tributaries of movement activism and independent political organizing where they exist, from the weathered but stubbornly viable labor and evangelical networks that have anchored the parties for decades to the nascent political mobilizations that have dotted the twenty-first century— Dreamers, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and also the Tea Party and the Alt-Right—not only to generate votes on Election Day but to bring movement cadres into formal party work -The connection between party organizations and the lived experience of ordinary Americans has frayed over time. The centrality of explicit party policy and party responsibility to the conflicts that structure the modern party system and powerfully shape policy has likewise faded. Stronger parties won't solve the core dilemma posed by the ill fit between disciplined ideological partisanship and Madisonian institutions—though we suspect they would mitigate the potential for crisis. But they will help to clarify the nature of the conflict and mobilize Americans to participate. A great partisan era calls for parties without apology.

The Result of the Perpetual Campaign Heclo

-What is the result of transforming politics and public affairs into a twenty-four-hour campaign cycle of pseudoevents for citizen consumption? For one thing, the public is regularly presented with a picture of deeper disagreements and a general contentiousness about policy issues than may in fact be true when the cameras and microphones are turned off. Second, immense encouragement is given to the preexisting human tendency to overestimate short-term dramatic risks and underestimate the long-term consequences of chronic problems. Third, public thinking is focused on attentiongrabbing renditions of what has gone wrong for which somebody else can be blamed. Thus, any attempt to debate policy continually reinforces a culture of complaint and victimization where seemingly dramatic conflicts never really settle anything or lead anywhere. -Political news is news made to happen. Meanings are spun. The performance becomes more significant than what is said. Pseudoevents generate competing pseudoevents. What happens becomes enmeshed in what might have been the motives and whether any statement really means what it says. People who are supposed to be self-governing are taught that nothing is what it is. It is only what it seems, and it is as true to say something seems one thing as another. What is one to say about such a situation? Perhaps only that this way madness lies.

NBC News United States of Trump

-What we found was a distinct movement of Americans alarmed by economic trends, unsure of their place in a more diverse nation and convinced that the major parties no longer have their interests in mind. -Trump seemed to grasp intuitively that his base lived in a different world than that of other candidates. He boasted in speeches that he did well with "poorly educated" voters and cited economic frustrations over trade and jobs, especially among blue collar workers, as essential to his appeal. -Trump seemed to grasp intuitively that his base lived in a different world than that of other candidates. He boasted in speeches that he did well with "poorly educated" voters and cited economic frustrations over trade and jobs, especially among blue collar workers, as essential to his appeal. -Trump's brand of nativism and populism is a classic example: He is ultra-conservative on deportations and border security, leans left within the GOP on social spending and trade, and offers a mix of isolationist and militarist views on foreign policy. It turns out these positions are popular among many GOP voters, but not among the intellectual leaders who have shaped the party's platform. -An important aspect of Trump's appeal isn't about individual issues at all, but rather a sense that his unusual background will allow him to bypass partisan gridlock and run things more effectively than conventional politicians.

Mann and Orenstein Money in Politics

-a major increase in recent decades in the demand for and the supply of money in politics directly exacerbates dysfunctional politics by threatening the independence and integrity of policy maker and by reinforcing partisan polarization. -there have been inadequate measures to limit the source and size of contributions to candidates and parties -by the 1990s parties found ways of raising soft money, unlimited contributions from corporations and individuals ostensibly used for purposes other than influencing federal elections. This created increased opportunities for innapropriate pressure and conflicts of interest if not outright extortion or bribery between public officials and private interests. -McCain Finegold act cracked down on soft money, but the later citizens united cased weakened this act. -misuse of non-profit status, courts allowing "indipendant-expenditure commitees" which can attack or defend cadidadtes directly (super pacs) to get unlimited soft money. -new fundraising and spending arraignments provide special opportuntities for individuals who hold extreme ideological views or who have direct stakes in public policy decisions to shape the positions and agendas of the parties.

Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks Koger, Masket and Noel

-a significant number of nominally independent media outlets and interest group exchange information with formal party organizations and ideologically similar organizations. These extended party networks are starkly divided into polarized camps that funnel information to formal party organizations. The Key Triochetemy: party in government, party in the electorate and party as an organization. Doesn't examine partisan media, interest groups, activists. -power in a network is potentially decentralized, unlike the hierarchies of formal organizations. Network members often influence each other by sending informative signals, linking members together and co-ordinating action. -the gap between formal party organizations extends to the constellation of interest groups and magazines. Polarization is present even beyond party organizations. -formal party organizations tend to me information receivers within their networks

Abramovitz the Disspearing Center Polarization and Social Groups

-between 1933 and 1969, the Democrats controlled the presidency based on a large majority coalition. White voters in the south, and white ethnic (largely Catholic) and working class voters in the north were the main groups. Blacks were a lesser force, but became a poweful supporter of democrats in the mid 1960s with the passage of the voting rights act when they were able to register. -durign this period democrats were party of the working class while Republicans were the party responsible for the great depression. For southereners, republicansn were also responsible for imposing Reconstruction on the south. -cracks began to form in this group after Roosevelt's death in 1945, when Strom Thermond led a walkout over weak civil rights platform, he sought the presidency later as the nominee of the states rights party that won several deep south states. -later the Republcians won whites in the south and more and more ethnic and working class whites in the north that though civil rights platform of the democrats was too liberal. -Reagan cemented GOP's ties to socially conservative white evangelicals by attacking Supreme Court decisions legalizing abortion and banning school parayer. Also to white northerners who were upset over welfare policies that they felt primarily benefitted blacks who were unwilling to work. -racial divide made democrats seem like the party of blacks and Republicans as the party of whites. -the disintegration of the new deal coalition was accompanied by the emergence of new divisions within the electorate—divisons based on race, gender (women (especially single ones) tend to vote democrat) and religious commitment. -the end result of this has been the emergence of a new American party system—one in which party loyalties are based primarily on ideological beleifs rather than on membership in social groups.

Fiorina Culture War

-contrary to claims of growing polarization, Dimaggio, Evans and Bryson find that during the last quarter of the 20th century, older and younger Americans grew more alike in their views. Same with educated and less educated, black and white, religious denomiantions and Americans living in different regions. -on the issues of abortion, between 1980 and 2000 there is been no increase in polarization in abortion attidues, despite the media's portrayal of the issue -Increasing partisan polarization in the absence of popular polarization indicates that "sorting" has occurred—those who affiliate with a party today are more likely to affiliate with the ideologically "correct" party than they were in earlier periods. -the inaacurate picture of national polarization presented by the media undoubtedly reflects the fact that the thin stratum of elected officials, political professionals, activists who talk to the media are better sorted now than a generation ago. They are more distinct, more ideological than their predessesors. -Sorting has made the strongest identifiers in each party more distinct from those of a generation ago. But the polarization story is much less accurate for the less strongly identified, let alone for political independents and in general for the mass of citizens who are rarely considered worthy of attention from the media. -the strongest party identifier have become somewhat more polarized. Democratic activists and strong partisans like generic liberals and dislike generic conservatives more than a generation ago, vice versa for Republicans. -reports of a culture war are mostly wishful thinking and useful fund-raising strategies on the part of culture war guerillas, abetted by a media driven by the need to make the dull and everyday appear exciting and unprecedented.

Bartels Unequal Democracy Partisan Biases in Economic Accountabiltiiy

-data shows that the majority of Americans, even of Republicans have achived the best economic prosperity under Democratic presidents. So why do Republicans still win? -election year income growth is the most important factor for voters in presidential elections. -Voters are swayed by the balance of campaign spending between the incumbents and challengers. -Bartels demonstrates the aspects in which the rationality of the American electorate falls short of this standard. For instance, they are not sensitive to economic conditions over the incument's entire term in office. In fact, voters ascertain whether the incumbent has done well on the economy on the basis of election year economic growth. -Republican adminsitrations experience economic growth consistently during election years, but slow growth early in their presidencies. Similarly, Democratic presidents have large growth early on, but slower growth in election years at the ends of terms. -Since partisans differences in average income growth are greatest for middle class and poor families, they are the obvious economic losers from the partisan bias in accountability produced by voter's short time horizons. This exacerbates economic inequality. -in addition, voters, regardless of their economic status, seem to use the income growth of high-income families as the barometer determining who they will vote for. -low income voters appear highly responsive to income growth among the rich even while they attach no apparent weight to overall income growth. Same for middle and high income voters. -reason for this may be that the mass media pays more attention to the economic fortunes of affluent people than normal people.

Bartels Class Politics and Partisan Change

-despite many saying that people are voting against their interests, deciding who to vote for based on "moral values" Bartels finds that economic issues are more important, epscially among the people on the losing end of the free market system. Over the past few decades, working class support for the democrats has increased. -over the last half century, the average democratic vote among white college grads has increased by 16%, but among white non-college grads it has decreased by 6% -Bartels finds that the trend for working class white has been going up for democrats, not down. -from 1976-2004 whites in the bottom third cast 51% of their votes for democrats. Middle income cast 44% for dems, upper class cast 37% for dems. -democratic identification among working class whites has declined from 22% in 1952 to 4% in 2004, but this decline is also present for middle and upper class whites. -the erosion of democratic identification among lower class whites is also entirely concentrated in the south. Largely due to Civil rights. -remarkably few analysts have noted that the net decline in support for Democratic presidential candidates among white voters over the past half-century is entirely attributable to partisan change in the south. In fact, poor white voters have actually become more loyal in their support of Democratic presidential candidates over this period. Republican gains have come among middle and upper class whites, gains concentrated also only in the south. -there is no evidence of a significant conservative shift since the 1970s among lower income whites. In fact, high income whites have become more conservative while lower income have become less conservative, on the issue of government jobs. -low income voters are generally liberal on economic issues, but tend to be conservative on cultural issues like abortion. -stats show that despite many saying that lower income whites have voted on cultural issues, economic issues are actually significantly more important to them. -even highly religious voters tend to vote more on the basis of economic issues than cultural issues.

