Presidential campaigning as a manifestation of both the principles and the dynamics of American political culture has been marked by noteworthy changes throughout its historical progression, but in significant ways identifiable aspects of this particular political phenomenon have endured substantively unchanged. Today politicians with presidential ambitions behave in ways not unlike their forerunners, and while under the comforting influence of sentimental remembrance we are tempted to regard the politics, and the politicians, of the past as loftier than what is presently familiar, or as somehow more genuine in the comparison to what we now experience, a more careful and fair appraisal of our own times in contrast to what has proceeded us may likely disclose a closer resemblance than our nostalgic yearnings will allow. Candidates still court party insiders, depend on the largesse of donors, rely on the steady commitment of party activists and the seasoned expertise of advisers, grapple with a vigilant media, joust against the competition at all stages, consult with image-weavers and hoopla spinners, even curry the favor of popular comedians and other celebrities in vogue, and all this while exposing themselves to the irregular, distracted gaze of the voting public through the effervescent spectacle that is the modern campaign trail. These features are what we have come to expect from any modern presidential campaign, and we expect them because they are not in essence by any means new; quite to the contrary, in some variation they are nearly as old as American political campaigning itself. Changes in delivery and the nature of timing throughout the flow of a campaign season certainly set contemporary campaigning apart from the past—technology by itself, as with so many things, is a major factor in transforming the dynamics of current political campaigning—and the techniques of showmanship, the rapidity and brevity of communication, the threshold of correct form and good taste, and the texture of political language, among other things, are indeed distinct from what was normal in the experience of previous generations; tweets, sound bites, memes, viral videos, the rise and expansion of public informality, the intensified and ubiquitous spotlight glare cast on personal lives and private issues—all characterize the political terrain of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first century in ways that would all appear decidedly foreign, and likely disconcerting, to those generations of voters in our past—and all of these features and more do in fact lend a singular quality to the nature of the current political basic situation. Nevertheless, there remain strong resemblances between the style, and even the substance, of the all-too-garish campaigns today and what we now tend to look back upon with a sense of loss, for how often do we speak of bygone eras as something better, cleaner, sounder? Without question, changes have occurred and differences are real, and yet there is much that demonstrates the continuity of essential things.
What are those “essential things” from which we are able to derive, and sustain, this continuity? Foremost among any itemized account of these durable aspects of presidential politics stands the basic fact that those politicians whose ambitions are resolved toward gaining the White House must win the confidence and support of the electorate, the people themselves. Granted, as we all well know, it is a matter of fact that the Electoral College, the management of which is directed by the legislatures of the several states, technically still elects the president as authorized by Article II of the federal Constitution. But the history of campaigning is not the history of winning over appointed electors; the history of campaigns is a long, often repetitive, at times dramatic, and at its edges somewhat curious chronicle of the competition for the people’s favor, a spectacularly theatrical but ultimately serious popularity contest with the highest possible stakes. Electors still cast the formal, certified ballots that determine who will serve as president, but they in turn, while remaining faceless to most Americans—even the nominated candidates who have earned their votes—are on Election Day elected by the citizens of the various states who are assured of the elector’s pledged commitment to the voter’s choice. Officially, citizens choose between those electors committed to the candidate that they support for the presidency, and while they may not vote for these electors by name, it is they, not the candidate, for whom they officially cast their ballot. That these names remain mostly anonymous—anonymous but not secret—reveals the dynamic at work, for while the votes are directly for the unknown electors, they are in fact cast for the actual candidate, however indirectly. Who among us enters the voting booth with the intent to vote for electors? Rather, uppermost in the voter’s mind are thoughts about and commitments to the candidates themselves. And as indirect as this may be under the language of the Constitution, the candidates well know whose support they must gain, and who they must persuade in the process, and thus the necessity and inevitability of presidential campaigning, of taking one’s case before the people themselves. This is the way it has been throughout most of the republic’s political history, or at least that history as developed since the popular vote was first tallied and recorded on a national scale in 1824, even during those times in which the right of suffrage was not universally protected, in which the nation’s democracy was still striving to spring forth in its fullness, even under circumstances and prejudices resistant to it.