Slate How Trump Happened

-economic populism, Republican divisive politics are not the main reason why Trump has risen -Barack Obama caused the race issue to burn out of control and enable Trump -For millions of white Americans who weren't attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country's political life. And with talk of an "emerging Democratic majority" he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, Reagan H.W. Bush, would no longer matter. -when coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the great recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn't give material benefits. -43% of Americans said discrimination against whites had become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities -The Obama era didn't herald a post-racial America as much as it did a racialized one, where millions of whites were hyperaware of and newly anxious about their racial status. -researchers have found a substantial increase in the number of voters with anti-black attitudes, which rose from 47.6% in 2008 to 50.9% in 2012. 79% expressed anti-black views among Republicans. -now middle class whites race drug addiction and economic dependency on government, which adds a racial element to economic anxiety, as the security provided by whiteness no longer exists for many Americans. -the trends that produced Trump, a brittle economy, an ailing white working class, an insecure white middle class, a rising non-white population, political gridlock, and growing minority political power are ongoing. Trumpism will likely continue into the near future.

Great Divide: Campaign Media In the American Mind Mutz

-evolution of scholarly views on mass media. This evolution characterizes scholars as initially believing that media had massive effects on political attitudes and opinions, followed by a period in which these effects were assumed to be minimal, and ending with a third era in which such effects were once again assumed to be at least substantial, if somewhat different in nature. -For example, media's ability to prime certain issues over others has indirect implications for vote choice. To the extent that campaign media emphasize an issue that is perceived as one candidate's strength or another's weakness, the voter's decision-making calculus will be skewed more heavily toward evaluating candidates on that particular issue, which could favor one candidate over another. -Advertising appears most influential in races for low-level of½ces where name recognition alone can produce votes. The slick, highly professional advertising that most Americans think of as powerful appears in high-level races such as the presidency-and there is little evidence of direct persuasive effects in these races -Moreover, advertising effects appear to be short lived when they do occur. -If a candidate does not spend large sums on television (the least efcient of campaign communications), then he or she is seen as less "serious" as a candidate. -But perhaps more important, because observers of campaigns perceive highly professionalized campaigns to be more likely to succeed, candidates continue to pay huge amounts to campaign professionals, who continue to rely on instinct and tradition in spending candidates' money. -this ineffectiveness of campaign ads leads to wasted resources. -If elections are believed to be won and lost because of the tactics of professional campaign consultants-not because of the beliefs of the mass public, or the merits of candidates, or politics-then how can the outcome be respected? -Finally, in addition to wasted resources and less perceived legitimacy in election outcomes, beliefs in the power of campaign media ultimately elevate media's actual power in elections.

Politics of Congressional Elections Johnson

-gerrymandering has big effect on a party's electoral chances in congressional races -small states, rural regions with smaller populations get disproportionate influence in the House. This benefits Republicans. From 1950s to 1970s party organizations atrophied and partisan ties weakened. But more recently there has been a reversal of this trend as more vigorous national party organizations have emerged. -addition of primary elections to congressional races has weakened party bosses who used to choose a candidate, strengthening voters. -primary elections have largely deprived parties of their most important source of influence over elected officials. Parties no longer control access to the ballot, and therefore, to political office.

Mccarty Reducing Polarization by Making Parties Stronger

-if parties were strong unified political parties have strong incenties to converge to the political center. A party that fails to position itself in the center will be defeated by one that does. With strong parties, there is little polarization -If parties are weak, the autonomous candidates of each party have incentives to converge on the median voter in each district. Voters would be indifferent between the candidates and would metaphorically flip coins. There is little polarization, and both parties are very heterogenous. -so neither the extreme weak or strong party system would be very polarized. -in intermediate scenarios, voters prefer candidates from homogenous parties, the candidate whose party label provides more precise information about the candidate's position. -My view is essentially that of E. E. Schattschneider (i960). Strong political parties have autonomy from and bargaining advantages over special interest groups. Weak parties are those whose elected officials are free agents who can build electoral coalitions around narrow and extreme interests. - First, the role of formal party organizations in the nomination of candidates should be enhanced, not diminished as in reforms such as California's "top-two" primary system. The official neutrality of political parties in primary elections facilitates the entry of more extreme candidates who can receive funding and organization by extreme groups. Formal partv groups ought to be able to deploy the resources necessary to counter such insurgent candidates. - Second, the role of the political parties in the campaign finance system ought to be enhanced. For all of its faults, the "soft money" loophole that once allowed political parties to receive unlimited campaign- contributions was far superior to the current system that shifts more of the action to outside groups. An ideal reform would shift the balance back toward parties so that they could play a much bigger role as a conduit of money to specific candidates. Such a role for parties might provide better assurances that moderate legislators need worry less about being "primaried" by candidates backed by outside groups

The Politics of Resentment Wisconsin Cramer

-in rural communities, rising gas prices are a major cause of concern, one that elites don't recognize, since people in these areas drive long distances to everything -price of gas was crippling their ability to buy health insurance -funding for education was an issue to because rural communities get the short end of the stick, as wealth communities get more. They make all the rules in Madison and don't respect us. Rural consciousness: about perceptions of power, who makes decisions or who decides what to discuss. Perceptions of values and lifestyle, involved perception of resources or who gets what. Power: decision making or the exercise of power in major cities victimizes people in small towns, by giving them less than their fair share of resoruces. School funding. Politicians never come to speak or meet with them in rural areas. Rural areas have no power because their voices are never heard. Values and Lifestyles: City people have a lack of listening skills, repect for the rural way of life. Resentment over rural stereotyping as hicks. The rural people thought urbanites had a lack of common sense, couldn't work with their hands. Economic concerns were more important that social concerns like abortion for them. Concpetions of hard work: working class people emphasize hard work. People they perceive as not working hard, as lazy, are underserving. This leads to opposition to welfare. Feeling that the deck is stacked against them, and no matter how hard htye work, they still would not be able to get head. These people want jobs, not welfare, they take pride in work, not in handouts. Resources: many complaints about injustice in the distribution of public dollars, unfair taxation. Cities get more reources, wages are better there. Cities get advantges in gas prices, utility bills, infrastructure. Decision makers overlook the rural areas. -more complex that just race tensions, antigovernment and other attitudes are important.

Johnson Incumbency Advantage

-incumbents are consistently successful at winning elections in Congress. 90% of incumbents have won postwar for the house, 79% in the Senate. -one reason for the incumbency advantage is the institutional characteristics of congress. For instance, highly decentralized committee and subcommittee structure allowed members to specialize in legislative areas where they could best serve local interests. They also benefit from federally paid resoruces that could be used to pursue reelection like paid travel to their districts, communications allowances, their large staffs. -congressmen also provide services to voters in their districts, and the fact they have done things to benefit their district make voters likely to favor the incumbents. -also incumbents use their resoruces to convince potential opponents of their invicibility, making strong opponents less likely to run. -how well challengers do at the pools is directly related to how much campaign money they raise and spend. Challengers rarely win without spending a great deal of money -Incumbents don't like to spend a lot of money, but have the networks and relationships to outspend challengers if they are in trouble. Thus empirically, the incumbents tend to raise less money since they usually don't need to. -non-incumbents need money more than incumbents because they need to produce name recognition, voter awareness. Incumbent's most effective electoral strategy is to discourgage serous opposition by avoiding showing signs of electoral vulnerability.

Lee The Perpetual Campaign

-nearly three decades have past since the last presidential landslide, divided government is the norm. Both parties can count on getting between 47 and 53% of the electorate in any given year. -then central argument of this book is that changed competitive circumstances have had far-reaching effects on political incentives in Washingtion. Intense party competition for institutional control focuses members of congress on the quest for partisan political advantage. -when party control seemingly hangs in the balance, members and leaders in both parties invest more effort in enterprises to promote their own party's image and undercut that of the opposition. This stands in the way of cooperation. -The quest for party differences (the main way parties gain advantage is by magnifying differences) cuts against bipartisan cooperation. An out party does not win competitive edge by participating in or voting for and thereby legitimating an opposing party's legislation. -messaging has become institutionalized responsibility for congressional party leaders, as well for minor members and staffers. It is the focus on constant strategizing, experimentation, institutional innovation and creative effort. -it's not just matter of emphasizing the positives of your agenda, but also on focusing the narrative on the weaknesses and failures of the other side, to portray opponents as untrustworthy or incompetent. -bipartiasn participation of legislating undercuts party messaging efforts. Important legislation rarely passes on the strength of one party alone, so really there is a tradeoff between passing any legislation and messaging. -legislation that draws support from both sides of the aisle also blurs the lines between the parties and provides a stamp of approval for the status-quo allocation of party power. Passing bills with bipartisan assent communicates to voters that the minority party is still able to achieve legislative result even though it is in the minority. The minority's acquiescence thus constitutes a grand of legitimcacy from the minority to the majority. Basically it signals " we agree with what the majority party is doing in these areas, but we are asking you to kick them out of power anyway" -legislative compromise often disappoints and demoralizes fellow partisans, instead of mobilizing and firing them up. -majoirties have more pressure to compromise, since they have to show they got stuff done when they were in power. By the same token, a lack of power is a freedom from this sense of governing responsibility. Minoirty parties also want to deny the majority victories that they can use to say they got things done. -proportion of Congressional staffers in communications has gone up. Congress has cut back on other functions while sustaining even higher levels of staffing for communications

The Invisible Primary

-now the invisible primary is of crucial importance. Faced with the need to compete in 50 state primaries and caucuses, presidential candidates have no choice but to enlist help. They have little to choice of where to get it, they must turn to party regulars and local leaders, as in the prereform system, as well as interest groups, issue activists, fundraisers. -now the invisible primary is of crucial importance. Faced with the need to compete in 50 state primaries and caucuses, presidential candidates have no choice but to enlist help. They have little to choice of where to get it, they must turn to party regulars and local leaders, as in the prereform system, as well as interest groups, issue activists, fundraisers. -party insiders are the most important influence on voter-decision making in primaries. Insiders endow candidates who stay in the race with extremely unequal amounts of media coverage, campaign funds, party endorcements and standing in opinion polls. -Endorcements can be viewed as persuasive messages targeted at individual voters who are likely to be receptive to those messages. Particularly in early contests, voters have relatively little info about the candidates, so endorcements can sway them.

Bartels Economic Inequality and Political Representation

-one of the key principals of democracy is that every citizen's preferencse should count equally. But there is reason to believe this is not the case. Weathier and better educated citizens are more likely than the poor and less educated to have clearly formulated and well-informed preferences, are more likely to vote and to have direct contact with public officials, and to contribute moneya dn efforts to political campaigns. -senators are vastly more responsive to affluent consittutents than constitutents of modest means. The views of the constitutents in the upper third of the income distribution received about 50% more weight than those in the middle third. The views of constitutents in thebottom third received no weight at all in the voting decisions of their senators. -Republican senators were twice as responsive to the top third of income than democrats. Democrats and Republcans were equally responsive to the middle third of income. Neither were responsive to the lowest third. -significant disparities in responsiveness to rich and poor consitutents still appear even after allowing for differences attributable to turnout.

Rieder Canarsie

-the basic fact of life for Canarsie people was the precariousness of their hold on middle class status, and the intense fear it cold be taken away -feeling that blacks are coming in taking their jobs. Workplace was under threat by liberal reform. -resentment was also directed at privilages portions of the middle classes, like union contracts and deals that benefited certain groups, like Dockworkers. -organzied minorities, liberalism, organized labor and big business all threatened the poor Canarsieans -redistribution of income from the middle class to the poor also angered them, a sense that recipients of welfare are parasites. -also the injustice of the tax system was an issue. Canarsians felt that tax penalities were heaped on working people while the affluent got off scot free. While the taxes go to welfare for the poor. -liberals were giving away too much to poor minorities, like a exploited prostitute. -affirmative action was also a flashpoint, we shouldn't just give jobs to blacks who aren't qualified. No civil rights laws existed to protect whites. Quotas to hire more blacks were controversial. -liberalism's special enthusiasm for the poor fortified the belief that it worked against middle-class survival. Deriding lower middle class nervousness as racism, many reformers saw Middle America as a defiant stumbling block to an englightend society.

The Party Decides

-up until the 1970s, party insiders decided presidential nominees de facto. Party leaders controlled outcomes by controlling state and local party conventions, most of which were closed to the public or discouraged their participation. -In contrast, today, the public chooses almost all of the delegate to the national party nominating conventions. -this book argues that the demise of parties has been exaggerated and parties reamin major players in presidential nominations. They scruitinize and winnow the field before voters get involved, attempt to build coalitions behind preffered candidates and sway voters to their choice. -traditional interest groups, issue advocacy groups, ideological activitsts are in long-term alignment with parties and may exert as much influence in nominations as party officials. -with several strong candidates vying for nomination, party officials can tip the balance in favor of a specific one -the party coalition does not have a monopoly on campaign resources, but it does control a large fraction of them, enough to make a critical difference. -parties try, via the candidates they nominate and elect, to pull policy toward what their interest and activist groups want, even if that is not what most voters want.

Congressional Voters Johnson

-voter turnout for congressional votes is most strongly related to education. Voting increase with income and occupational status. Also increses with age. -electorate in presidential years was found to be composed of larger proportion of voters weakly attached to either political party and subhect to a greater influence by political phenomena peculiar to the specific election. At the midterm, with such voters making up a much smaller proportion of the electorate, partisanship prevailed. -this results in a period of "surge and decline" where the winning presidential candidate's party picked up congressional seats, many of which were subsequently lost at the next midterm when the pull of the presidential candidate was no longer operating. -surveys show that partisanship is the single most important influence on individuals' voting decisions -because it costs time an energy to determine the full range of information on all candidates who run for office, voters quite reasonably use the shorthand of party to simplify their decision. -incumbents do better because voters are much more likely to remember their name . -if they spend enough, senate challengers become as well known as incumbents -house members thrive when voters focus on their personal virtues and services to the district. They become more vulnerable when the focus is on their own party, ideology or policy stances, for these repel as well as attract voters. There has been measurable decline from the remarkably high levels of regard for incumbents found in the late 1970s.

Mann and Orenstein Bromides to Avoid

-we can't assume the political system will self-correct. We have to fix our politics ourselves. -turning to third-parties to solve our problems is also stupid. -enshrining a requirement to have an annual balanced budget is also a faulty response, because it would require huge cuts as soon as it is implemented, with disaterous economic consequences. A modern economy must have the ability to deficits and debt strategically for its well-being. Also the odds of such a constitutional amendment being passed is basically none. -term limits for congress is also bad. Term limits would replace professional politicians with citizen legislators, whose would be inexperienced in the ways of politics. Also they have less specialized knowledge and produced incentivs to go for a big short term splash to get their next post. -Term limited legislators actually became less beholden to the constituents and more attentive to othe interests. -full public financing of elections is also no good. Special interest influence is more than just money. Also this is unlikely to be achieved.

Roosevelt Presidency (Three Legged Stool

1932 FDR wins election as a repudiation of Hoover. Shock of depression -emphasis on government as th solutions to problems, counterforce to buisiness infuence -New deal era had incredible legislative productivity -Three legged stool coalition, organied labor and the CIO, Urban bosses, the solid south -craft unions in new deal eras focus on getting beneftis from teh state,

Superdelegates

1984 Hunt Comission adds unpleged PLEOS, aka superdelgates. These are all DNC members, Dems in congress, governors, mayors. Back to peer reviwe. post-sanders superdelegates might no longer be DNC members -superdelegates have also never been decicive in a race.

Political Machine

A political machine is a political organization in which an authoritative boss or small group commands the support of a corps of supporters and businesses (usually campaign workers), who receive rewards for their efforts. The machine's power is based on the ability of the workers to get out the vote for their candidates on election day. Although these elements are common to most political parties and organizations, they are essential to political machines, which rely on hierarchy and rewards for political power, often enforced by a strong party whip structure. Machines sometimes have a political boss, often rely on patronage, the spoils system, "behind-the-scenes" control, and longstanding political ties within the structure of a representative democracy. Machines typically are organized on a permanent basis instead of for a single election or event. The term may have a pejorative sense referring to corrupt political machines A political machine is a party organization that recruits its members by the use of tangible incentives—money, political jobs—and that is characterized by a high degree of leadership control over member activity. In the 1930s, James A. Farley was the chief dispenser of the Democratic Party's patronage system through the Post Office and the Works Progress Administration which eventually nationalized many of the job benefits machines provided. The New Deal allowed machines to recruit for the WPA and Civilian Conservation Corps, making Farley's machine the most powerful. a party organization, headed by a single boss or small autocratic group, that commands enough votes to maintain political and administrative control of a city, county, or state. Organizers who "deliver" the votes are often rewarded with patronage jobs. However, patronage can result in poorer service to the citizens because appointees may be neither qualified for their jobs nor interested in performing them Since the 19th-century heyday of machine politics, civil service reforms limiting the number of patronage jobs, the institution of direct primaries rather than party nomination of candidates, the municipal operation of public utilities, and judicial review by state and federal courts have all reduced the power of political machines. The steady exodus of city residents to the suburbs since World War II and a more mobile population with fewer ties to particular neighbourhoods have also weakened the social base that once made political machines synonymous with city government.

Incumbency Effect

Best predictor of wiinning. Incumbnecy Effect: increment of the vote that an incumbent running for re-election received by virtue of being teh incumbent -about 8-10 percent -incumbents fundraise only to scare off challengers or when they face a serious opponent. -Party ID is also very important, more than consittuent service or personal vote, as congresional eelctions are increasingly nationalized.

Buckley vs Vallejo

Buckley v. Valeo, 424 US 1 (1976) is US constitutional law case of the US Supreme Court on campaign finance. A majority of judges held limits on election spending in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 §608 were unconstitutional. The majority, in a per curiam opinion, contended that expenditure limits contravened the First Amendment provision on freedom of speech because spending money, in its view, was the same as written or verbal expression. It limited disclosure provisions, required the Federal Election Commission's composition to be changed Although the decision upheld restrictions on the size of campaign contributions, by striking down limits on expenditures the Court decision left in place a demand for money. By limiting the supply of funds (contribution limits) but not the demand for funds, this may have increased fund raising pressures on candidates. The decision left intact the ability of government to offer direct funding for campaigns, but not to force candidates to accept public funding and accompanying limits on expenditures. The Court's decision also upholds the public disclosure of political contributions, but only contributions made to candidates and parties, organizations with the primary purpose of influencing campaigns, and for contributions used to directly advocate for or against a candidate.

Citizens United

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is a U.S. constitutional law and corporate law case dealing with the regulation of campaign spending by organizations. The United States Supreme Court held (5-4) on 21 January 2010 that freedom of speech prohibited the government from restricting independent political expenditures by a nonprofit corporation. The principles articulated by the Supreme Court in the case have also been extended to for-profit corporations, labor unions and other associations -allows unlimited independent expenditures, as long as not connected wiht a candidate Justice Kennedy's majority opinion[24] found that the BCRA §203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech. The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech n January 2010, the Supreme Court struck sections of McCain-Feingold down which limited activity of corporations, saying, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech." Specifically, Citizens United struck down campaign financing laws related to corporations and unions; law previously banned the broadcast, cable or satellite transmission of "electioneering communications" paid for by corporations in the 30 days before a presidential primary and in the 60 days before the general election. The ruling did not, as commonly thought, change the amount of money corporations and unions can contribute to campaigns. The minority argued that the court erred in allowing unlimited corporate spending, arguing that corporate spending posed a particular threat to democratic self-government

Elbridge Gerry's slamander

Elbridge Thomas Gerry (/ˈɛlbrɪdʒ ˈɡɛri/; July 17, 1744 (O.S. July 6, 1744) - November 23, 1814) was an American statesman and diplomat. As a Democratic-Republican he was selected as the fifth Vice President of the United States (1813-14), serving under James Madison. He is known best for being the namesake of gerrymandering, a process by which electoral districts are drawn with the aim of aiding the party in power, although its initial "g" has softened to /dʒ/ from the hard /ɡ/ of his name.[2] During his second term, the legislature approved new state senate districts that led to the coining of the word "gerrymander

Hard vs Soft money

Hard money goes directly to campaigns, soft money goes to national party. When cash is contributed directly to a political candidate, it is known as a "hard money" contribution. These contributions may only come from an individual or a political action committee, and must follow the strict limits set forth by the FEC. For example, in 2012, the maximum amount that an individual can contribute to a presidential candidate or committee is: Read more: What is the difference between "hard money" and "soft money"? | Investopedia http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/hard-money-soft-money.asp#ixzz4TJFV1Hd1 Follow us: Investopedia on Facebook The funds can come from individuals and political action committees as with "hard money", but they can also come from any other source, such as corporations. The law says that this money can only be used for "party-building activities" such as advocating the passage of a law and voter registration, and not for advocating a particular candidate in an election. Because soft money is not regulated by election laws, companies, unions and individuals may give donations in any amount to a political party for the purpose of "party building." Party building may include ads that educate voters about issues, as long as the ads don't take the crucial step of telling voters which candidates to vote for. For example:

Waving the Bloody Shirt

In the American election campaigns in the 19th century, "waving the bloody shirt" was a phrase used to ridicule opposing politicians who made emotional calls to avenge the blood of political martyrs. The pejorative was most used against Republicans, who were accused of using the memory of the Civil War to their political advantage. Republicans were often accused of 'waving the bloody shirt'--reminding voters of Southern secession, and urging them to vote for the party of the Union and Lincoln. These appeals held enormous appeals to those who had made great sacrifices in the Union war effort: veterans, including men still suffering from injuries and diseases contracted in the Army; those who had lost husbands, sons, and fathers; former nurses and volunteers; Southern African-Americans emancipated by the war; and Northerners, black and white, who had sought to abolish slavery.