While it is commonplace to observe, and even complain of, the discrepancies between the Electoral College and the popular vote, and not without good reason, by and large the outcome of the popular vote has been consonant with the Electoral College, even though the respective percentages are typically different. With the important exceptions of three elections (1876, 1888, and 2000), the Electoral College has followed the popular will; in two of those elections (1876 and 2000), the final outcome was contingent on a decision by the Supreme Court. An additional case, the 1824 election—a four-candidate race that did not produce a majority in either the Electoral College or among the tallied popular vote—was decided in the House of Representatives according to procedure as established under the Constitution, the second and last time in American history in which the House determined the election of the president (the first being the election of 1800 wherein the House selected Thomas Jefferson after a tie with Aaron Burr in the Electoral College tally, an election that occurred before the practice of recording the popular vote for the president). In the 1824 election, candidate Andrew Jackson actually received the higher number of popular votes as well as more votes in the Electoral College among the four competitors; however, in both cases he won only a plurality, not the mandatory Electoral College majority, and thus the decision fell to the House, resulting in the selection of John Quincy Adams. Along with the 1824 outcome, those three exceptions in 1876, 1888, and 2000 in which the Electoral College overrode the recorded popular vote may easily be perceived as failures of democracy—the silencing of the people’s voice—and thus evidence that the Electoral College is both dated and undemocratic. Moreover, simple electoral math guarantees a discrepancy between the popular tally and the electoral tally in each election. An election can be as close as imaginable in the popular vote, and yet the winner can still come away with a more convincing Electoral College victory. For example, in the famously tight election of 1960, won by Senator John F. Kennedy by just slightly under 113,000 votes—49.7 percent of the popular vote cast for Senator Kennedy and 49.6 percent cast for his rival, Vice President Richard Nixon—a more persuasive victory of 56 percent of the Electoral College votes was enjoyed by the senator (an Electoral College count of 303 to 219, or 56% to 40%). For good reasons, this election has become familiar to students of political history as one of the closest in American political history because of the small margin among the popular voters, for we know that this is what really matters to Americans, and not the larger margin in the Electoral College. Moreover, it is even possible, although only slightly so, to win each state’s popular vote by one vote while sweeping all fifty states in the Electoral College, but the odds of this happening are decidedly long. Nonetheless, it is a fact that in most cases a candidate’s victory is amplified by the Electoral College, but it is mathematically conceivable, although improbable, that a wide margin of victory in the popular vote would be matched by a narrower percentage in the Electoral College under certain circumstances. The point of this is simply to illustrate the odd relationship between the popular vote for the president—or more accurately the popular vote for those electors pledged to in turn cast their votes for that designated candidate—and the Electoral College. This eccentricity has at various times perplexed and even frustrated Americans, and yet, even after the exceedingly controversial and frustrating election of 2000, a veritable comedy of errors, no serious effort to work for the amendment of the Constitution to abolish or even modify the Electoral College has occurred. Prior to that election, one might have predicted that the Electoral College would remain untouched until a case arose wherein the electors neutralized the popular will, as in the case of the 2000 general election. And yet, fifteen years later, the system remains in place, no effort to amend it having been mounted. For all our perplexity and episodic disgruntlement with regard to the Electoral College, it is still the constitutional procedure under which the president of the United States is chosen. Few Americans would openly admit to approving of the Electoral College’s continued existence—it is more common to dismiss it, even contemptuously deride it as antiquated and pointless in a modern, more enlightened democracy—and yet, even after the fractured and embarrassingly inept election of 2000, no groundswell to abolish it has surfaced.
What might explain and clarify this dissonance merits further study, but the reasons behind the establishment of the Electoral College are clear and familiar. The American Founders sought a compromise between the direct election of the president by the people on the one hand and the appointment of the president by Congress on the other, the latter undesirable on grounds that it would transgress the margins set for the separation of power, the former intolerable for dread of the unreliability of the popular judgment and the serious risk of demagoguery. Additionally, the Founders anticipated that the Electoral College would be better equipped to foster the kind of expertise requisite to an intelligent, mature choice with regard to the selection of a chief executive; left to the people alone—who are not of necessity the most dependable judges of political ability and moral character—politicians capable of winning elections through their charms but less qualified to govern effectively might gain the presidency. “The process of election [via the Electoral College] affords a moral certainty,” Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 69,
that the office of the President will seldom fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of the President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.