Poll Tax

In the United States, payment of a poll tax was a prerequisite to the registration for voting in a number of states. The tax emerged in some states of the United States in the late 19th century as part of the Jim Crow laws. After the right to vote was extended to all races by the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, a number of states enacted poll tax laws as a device for restricting voting rights The poll tax requirements applied to whites as well as blacks, and also adversely affected poor citizens. The laws that allowed the poll tax did not specify a certain group of people.[6] This meant that anyone, including white women could also be discriminated against when they went to vote

Lochner v New York

Lochner v. New York, 198 US 45 (1905) was a landmark US labor law case in the US Supreme Court, holding that limits to working time violated the Fourteenth Amendment. A majority of five judges held that a New York law, that bakery employee hours had to be under 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week, violated the due process clause, which in their view contained a right of "freedom of contract". They said there was "unreasonable, unnecessary and arbitrary interference with the right and liberty of the individual to contract. Lochner is one of the most controversial decisions in the Supreme Court's history, giving its name to what is known as the Lochner era. During this time, the Supreme Court issued several decisions invalidating federal and state statutes that sought to regulate working conditions during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression. This period ended with West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937), in which the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of minimum wage legislation enacted by the State of Washington The Supreme Court during the Lochner era has been described as "play[ing] a judicially activist but politically conservative role."[5] The Court sometimes invalidated state and federal legislation that inhibited business or otherwise limited the free market, including laws on minimum wage, federal (but not state) child labor laws, regulations of banking, insurance and transportation industries.[5] Originating in the late 19th century, the Lochner era carried into the mid-1930s, when the Court's tendency to invalidate labor and market regulations came into direct conflict with Congress' regulatory efforts in the New Dea Alarmed at the new rules of the game for campaign funding, the Progressives launched investigations and exposures (by the "muckraker" journalists) into corrupt links between party bosses and business. New laws and constitutional amendments weakened the party bosses by installing primaries and directly electing senators.[2] Theodore Roosevelt shared the growing concern with business influence on government. When William Howard Taft appeared to be too cozy with pro-business conservatives in terms of tariff and conservation issues, Roosevelt broke with his old friend and his old party. He crusaded for president in 1912 at the head of an ill-fated "Bull Moose" Progressive party. TR's schism helped elect Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and left pro-business conservatives as the dominant force in the GOP. The latter elected Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. In 1928 Herbert Hoover became the last president of the Fourth Party System. -control of buisiness, rise of unions

Alan Abramowitz Polarization

Main Three Arguments of Book: 1. partisan-ideological polarization is greatest among the politically engaged public. On the other hand, it is among the uninterested and uninformed that ideological moderation flourishes. 2. There is no disconnect between political elites and the public. However, candidates pay a disproportionate amount of attention to the views of the politically engaged segment of the public, which is also the most polarized. Therefore polarization at the elite level is a reflection of the politically engaged segment of the populace. 3. By clarifying choices and increasing the stakes in elections, polarization can increase the interest and motivation of the public to vote and engage in political activities, thereby increasing the size of the engaged public. - However, despite or perhaps because of growing polarization, a large segment of the public remains uninterested and uninvolved in political discourse. Polarization may be more of a turn off than a turn on. -there has been increasing polarization among poltiically engaged citizens, which make up a large segment of the populace. -there as been a growing consistency acros issues and between issue positions and party identification. - -less informed, interest citizens tend to make up the moderate center -educational level of American electorate has increased recently, leading to more politically engaged people. -because of increasing party loyalty and increasing one party dominance of states and districts, rucampaign strategies have changed from appealing to swing voters to mobilizing the base. -educations levels continue to rise, and college-educated citizens tend to be more politically engaged. They display much more ideological awareness.

Poujadisme

On 29 November 1953, Pierre Poujade created the Union de Défense des Commerçants et Artisans (UDCA; Defense Union of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen), to organize the tax protesters. This movement would soon be called "Poujadism" (French: Poujadisme).[2] Poujadism flourished most vigorously in the last years of the French Fourth Republic, and articulated the economic interests and grievances of shopkeepers and other proprietor-managers of small businesses facing economic and social change. The main themes of Poujadism were articulated around the defense of the common man against the elites The movement's "common man" populism led to antiparliamentarism (Poujade called the National Assembly "the biggest brothel in Paris" and the deputies a "pile of rubbish" and "pederasts"), a strong anti-intellectualism (Poujade denounced the graduates from the École Polytechnique as the main culprits for the woes of 1950s France and boasted that he had no book learning), xenophobia, and antisemitism especially aimed against Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France (claiming "Mendès is French only as the word added to his name"), who was perceived as responsible for the loss of Indochina.[4] Poujadism also supported the cause of French Algeria

What Are Parties

Parties are linckage instituions linking politicans and the populace -they define competing policy priorties -parties organzie political conflict, people no more about a candidate when they see a R or a d on the ballot -competittive choice among parties makes a democracy. There is no democracy without parties.

The Hollow Parties

Political Parties as strong among elites: dc establishment, congress Parties as strong in mass public due to link between party ID and voting behavior -but weak organizational parties, no sense of party, collapse of linkage institutiosn like churches and unoions -parties villified, little mobilization -low turnout -no blockign power DNC distrusted, Trump

SpeechNow.org vs FEC

SpeechNOW.org v. Federal Election Commission is a 2010 federal court case involving SpeechNOW, an organization that pools resources from individual contributors to make independent expenditures. SpeechNOW challenged the constitutionality of the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)'s political committee registration, contribution limits and disclosure requirements for independent expenditure-only groups. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that FECA's limits on what individuals could contribute to SpeechNOW, and what SpeechNOW could accept, violated the First Amendment.[1] SpeechNOW.org is the first case in which a federal court applied the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed contribution limits on independent expenditures.[2] allows unlimited uncoordinated fundraising -groups like SPeechnow now have no limits on fundraising, since they make independent political expenditures

Mccain Feingold Act

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA, McCain-Feingold Act, Pub.L. 107-155, 116 Stat. 81, enacted March 27, 2002, H.R. 2356) is a United States federal law that amended the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, which regulates the financing of political campaigns. Its chief sponsors were Senators Russ Feingold (D-WI) and John McCain (R-AZ) Prohibiting national parties from raising or spending nonfederal funds - Under the provisions of McCain-Feingold all donations to national candidates or parties must come in the form of "hard money," which is subject to annual contribution limits and other strict regulations. (State parties are still allowed to accept soft money in accordance with individual state laws. So are certain interest and issue-advocacy groups that have no official connection to a party.) The BCRA decreased the role of soft money in political campaigns as the law places limits on the contributions by interest groups and national political parties.[citation needed] The BCRA had a "Stand by Your Ad" Provision, which requires candidates in the United States for federal political office, as well as interest groups and political parties supporting or opposing a candidate, to include in political advertisements on television and radio "a statement by the candidate that identifies the candidate and states that the candidate has approved the communication."[citation needed] Additionally, this had an effect on the amount of attack ads and controversial claims that were made due to the apparent association with a certain candidate and his or her political party. -hard money limits raised

Farmers' Alliance

The Farmers' Alliance was an organized agrarian economic movement among American farmers that developed and flourished in 1875. The movement included several parallel but independent political organizations — the National Farmers' Alliance and Industrial Union among the white farmers of the South, the National Farmers' Alliance among the white and black farmers of the Midwest and High Plains, where the Granger movement had been strong, and the Colored Farmers' National Alliance and Cooperative Union, consisting of the African American farmers of the South. One of the goals of the organization was to end the adverse effects of the crop-lien system on farmers in the period following the American Civil War. The Alliance also generally supported the government regulation of the transportation industry, establishment of an income tax in order to restrict speculative profits, and the adoption of an inflationary relaxation of the nation's money supply as a means of easing the burden of repayment of loans by debtors. The Farmers' Alliance moved into politics in the early 1890s under the banner of the People's Party, commonly known as the "Populists. -subtresuries, graduated income tax, direct election of senate, fiat currency. -challenge to industrial capitalism

New Deal System

The Fifth Party System refers to the era of American national politics that began with the New Deal in 1932 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This era emerged from the realignment of the voting blocs and interest groups supporting the Democratic Party into the New Deal Coalition following the Great Depression. For this reason it is often called the New Deal Party System. With Republicans losing support because of the Great Depression, the four consecutive elections, 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, of Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the Democrats dominance. The conservative coalition generally controlled Congress from 1938 to 1964, again based on the powerful rural white control of the Democratic Party (and congressional representation) in the South, with its disfranchisement of blacks. The activist New Deal members promoted American liberalism, anchored in a New Deal Coalition of specific liberal groups—especially ethno-religious constituencies (Catholics, Jews, African Americans)—in addition to Southerners, well-organized labor unions, urban machines, progressive intellectuals, and populist farm groups. -southern dems, urban whites, urban bosses, new ethnic groups, progressives, and farm groups Franklin D. Roosevelt forged a coalition that included banking and oil industries, the Democratic state party organizations, city machines, labor unions, blue collar workers, minorities (racial, ethnic and religious), farmers, white Southerners, people on relief, and intellectuals Roosevelt discovered an entirely new use for city machines in his reelection campaigns. Traditionally, local bosses minimized turnout so as to guarantee reliable control of their wards and legislative districts. To carry the electoral college, however, Roosevelt needed massive majorities in the largest cities to overcome the hostility of suburbs and towns. With Postmaster General James A. Farley and WPA administrator Harry Hopkins cutting deals with state and local Democratic officials, Roosevelt used federal discretionary spending, especially the Works Progress Administration (1935-1942) as a national political machine. Men on relief could get WPA jobs regardless of their politics, but hundreds of thousands of supervisory jobs were given to local Democratic machines. The 3.5 million voters on relief payrolls during the 1936 election cast 82% percent of their ballots for Roosevelt. The vibrant labor unions, heavily based in the cities, likewise did their utmost for their benefactor, voting 80% for him, as did Irish, Italian and Jewish voters.

System of 1896

The Fourth Party System is the term used in political science and history for the period in American political history from about 1896 to 1932 that was dominated by the Republican Party, excepting the 1912 split in which Democrats held the White House for eight years. American history texts usually call it the Progressive Era. The concept was introduced under the name "System of 1896" by E.E. Schattschneider in 1960, and the numbering scheme was added by political scientists in the mid-1960s.[1] The central domestic issues concerned government regulation of railroads and large corporations ("trusts"), the money issue (gold versus silver), the protective tariff, the role of labor unions, child labor, the need for a new banking system, corruption in party politics, primary elections, direct election of senators, racial segregation, efficiency in government, women's suffrage, and control of immigration. Foreign policy centered on the 1898 Spanish-American War, Imperialism, the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the creation of the League of Nations. -Republican dominance at the national level

Free Soil Party

The Free Soil Party was a short-lived political party in the United States active in the 1848 and 1852 presidential elections, and in some state elections. Founded in Buffalo, New York, it was a third party and a single-issue party that largely appealed to and drew its greatest strength from New York State. The party leadership consisted of anti-slavery former members of the Whig Party and the Democratic Party. Its main purpose was to oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories, arguing that free men on free soil comprised a morally and economically superior system to slavery. It opposed slavery in the new territories (agreeing with the Wilmot Proviso) and sometimes worked to remove existing laws that discriminated against freed African Americans in states such as Ohio. It nominated Martin Van Buren for the presidency in 1848 and John P. Hale for the presidency in 1852. The party membership was largely absorbed by the Republican Party between 1854 and 1856, by way of the Anti-Nebraska movement

Hastert Rule

The Hastert Rule, also known as the "majority of the majority" rule, is an informal governing principle used in the United States by Republican[1][2][3] Speakers of the House of Representatives since the mid-1990s to maintain their speakerships[4] and limit the power of the minority party to bring bills up for a vote on the floor of the House.[5] Under the doctrine, the Speaker will not allow a floor vote on a bill unless a majority of the majority party supports the bill The Hastert Rule's introduction is widely credited to Speaker Dennis Hastert (1999-2007); however, Newt Gingrich, who directly preceded Hastert as Speaker (1995-1999), followed the same rule

Liberty Party

The Liberty Party was a minor political party in the United States in the 1840s (with some offshoots surviving into the 1850s and 1860s). The party was an early advocate of the abolitionist cause. It broke away from the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) to advocate the view that the Constitution was an anti-slavery document; William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the AASS, held the contrary view that the Constitution should be condemned as an evil pro-slavery document. The party included abolitionists who were willing to work within electoral politics to try to influence people to support their goals; the radical Garrison, by contrast, opposed voting and working within the system.

Mcgovern Fraser Commision

The McGovern-Fraser Commission, formally known as Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection,[1] was a commission created in response to the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Soon after Richard Nixon's electoral victory, the 28-member commission was selected by Senator Fred R. Harris, who was then the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.[2] Senator George McGovern and later Representative Donald M. Fraser chaired the commission, which is how the commission received its name.[1] McGovern resigned from the commission in 1971 in order to run for president. He won the first nomination decided under the new rules, but lost the general election to Nixon by a huge margin. The McGovern-Fraser Commission established open procedures and affirmative action guidelines for selecting delegates. In addition the commission made it so that all delegate selection procedures were required to be open; party leaders could no longer handpick the convention delegates in secret. The commission recommended that delegates be represented by the proportion of their population in each state.[8] An unforeseen result of these rules was that many states complied by holding primary elections to select convention delegates. This created a shift from caucuses to primaries. The Republican Party's nomination process was also transformed in this way, as state laws involving primaries usually apply to all parties' selection of delegates. One of the unintended consequences of McGovern-Fraser reforms was an enormous surge in the number of state party presidential primaries.[9] Prior to the reforms, Democrats in two-thirds of the states used elite-run state conventions to choose convention delegates. In the post-reform era, over three-quarters of the states use primary elections to choose delegates, and over 80% of convention delegates are selected in these primaries. This is true for Republicans as well.[10]

American Party

The Native American Party, renamed the American Party in 1855 and commonly known as the Know Nothing movement, was an American political party that operated nationally in the mid-1850s. The movement arose in response to an influx of migrants and promised to "purify" American politics by limiting or ending the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, whom they saw as hostile to Republican values and as being controlled by the Pope. Mainly active from 1854 to 1856, the movement strove to curb immigration and naturalization but met with little success. Membership was limited to Protestant men. There were few prominent leaders, and the largely middle-class membership was divided over the issue of slavery.

People's Party (Populists)

The People's Party, also known as the Populist Party or the Populists, was an agrarian-populist political party in the United States. For a few years, 1892-96, it played a major role as a left-wing force in American politics. It was merged into the Democratic Party in 1896; a small independent remnant survived until 1908. It drew support from angry farmers in the West and South and operated on the left-wing of American politics. It was highly critical of capitalism, especially banks and railroads, and allied itself with the labor movement.[ A People's Party grew out of a large mood of agrarian unrest in response to low agricultural prices in the South and the trans-Mississippi West, as well as thought that the "Eastern Elites" were taking advantage of the farmers by charging higher rates on loans and trains The drive to create a new political party out of the movement arose from the belief that the two major parties Democrats and Republicans were controlled by bankers, landowners and elites hostile to the needs of the small farmer. The movement reached its peak in 1892 when the party held a convention chaired by Frances Willard (leader of the WCTU and a friend of Powderly's)[7] in Omaha, Nebraska and nominated candidates for the national election. natural aalies were the Republicans in the south adn the Democrats in the west

Election of 1896

The United States presidential election of 1896 was the 28th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 3, 1896. It was the climax of an intensely heated contest in which Republican candidate William McKinley (a former Governor of Ohio) defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan (a former Representative from Nebraska) in one of the most dramatic and complex races in American history. The 1896 campaign is often considered to be a realigning election that ended the old Third Party System and began the Fourth Party System.[2] McKinley forged a conservative coalition in which businessmen, professionals, skilled factory workers, and prosperous farmers were heavily represented. He was strongest in cities and in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific Coast. Bryan was the nominee of the Democrats, the Populist Party, and the Silver Republicans. He presented his campaign as a crusade of the working man against the rich, who impoverished America by limiting the money supply, which was based on gold. Silver, he said, was in ample supply and if coined into money would restore prosperity while undermining the illicit power of the money trust. Bryan was strongest in the South, rural Midwest, and Rocky Mountain states. Bryan's moralistic rhetoric and crusade for inflation (to be generated by a money supply based on silver as well as gold) alienated conservatives The Democratic Party's repudiation of its economically conservative Bourbon faction, represented by incumbent President Grover Cleveland, largely gave Bryan and his supporters control of the Democratic Party until the 1920s, and set the stage for Republican domination of the Fourth Party System and control of the White House for 28 of the next 36 years McKinley secured a solid victory by carrying the core of the East and Northeast, while Bryan did well among the farmers of the South, West, and rural Midwest. -Bryan won the heartland while Mckinley won west coast and the northeast -Democracy met capitalism and capitalism won -cities versus farms.

Election of 1968

The United States presidential election of 1968 was the 46th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 5, 1968. The Republican nominee, former Vice President Richard Nixon, won the election over the Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Analysts have argued the election of 1968 was a major realigning election as it permanently disrupted the New Deal Coalition that had dominated presidential politics for 36 years. Richard Nixon ran on a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the nation's cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. A year later, he would popularize the term "silent majority" to describe those he viewed as being his target voters. Nixon won the popular vote by a narrow margin of 0.7 percentage points, but won easily in the Electoral College, 301-191. The election also featured a strong third party effort by former Alabama Governor George Wallace, a vocal advocate for racial segregation in public schools. He carried several states in the Deep South and ran well in some ethnic enclave industrial districts in the North. -dems divided between anti-war Mcgovern and more traditional Humphrey (who backed LBJ's position on the war) -nixon wins on law and order new social movements back dems like Feminists, LGBT, Latino, American indian movements

Schattschneider In Defense of Political Parties

Thesis: political parties created democracy and modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of the parties -early democratic theorists took it for granted that people would assume responsibility for the expression of their own will in government, not even imagining the need for self-appointed political managers and manipulators that would have to organize the electorate and channel the popular will. This is the great omission in the theory of democracy formulated by classical philosphers who dealt only with imaginary democracies. This gap has never been closed. Theorists assumed that popular sovereignty would be effective automatically. Everyone who has thought about it at all has recognized that the parties and the law are nonassimilable. The extralegal character of political parties is one of their most notable qualities. In a highly legalistic system of government such as the government of the United States, therefore, the parties seem to be a foreign substance. -by political devices that are subtler than the devices of the law, politicans are able to establish refinements of control of which the law is incapable. Politicans influence the decisions of public authorities at points at which the law is vulnerable and cannot control them. -parties operate in a legal no-mans land, and can thus produce starteling effects. -American political parties have transformed the Constitution, substantially abolished the electoral college, created a plebiscitary presidency and contributed to the extraconstitutional growth of that office. -As a result of the efforts of political parties, the president receives a mandate to govern the nation -parties took the 18th century constitution and made it function to fit the needs of modern democracy in ways not contemplated by the authors

Issue Bundles

Today, issues are increasingly bundled. Pro life and pro buisiness. Issue bundles increasingly go with ideology, issues and ideology correspond to partisanship more and more.

High Demanders Retake control

UCLA School (Zaller) party networks offer resources to candidates, boots on teh ground, poltiical intellgience. -invisible primary -when parties send clear signal of who they like, voters follow it -parties don't endorse when there is no candidate acceptable to all.

VAP vs VEP

Voting Age Population: people over 18 Voting Eligible Population: felons and non citizens not included. People living overseas, military are included.