Now, this is not to argue that the Electoral College in practice guarantees or even encourages the most talented and virtuous to seek or win the White House, but it does explain the intent, at least in part, of those Founders who considered this institution to be the best compromise between direct election by the people (with its attendant foibles, caprice, and vulnerability to pandering demagogues) and selection by individuals from or by another branch of the government, which could itself blur the designed boundaries between the branches of government and slant toward oligarchy, or worse, toward despotism. More than democracy, the Framers sought the balanced dispersal of power, for concentration of power in either the people or among their talented elites were regarded as both equally distasteful prospects. Discernment of ability, detachment from popular passion (and naïveté), and protection from the ambitions and anxieties of particular interests, the venality of the self-serving, and the intrigues of “cabals”—in a word, the prevention of “tumult and disorder” and the evils of its consequences were all, in the judgment of Hamilton and those of like mind, sufficient reasons to institute a separate, dispassionate body for the selection of this eminent, momentous, and yet at the time still largely undefined office. Perhaps a vague, subconscious resonance with these reasons abides within the American citizenry to this day; thus, even though there is an enduring impression among the politically informed that the Electoral College is a musty relic of the past, there may yet be a residual, albeit still more enduring intuition, sympathetic to the rationale behind maintaining the institution, modified by and within the practices of the democratic processes of party politics. Ultimately, with the four exceptions noted above, the ongoing maintenance of this method of selecting the president has, in its own idiosyncratic way, aligned with the more democratically established popular will detected within limitations; and while incongruity has occurred in the past and the popular vote on a handful of occasions has been overridden—a scenario that remains a possibility for any future election—for the most part the Electoral College simply and typically confirms the popular vote while lending it greater weight as a function of the disparate proportions, and thus candidates earnestly petition their many and varied appeals to people.
Campaigning to earn the people’s confidence and endorsement from the voting booth has been elemental to presidential elections since the mid-1820s, that aspect of presidential politics being the most constant of all. Equally persistent throughout the history of presidential politics is the nature of partisan commitment. While few political scientists and presidential observers would deny the importance of campaigning, it remains a long-established fact that most voters are set in their allegiances and have determined how they will vote well before the general election, perhaps well before the earliest signs that the campaign season is under way. As with anything, there are exceptions; there are indeed voters within the general public who from the start of the campaign season remain uncommitted, waiting for something to be said or done that will persuade them toward one direction or the other; but those exceptions aside, most likely voters are guided by their own partisan tendencies, loyalties to specific politicians, and behavioral proclivities. Many other variables must be factored in, such as the state of the economy (perhaps the most important factor in determining an election’s outcome) during the election year, or the presence of a crisis abroad, and yes, the level of a candidate’s personal appeal across a broad and diverse population; all of these and more do have some influence in helping to determine the outcome in November, but the fact holds that a large segment of the likely voting population know how they will cast their ballot, campaign efforts notwithstanding. Most of us follow our tendencies, the patterns that we have adopted in the past; even if we are politically inactive, we nonetheless lean one direction and follow that direction on Election Day even if the candidate holding the standard of our party of preference is not for us an inspiring choice. It has often been observed that American political parties lack the discipline of their counterparts in Europe, a comparison that in many tangible ways still obtains. Nevertheless, absent the more deeply set fidelities of European parties, American voters still persist in their own engrained habits; they still abide by their own partisan commitments and prefer to follow those ideological markers that lead them in support of those they deem to be the right candidates. There is more ideological fixity in American political culture than most of us may realize, and while our expressed desire to keep an open mind, to wait for candidates to make their case, and to form a decision only after all the evidence is laid out before us, is no doubt sincere for many among us, it is unlikely that campaigning, for all the expense and spectacle attendant to it, will move those who are predisposed to vote for x to abandon their affinities and commit their vote to y. And while campaigning is an expected and requisite component of the democratic process, only a small fraction of votes are influenced by it. In the closest elections, an artfully crafted campaign does make a difference, along with other factors of various and often unexpected kinds, but in general much of what occurs on Election Day is not necessarily the result of persuasive campaigning, but more realistically the expression of that portion of the electorate that has managed to organize and motivate its perennial adherents, to muster out their loyal rank and file. Even the more objective among us often find the certainties that we’re already looking for, and while this is not meant to assert that there is little hope of objectivity with regard to truth—quite the contrary, for truth is inherently objective—it is nonetheless an admission that those certainties that we do adopt throughout our lives, and especially with regard to decisions committed in response to political questions and even larger social issues, are to an extent refracted by our perceptions, fitted to our expectations, bent by our inclinations, hewn to our hopes, and molded by our existential background. Even for those of us who might have committed a dramatic shift in ideological propensities—and such shifts do happen for some people during the course of their lives—we move from one pattern and reliance on its markers to another pattern defined by new markers and signposts. Human freedom generates possibility, and for this reason no election is a foregone conclusion; but human habit often forecloses electoral possibilities a priori.