Crisis of the 1850s

Whigs disintigrate into liberty party (1840-1844) and free soil party. Republicans form in 1854, comprised of bulk of northern Whigs, anti-slavery democrats and free soil voters. When new issues of nativism, prohibition, and anti-slavery burst on the scene in the mid-1850s, few looked to the quickly disintegrating Whig Party for answers. In the North most ex-Whigs joined the new Republican Party, and in the South, they flocked to a new short-lived American Party. The Compromise of 1850 had fractured the Whigs along pro- and anti-slavery lines, with the anti-slavery faction having enough power to deny Fillmore the party's nomination in 1852. The Whig Party's 1852 convention in New York City saw the historic meeting between Alvan E. Bovay and The New York Tribune's Horace Greeley, a meeting that led to correspondence between the men as the early Republican Party meetings in 1854 began to take place. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the new territories to slavery, was passed. Southern Whigs generally supported the Act while Northern Whigs remained strongly opposed. Most remaining Northern Whigs, like Lincoln, joined the new Republican Party and strongly attacked the Act, appealing to widespread northern outrage over the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Other Whigs joined the Know-Nothing Party, attracted by its nativist crusades against so-called "corrupt" Irish and German immigrants

White Primary

White primaries were primary elections held in the Southern states of the United States of America in which only white voters were permitted to participate. White primaries were established by the state Democratic Party units or by state legislatures in many Southern states after 1890. The white primary was one method used by white conservative Democrats to disenfranchise most black and other minority voters. They also passed laws and constitutions with provisions to raise barriers to voter registration, completing disenfranchisement from 1890 to 1908 in all states of the former Confederacy.

We need to Rethink Party Democracy Azari

`People think of parties as bad and corrupt, neutral in nomination races - Bernstein writes, "The real problem isn't that people can't accept certain party procedures, whether closed primaries or the caucus system or superdelegates. It's that a century after the Progressives preached against political parties, many in the U.S. don't really accept the parties themselves as legitimate." - I don't know that we have any hard data on this, but it seems like the way most Americans define democracy is more compatible with big rally than a party caucus of engaged supporters. The emphasis on individuality also privileges a candidate-centered approach, and casts the best choice as the candidate who pleases the most voters, rather than the candidate who appeals across different factions, read: groups, within the party - For people under 40, we've also only ever known a political world with another layer of post-Watergate sunshine reforms. We expect that official party organizations will be neutral in nomination contests and can't accept that the rules might be designed to favor certain types of candidates because the party thinks that's how it can achieve its main goal: winning political office. - My own normative sense, based on more than a decade of teaching, researching, and reading about this stuff and thinking about democracy from all angles, is that these shifts represent some true losses. A colleague suggested that caucuses and state conventions are unlikely to be the solution because of the highly unrepresentative sample of people who turn up at these events

Elections as Predictable

best predictor, real income growth in the election year -voters have short memory, what have you done for me lately -unpopular war bad for president's party -after 8 years, holding the white house gets harder. -party ID is also a big determiner of vote as 90% of partisnas support their presidential candidate -indepdents are often closest partisans, lean toward one party or another.

Realignment

change in dominant algnment, new line of cleavage develops that seperate parties. -Critical elections often reshape alignments, 1928, 1960, 1896, 1932 -long-term patterns are important, not just critical elections though, party systems collapse and reform over time

Rise of the New Right

corporate mobilization -coded racist language -religious right, evangelicals -NRA and the pro gun wing -hawkish foreing policy

Polarization

education adn income level, higher the better. Educated people tend to be more ideological. ' -Americans increasingly see important distinctions between parties -polarization caused by increasing education, clearer choices. -increasing dislike of the other party, don't feel more positive about their own party though -voters idetify as ideologues, non-voters are less ideological Fiorina: people have underlying views but are just sorted better into the right party -decrease in floating voters.

Wilson Amateur Democrat

felt that politicians needed to be motivated by material incentives rather than ideology. When motivated by idelogy, people tend to disagree vehementy, can't compromise

Gerry Mandering

incumbency protection, often bipartiasn -drawing district lines to benefit an political parties. -incumbents draw lines to give themselves favorable voting demographics -Rebpulicans are good at this. Republican voters are distributed more efficiently, diffused through the countryside rather than concentrated in cities.

Federal Elections BIll 1890

would sent inspectors to ensure African America sufferage, failed by one vote in the senat.e. Was last republican attempt to ensure Black sufferage. -literary test, poll taxes, grandfather clauses followed.

Racial Gap

blacks support dems overwhelmingly, whites have suported them less

Parties as informal networks

high demanders, interest groups are constitutive of parties rather than substitues for them -parties are more than just elected officals, also activists, media

Abramowitz the Rise of the Tea Party

increasing conservatism of the Republican Party's activist base over the past several decades. While only a small fraction of this base has actually participated in Tea Party protests, the expansion of the activist conservative base of the Republican Party has produced a large cadre of politically engaged sympathizers from which such participants can be recruited -activist wing of the party has grown incredibly polarized, with dislike of democrats increasing dramatically and their idelogical conservatism increasing dramatically -tea party supporters were also much more poltically active than non supporters, much more likely to vote , donate, contact representatives, et cetera -Along with a growing number of conservative Republican activists, the other factor crucial to the emergence of the Tea Party movement at the grass roots was the Democratic victory in the 2008 election and especially the election of Barack Obama as president. Obama is not only the first African American president, but he's also the first nonsouthern Democratic president since John F. Kennedy and arguably the most progressive Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt -Obama's mixed racial heritage, his ambitious policy agenda, and the extraordinarily diverse coalition of liberals, young people, and racial minorities that supported him in 2008 all contributed to a powerful negative reaction on the part of many economic and social conservatives aligned with the Republican Party and perhaps among whites who were simply upset about having a black man in the White House. -Over the past several decades, the U.S. party system has undergone an ideological realignment at both the elite and mass levels. At the elite level, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans who once held key leadership positions in the congressional parties have almost disappeared, and the number of moderates in both parties has gradually diminished, leaving a predominantly liberal Democratic Party battling a predominantly conservative Republican Party -These results indicate that over the past three decades there has been a marked increase in the size of the activist base of the Republican Party—an increase that preceded the rise of the Tea Party movement. Moreover, as the GOP's activist base was growing, it was also becoming increasingly conservative -The results in Table 8.5 show that ideological conservatism was by far the strongest predictor of Tea Party support. In addition to conservatism, however, both racial resentment and dislike for Barack Obama had significant effects on support for the Tea Party. These two variables had much stronger effects than party identification. Racial resentment had a somewhat stronger effect than dislike for Obama. Moreover, dislike for Obama was itself very strongly related to racial resentment with a correlation of .46. Finally, two social background characteristics, age and gender, had significant effects on Tea Party support with older respondents and men more likely to support the Tea Party -But by far the most striking differences between Tea Party supporters and the overall public involved their political beliefs. Tea Party supporters overwhelmingly identified with the Republican Party and they were much more conservative than the overall public and even other Republicans on a wide range of issues including social issues and economic issues. Moreover, Tea Party supporters displayed high levels of racial resentment and held very negative opinions about President Obama compared with the rest of the public and even other Republicans.

Whigs

industrialists, large planters, moral reformers, focus on internal reforms in the country.

Rise of the Republicans

kansas nebraska act divided Whigs, nortehrn and souther democrats. Northern dems, nativists (know nothing), free soil and norther whigs formed republican party.

Producerism

laboring white males are glorified, slaves and un-working aristocrats are bad

Economy and Strategic Politcians

when the economy is bad and the president is unpopular, incumbents retire and strong challengers run.

Gender Gap

white male democratic support has gone down, white female support is high

Kousser Southern Politics

- During the period from 1877 through the last decade of the century, the possibility remained that the Northern Republicans, because of a residue of humanitarianism left over from the antislavery and Reconstruction struggles, or merely for party advantage, would pass new national election bills, or even, white Southerners feared, pass civil rights acts. - In 1896, the heated contest inflated Yankee participation rates, while the collapse of Populism produced a lull below the Potomac. That Southern lull became permanent with the passage of harshly restrictive laws in several more states around the turn of the century. Though participation fell off in the North, too, the percentage of Northern turnout more than doubled that in the South in 1904, and similar gaps separated the sections through midcentury - in the 1880 presidential election. It indicates that a majority of the Negro adult males voted in that contest in every Southern state except two—Mississippi, where violence was extraordinarily thorough, and Georgia, which had adopted a cumulative poll tax. Not only did they vote. A majority of the black votes in ten states were actually counted for the Republican party, to which the Negroes overwhelmingly adhered. - The methods that the Democrats had employed to end Reconstruction had not caused either turnout or opposition to cease by 1880. It was true that the Republican label had lost popularity in the South, especially the Deep South. Most white Republicans had been converted or coerced into the Democratic party, leaving blacks and ex-Unionist, hill-country whites in control of the GOP. Continued coercion, widespread Democratic fraud at the polls, poll taxes in Georgia and Virginia (before 1882), the registration and the eight-box law (after 1881) in South Carolina, and Rutherford Hayes's naïve attempt to convert Southern aristocrats further stultified attempts to reorganize Southern Republicanism - Northern Republicans fluctuated between two Southern strategies: the first envisaged men interested in rapid, federally encouraged expansion of Southern industry flocking to the banner of the party of the protective tariff and internal improvements subsidies; the second, never so precisely defined, counted on adding lower-class whites to the party's Negro base by stressing such positive themes as fair elections and the improvement of public services, and such Democratic foibles as corruption and boss rule. - The assaults on the Democratic party came closer to success than some historians realize. As table 1.3 shows, the fusion efforts in governor's races failed very badly only in South Carolina, where the registration and eight-box law cut illiterates out of the electorate. Elsewhere, the Independents and Republicans garnered from a little less than a third to more than half of the votes. In seven of the eleven states, at least 40 percent of the voters opposed the ruling party, and in six of these states more than 60 percent of the potential voters participated. Given absolute Democratic control of the ballot boxes and their avowed willingness to fabricate returns in many black belt areas (particularly in Alabama and the river parishes in Louisiana), the opposition did remarkably well. - In sum, Southern politics in the eighties exhibited a fluidity and freedom unknown after disfranchisement. Politicians attempted to build up stable, continuous parties—a necessity if the voter's decision is to be rational. Both parties competed for votes among men of both races. And if the opposition could only guarantee a fair ballot count, it had a chance to carry several states—thus the bitter struggle over the Lodge fair elections bill - By 1896, when the GOP regained national power, Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama, and Virginia had adopted secret ballots and/or poll taxes; Mississippi and South Carolina had held dramatic disfranchising conventions. - Among the other factors in the final Republican capitulation to the Southern oligarchy was the fact that not only death but the overwhelming Republican defeats in 1890 and 1892 eliminated many leaders who had participated, though not always fervently, in the party's campaigns for human rights. - In their places rose younger men to whom abolition and Reconstruction seemed irrelevant, merely picturesque, or even evil. To the new generation of Republican leaders, domestic politics consisted almost entirely of the promotion and/or regulation of business. - Quite as weighty was the fact that the reaction against the party in power at the low point of the economic downturn created a stable national Republican majority. After 1894, the GOP did not need to carry a single Southern congressional district to control the federal government. To increase its majority by seeking Southern Negro votes risked alienating Northern racists.

Old Nomination System

- a private, intraparty affairs. Peer review of sorts. -state parties chose delagates as they saw fit -party organizations, especially big city mayors controlled delegations

Nickerson and Rodgers Political Campaigns and Big Data

- recently, campaigns have started to use large and detailed datasets to make predictions. While this has not radially transformed how campaigns operate, it does give data-savvy campaigns a competitive advantage. -an arms race has begun among political parties to leverage ever-growing volumes of data to create votes. -The supply of quantitatively oriented political operatives and campaign data analysts has increased as predictive analytics has gained footholds in other sectors of the economy like banking, consulting, marketing, and e-commerce. -Contemporary political campaigns amass enormous databases on individual citizens and hire data analysts to create models citizens' behaviors, dispositions, and responses to campaign contact - Campaigns need accurate contact information on citizens, volunteers, and donors. Campaigns would like to record which citizens engage in specific campaign-supporting actions like donating money, volunteering, attending rallies, signing petitions, -Behavior scores use past behavior and demographic information to calculate explicit probabilities that citizens will engage in particular forms of political activity. -Support scores predict the political preferences of citizens. In the ideal world of predict the political preferences of citizens, campaigns would contact all citizens and ask them about their candidate and issue preferences. However, in the real world of budget constraints, campaigns contact a subset of citizens and use their responses as data to develop models that predict the preferences of the rest of the citizens who are registered to vote. -Responsiveness scores predict how citizens will respond to campaign outreach. -however, traditional campaign work is still needed to harness the power of predictive scores, need to develop messages that appeal. just because we know what preferences are, doesn't necessarily make it easy to develop messages that appeal

End of the Old system

television exposed intraparty decision making -Kennedy used television to prove himself worthy -1968 Dems have disaterous convention, chaos over race, Vietnam . Dems are divided. Protests occur and are repressed brutally in Chicago. Humphrey is nomiated but has little popular support or legtimacy. -From 1968 on, DNC mandes a commison on party structure which led to reforms in popoular participation in nominations, end of close slates. Party insiders lose influence -primaries today are state by state affairs., primaries and open caucuses -Republicans follow suit. -gatekeepers lose control, people like Mcgovern and Carter nominated against elite wishes

Marriage Gap

white married women much more likely to be republican, single women much more likely to be dems

Gerrymandering Tactics

"Cracking" involves spreading voters of a particular type among many districts in order to deny them a sufficiently large voting bloc in any particular district. An example would be to split the voters in an urban area among several districts wherein the majority of voters are suburban, on the presumption that the two groups would vote differently, and the suburban voters would be far more likely to get their way in the elections. "Packing" is to concentrate as many voters of one type into a single electoral district to reduce their influence in other districts. In some cases, this may be done to obtain representation for a community of common interest (such as to create a majority-minority district), rather than to dilute that interest over several districts to a point of ineffectiveness (and, when minority groups are involved, to avoid possible racial discrimination). When the party controlling the districting process has a statewide majority, packing is usually not necessary to attain partisan advantage; the minority party can generally be "cracked" everywhere. Packing is therefore more likely to be used for partisan advantage when the party controlling the districting process has a statewide minority, because by forfeiting a few districts packed with the opposition, cracking can be used in forming the remaining districts. "Hijacking" redraws two districts in such a way as to force two incumbents of the same political party to run against each other in one district, ensuring that one of them will be eliminated, while usually leaving the other district to be won by someone from a different political party. "Kidnapping" aims to move areas where a certain elected official has significant support to another district, making it more difficult to win future elections with a new electorate. This is often employed against politicians who represent multiple urban areas, in which larger cities will be removed from the district in order to make the district more rural.

Heclo Why governing and Campaigning are different

-campaigning has a fixed time frame you only campaign in teh election, focused on short term gains and cocnerns. Governing is long term and the goal is always in teh horizon. -campainging is adversarial, governing is cooperative and ncessarily so -campainging is an exercise in persuasion, while govenring is based on deliberation. one relies on illusoins, the other on deeper and real concerns. An campainger doesn't need to examinen the truth of things, a governor does. -the more campaning and governing are intertwined, teh more the attitudes of campainging will seep into the governnance of the state

Kansas Nebraska Act

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 (10 Stat. 277) created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and was drafted by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and President Franklin Pierce. The initial purpose of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to open up thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. The popular sovereignty clause of the law led pro- and anti-slavery elements to flood into Kansas with the goal of voting slavery up or down, resulting in Bleeding Kansas The Kansas-Nebraska Act divided the nation and pointed it toward civil war.[65] The act itself virtually nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The turmoil over the act split both the Democratic and Whig parties and gave rise to the Republican Party, which split the United States into two major political camps, North (Republican) and South (Democratic). The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed each territory to decide the issue of slavery on the basis of popular sovereignty. Kansas with slavery would violate the Missouri Compromise, which had kept the Union from falling apart for the last thirty-four years. The long-standing compromise would have to be repealed. Opposition was intense, but ultimately the bill passed in May of 1854. Territory north of the sacred 36°30' line was now open to popular sovereignty. The North was outraged.

Rise of Populism

The platform included all the familiar agrarian demands— free silver, currency expansion by the government through the subtreasury plan7 or a better system," a graduated income tax, government ownership of railroads, telegraph, and telephone systems, forfeiture of undeveloped railroad land grants, direct election of senators— plus some planks on labor issues, including restriction of "undesirable immigration." -1892, people's party won 5 states in teh midwest -farm prices of crops had declined in recent years -1896, William Jennings Bryan and the Democratic party absorbed hte people's party supporters, plus some Democrats who were pro-silver -conservatives were terrified of the populists, people in cities thought of them as too radical -academics, clergy, buisiness, newspapers were all united in oposition to the populists -Cities went Republican en masse, as bryan failed to win over the urban working class. Bryan's support among silver republcians was also not as high as he wanted it to be. Free silver was a major policy issue in late 19th-century American politics. Its advocates were in favor of an inflationary monetary policy using the "free coinage of silver" as opposed to the deflationary gold standard. Its supporters were "Silverites", because silver would increase prices of goods, that farmers sold.

Realignment of 1930

based on conservative principals vs government intervention -Hoover was conservative in his responce to the Depression -FDR was progressive, but not that radical As it happened, the forces demanding change captured the Democratic party. And even after Roosevelt's election, they, more than he, controlled the direction of the party and the government. If Roosevelt led his party and the people, he was also led by them, the people demanded action adn relief, a new social order. -politics became polarized around the new deal, conservatives saw it as radical government overreach -The millions of voters who switched from the Republican to the Democratic party or were mobilized into the electorate as Democrats for the first time, attracted by the Democratic program and the Rooseveltian personality and leadership— shown as block B -Roosevelt won over industrial workers in the north with the new deal program, tight bonds were formed between organized labor and new deal FDR poltics -Roosevelt did lose some traditionally democratic rural people though -immigrants in cities came to Roosevelt too

Chapter 3 A Realignment Process Sundquist

-A party system that divides people into two contending political groups on the basis of their attitudes and beliefs about one set of public issues is disturbed by a new issue (or cluster of related issues). The new issue cleaves the electorate on a different line and hence divides each of the parties internally. The new issue can be of any kind, arising from any of the wide variety of dissatisfactions and grievances that can be felt by groups of citizens on matters they conceive to be the proper concern of government. -Either at the outset or as it gathers momentum, the new issue comes to be of such paramount political concern to some proportion of the voters that if it encounters resistance from the parties with which they are affiliated, it overrides all the considerations that form the basis of their attachment to those parties. In the intensity of their desire to use the machinery of politics and government to resolve the new issue, these voters arouse an equally passionate opposition dedicated to maintaining the status quo. -Thus within each party two hostile blocs take form, located on opposite sides of the line of cleavage created by the new issue and at the extreme of intensity of feeling on each side—at the poles. In modern parlance, they are single-issue groups, wholly dedicated to their cause. In between are the voters who have not been polarized, who may be called centrists; some may feel strongly about the new issue but all have in common a desire to see that the party that has served well as the instrument for united action in dealing with old issues not be torn apart by controversy over the new one. -If the centrists are able to resolve the new issue before the polar groups have achieved significant growth, both major parties will survive and the realignment will be minor. But if the issue remains unresolved and public concern continues to grow, the polar forces will increase and each of the major parties will become a battleground for the three forces contending for control—the two polar blocs and the centrists who are trying to prevent the splintering of the party. The outcome of the struggle determines the timing of the realignment, its scale, and the form it takes. -The polar groups will try, at the outset, to use the existing party machinery for their purposes. But if neither polar group can gain control of a major party—that is, of its policies and its nominations—then some elements of one or both polar groups may create a new party or parties. Other polar elements will remain within the existing parties, still striving to convert them to their ends. As long as the centrists are able to retain control of both major parties, realignment will be forestalled, and three or even four parties may compete for a time. But if the new issue becomes increasingly dominant, the polar forces will grow at the expense of the centrists, and eventually the centrists in one or both major parties either will be forced to take sides or will be overthrown. At that point, when one of the major parties comes under the control of a polar force and so moves to the polar position on the crosscutting issue, the realignment is precipitated. -The voters who have made up the polar blocs then have the instruments of political action they have been endeavoring to create, and they identify accordingly. The two parties organize for a showdown on the issue that has agitated and polarized the population. A critical election turns on the issue and the voters make their choice. If they are indecisive or if the issue is not the kind that can be quickly solved, one or more additional critical elections may follow. -In any case, the party system has a new rationale, an old conflict has been displaced by a new one for a segment of the electorate, and that segment of the electorate has formed, or is in the process of forming, new party attachments on the basis of that rationale.1 If the segment is large enough—that is, if the new conflict supersedes the old one for most of the electorate—a new party system supplants the old one. -The power and capacity of the established party leadership are, in a sense, matched against the strength and momentum of the issue. If the leaders have the skill and motivation to handle the issue in a way that will check the growth of the polar blocs, and if the issue is the kind that allows such handling, a major realignment will not take place. If, on the other hand, they throw in their lot with one or the other polar group, the realignment becomes inevitable. The historic realignments of the American party system occurred because the leaders either did not try to mediate and compromise the issue or tried and failed.