Perhaps these tendencies help explain why political parties are inevitable within any polity shaped by democratic processes. While the Framers designed a process for presidential selection that they deemed compatible with republican principles, inserted within the Constitution itself the expectation of at least some democratic processes such as the election of representatives, guaranteed for the states republican government and those dimensions of democracy expected thereby, and defined da capo the very act of establishing the Constitution as legitimized by the people as a whole, they made no mention of party politics, if not perhaps hoping to discourage partisanship from the beginning, at least hoping to diminish its role in designing the future of the American polity. And yet parties materialized, and relatively quickly, a natural outgrowth of a pluralistic political culture characterized by debate and division. Equally compelling, the party system that grew out of this institutional architecture, and the cultural foundations upon which it is anchored, coalesced around bipartisan allegiances, and while additional parties have come and gone, for the most part politics in America has been propelled forward on the energy of two major parties, and for the last 160 years the same two parties: Democrats and Republicans in all their at times inexplicable permutations. Moreover, these parties have, historically and with comparison to other party systems, gravitated toward the center, and while at various times throughout American history we can accurately speak of the electorate being pulled toward the right or left, in the long view American political parties, while certainly containing noticeable elements that lean hard to one extreme or the other, have been moored to the center. This is not always the case. In recent years, for example, we can speak of the ideological base of the Republican Party as having adopted, for the past two to three decades, attitudes and policies aligned more closely to the right, and it remains to be seen whether or not those dynamics that have fashioned moderate parties in America will self-correct. Political volatility, by its very nature, is a short-term phenomenon; when we assess the long term, the measure of stability is brought into focus. In any event, should a shift in one direction or the other eventually prove to be long-term, the bipartisan structure is likely to remain in place, even if the focus has itself fixed on a new point.
A third constant that can be observed over the course of American political history involves the potent influence of media. Within any political regime, the tools used for communication and the dissemination of information help to frame our perspective and thereby direct our discourse. What events are covered in the media, which elements are stressed, how the information about these elements is conveyed, and the manner in which subsequent conversations about a given event are directed, all contribute to the packaging of our experiences and inadvertently limit the scope of what we can know. So much of what we know about the world beyond our immediate experiences is dependent upon a communication network that processes and compartmentalizes information for us. This is not a deliberate act of controlling knowledge, as the conspiracy-anxious among us might conclude, but rather simply a facet of the structure of the communicative environment. Certainly, some journalists working within the media can and do shape the information that they share, and perhaps for their own purposes, but even when members of the media earnestly seek to adhere to a standard of neutrality, a perspective still sets constraints on which information we are given, how it is dispensed, and what is therein emphasized. In a presidential campaign, which is a complex national event with the capacity to overwhelm our senses and thus one that actually requires that the ordinary mind of the voter undertake a considerable degree of filtering to reasonably process the unfolding spectacle, the media provides a necessary, even critical service for the voting public. We live in an information-fixated age, and the manner in which that information is delivered is vital to the democratic process. With or without intent, the media is responsible for its share in shaping a presidential campaign, in the selection of which politicians to follow and how what they say and do are reported, as well as which issues blinker a candidate’s campaign agenda and rhetoric. Democratic government is deeply dependent on communication, and for this reason, media is an elemental constant in presidential campaign history.
Conceding this, even an exceedingly influential media cannot always anticipate what will happen or channel the news according to some set of hidden, subconscious patterns; the more effective candidates assert themselves into the process in ways that cannot be ignored. For this reason we cannot always anticipate which candidate will arise as the sustained front-runner, nor can we confidently predict, beyond reasoned conjecture, what even comfortable front-runners may do to strengthen or weaken their own efforts. Front-runners can be overtaken by events, dark horses propelled by unexpected opportunities, media favorites self-destruct, once seemingly invulnerable incumbents succumb to circumstances, and ostensible pacesetters collapse under pressure. In a real sense, presidential campaigning is as much about survival as it is about qualification, the need to survive often controlling the convictions shared and the competencies revealed.
There are many aspects about presidential campaigning that have endured over the generations, and many that have undergone flux and uncertainty. Through all this, the presidency captivates the American public like no other elective office across the republic’s political landscape. At the risk of leaning on a cliché, the White House is the Mt. Everest of American democracy, even if its occupant is not solely determined by what we would hope to be purely democratic procedures. Democracy is nonetheless insistent that a free citizenry will always be the one constant that grounds any political process, as well as the principal agent of change in the structure and dynamics of a political community. The promise of the presidency is ineradicably a democratic promise, and every credible person who has sought or held the office has understood this, even as their actions have not always reflected this inner awareness. Presidents carry the appellation “Leader of the Free World” for a reason; those who select them for office are therefore charged with the sober duty of raising up a personage equal to that immense responsibility. We rest our hopes on the president; more deeply, the promise of the presidency rests on our own capacity for self-government and the expression of a reasoned freedom; and the virtues of our candidates, those who succeed in their efforts and those who fail, are in the end only as sound as the virtues we have cultivated within ourselves.