Creation of the People's Party

-In polling over a million popular votes (more than 8 percent of the total cast in 1892), the People's party won a plurality in five states—Kansas, North Dakota, Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. Their electoral votes were the first won by a third party in thirty-two years.9 The populists supplanted the Democrats as the principal opposition to the Republicans in Nebraska (where they polled more than three times the Democratic vote), South Dakota (almost three times), and Oregon (almost double). A Populist-Democratic fusion state ticket carried Wyoming -The young congressman described a country that had polarized. From the Pacific Coast to the Plains and across the South to the Atlantic, the "work-worn and dust-begrimed" had risen in bitterness against the economic order. Something was wrong with the system, it seemed obvious to them. -Farmers did not have to be experts on the quantity theory of money to understand that the value of money too was governed by the law of supply and demand— a greater supply of money would depress its value and correspondingly raise the price of every good and service. To them, it was clear that the government, which controlled the money supply, had not increased that supply to keep pace with the volume of business; otherwise, why would prices have declined for three long decades? The monetary policies of both parties had been determined by the East, administered by secretaries of the treasury who listened not to the nation's debtors but to the New York bankers, and heavily influenced by campaign contributors whose offices were in downtown Manhattan. -Finally, then, what had been foreshadowed by the Ohio Idea and the Granger movement and a long series of later protest efforts had come to pass. The economic rationale for the party system that had been displaced in midcentury by the issues of slavery, war, and reconstruction had reemerged at last. The major parties were again aligned on opposite sides of the genuine and crucial conflict of the day. In a country rent by economic depression, they appealed to the polarized electorate from opposing poles. -In the 1896 election Bryan set out deliberately to press the challenge and heighten the polarization of the country. This was not only true to the spirit of both conventions that had selected him as standard bearer; it was also dictated by necessity. To win, Bryan had to complete the realignment that had been set in motion by his nomination; to offset his lost Democratic support, he had to jar loose a substantial bloc of Republican voters from the anti-Democratic fixation in which they had been frozen since the days of slavery and civil war, and to do that he had to make the economic issue paramount and compelling -The 1896 election was the first to be fought out along the new line o cleavage that had been developing in American politics since the 1860s cutting across the line established on the issues of slavery, war, and reconstruction. Then suddenly, with the nomination of Bryan in 1896, the party system took on meaning once again. Each major party now had a position, and a program, that was relevant on economic matters. Each reflected one of the polar positions in the polarized society. -The massive swing to the Republicans in the North was predominantly urban.55 In rural counties in the Midwest and even in the East, the Democrats showed relatively slight losses from their strength of 1892. But in the urban centers the shift was decisive and lasting, and it was reflected in state as well as national elections. It is clear that Bryan failed disastrously to win over the urban element of his "toiling masses" coalition. "The simple fact which shines out from the election returns is that Bryan failed to win the support of labor," concluded Faulkner. -Finally, the Republican campaign of 1896 and the events on which it was based undoubtedly painted in the minds of many urban voters a new image of the Democratic party. Bryan enthusiasts may denounce the campaign as built on "scare" tactics that drastically distorted the facts. Be that as it may, the campaign succeeded. Many voters were in fact scared. To the image of the Democrats as the party of rum, Romanism, rebellion, and economic recession was added another R— radicalism

Breakup of the New Deal Coalition

-Truman desegregates armed foces, and Humphrey leads emphasis on minority right in 1948 convention -Strom Thurmond angry over this, runs on a dixiecrat states rights platform, wins 4 states. -combination of factors produced moderation of views on race, rise of mechanized cotton pikciing, cold war making black treatement untenable, North republicans move south as air conditioning makes life in the south tolerable. -Civil rights act of 1964, Barry Goldwater opposes and wins 5 states in teh deep south in a loss to LBJ. -civil rights act kills the southern demcoratc bloc. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the twin forces of the Civil Rights Movement and the counterculture caused a fracture in the party in the northern States. Many blue collar voters, who were socially and culturally conservative, disliked the aims of both the youth counterculture and Civil Rights Movements.

Tesler Most Racial vs Post Racial

-Racial resentment taps into the aforementioned components of the symbolic racism belief system with a battery of four questions asked in American National Election Studies (ANES) surveys from 1986 to 2012. The questions are presented as assertions, and respondents were asked to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, and how strongly they did so -Based on these measures, racial stereotyping is subtle but consistent (Kinder 2013). A majority of whites consistently rate their own group as more hardworking and intelligent than African Americans. Yet, almost no whites say that their racial group is categorically better than blacks. In fact, on a 0-100 stereotype scale, where a score of 50 means rating blacks and whites equally and a score of 100 represents the most prejudiced response possible, the average white American consistently scores in the mid-5os -Along with the improving economy, this chapter discusses how aspects of Barack Obama's first-term governing behavior could have also put him on the fast track to deracialization. Most notably, the president's raceneutral rhetoric, his colorblind policy proposals, and his historically moderate legislative agenda may have all helped alleviate stereotypical fears about African American political leadership. If those common concerns about black politicians were actually assuaged, then racial attitudes probably would not have been as prominent in 2012 voting behavior as they had been in 2008 After first establishing the theoretical reasons to believe that Obama's race remained an important consideration in how white Americans' evaluated his presidency, I show that the effects of racial attitudes on 2012 presidential vote preferences were similar to their unprecedented influence on the 2008 election. Also, like in the 2008 election, the mass public continued to evaluate Barack Obama not just as an African American but also as someone who exemplifies the more primitively frightening out-group status of "otherness -In sum, the three major reasons to suspect voting patterns would be less racialized in 2012— Barack Obama's race-neutral agenda, his ideological moderation, and the improving election-year economy— were all influenced by biased information processing. Indeed, Americans saw a much larger divide between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates' support for race-targeted policies in 2012 than they did throughout the pre-Obama era. Racial liberals and racial conservatives also perceived Barack Obama's ideological orientation and the state of the economy much differently during the 2012 election year. Taken together, then, these results strongly suggest that racial attitudes remained a powerful predictor of 2012 voting behavior. -Indeed, it was difficult to deactivate racial attitudes in 2012 voting behavior, given such factors as intense opposition to Obama, biased information processing, an ambiguous presidential record, changing demographics, racialized communications, and the president's historical racial significance. -the chapter showed that the effects of racial resentment, antiblack stereotypes, antiblack affect, and Muslim thermometer and favorability ratings on 2012 presidential vote preferences were similar to their large impact on the 2008 election. It is safe to conclude, then, that racial attitudes continued to be one of the more powerful determinants of 2012 voting behavior.

Campaign Finance

-courts have ruled that money is speech -more money equals more speech, so rich are overrrepresneted -giving as investment, to influence candidate -also giving as consumption, people like to talk to people in power, get their picture taken, go to swanky fundraisers. -no real quid-pro quo though, you buy access, not outcomes. -But money does influence agenda setting. -.01% gave 29% of disclosed contributions in 2014

Bartels Irrational Electorate

-concensus in political science is that collectivitly, electorates are rational. -however many are pessimistic about voter rationality. -some say that voters don't understand the issues and that shifts in election outcomes are attributable to defections from long-standing partisan loyalties by relatively unsophisticated voters. -Columbia professors in 1950 said that electoral choices are invulnerable to direct argumentation and are characterized more by faith and conviction, and by wishful expectation. -another argument is that voters use information shortcuts to make rational choices, like partisan stereotypes, personal narratives, endorcements and other cues. But that they lacked detailed knowledge of policies. . For one thing, voters' perceptions may be seri- ously skewed by partisan biases. For example, in a 1988 survey a majority of respondents who described themselves as strong Democrats said that inflation had "gotten worse" over the eight years of the Reagan administration; in fact, it had fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980 to 4.1 percent in 1988. Conversely, a major- ity of Republicans in a 1996 survey said that the fed- eral budget deficit had increased under Bill Clinton accordingly. However, a detailed analysis by political scientist Gabriel Lenz found very littie evidence that people actually changed their vote because of the Social Security debate. What happened, mostly, was that people who learned the can didates' views on privatization from the blizzard of ads and news coverage simply adopted the position of the candidate they already supported for other rea sons. The resulting appearance of "issue voting" was almost wholly illusory -in one study, only 70% of voters chose the candidate who matched their preferences. Subsequent work has shed light on how some of the powerful political "heuristics" used by ordinary voters contribute to the problem. For example, a team of psychologists led by Alex Todorov established that candidates for governor, senator, or representative who are rated as "competent" by peo- ple judging them solely on the basis of photographs are considerably more likely to win real-world elec- tions than those who look less competent -Bartels found that the actual popular vote in elections differed from the hypothetical outcome that would have occurred if each voter had been fully informed, this difference amounted to 3%, enough to swing four elections. This shows that the "errors" by millions of individuals voters do not always cancel out and can swing elections. -careful observation suggests that the reasons that people say they vote the way they do are merely rationaliztions constructed by readily available campaign rhetoric to justify prefernces formed on other grounds. There often is no "issue voting'

Duverger's Law

In political science, Duverger's law holds that plurality-rule elections (such as first past the post) structured within single-member districts tend to favor a two-party system and that "the double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to favor multipartism".[1][2] The discovery of this tendency is attributed to Maurice Duverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s. In the course of further research, other political scientists began calling the effect a "law" or principle.

FECA Amendments

The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA, Pub.L. 92-225, 86 Stat. 3, enacted February 7, 1972, 52 U.S.C. § 30101 et seq.) is the primary United States federal law regulating political campaign spending and fundraising. The law originally focused on increased disclosure of contributions for federal campaigns In 1974, the Act was amended to place legal limits on the campaign contributions and expenditures. The 1974 amendments also created the Federal Election Commission (FEC). -public funding program also administrated, federal money went to fund persidential campaigns 2008 Obama abandoned hte federal campaign finacne system, relied on private donations and rasised a ton. Now no one used the federal system.

Jacksonian Democrats

sun party of early 19th century. limited government, anti-tariff -party of laborers, farmers and artisans