Special Orders
Members of Congress and the Two Permanent Campaigns
For members of the contemporary Congress, there are two distinct, though related, permanent campaigns. The first is each legislator's individual campaign for reelection, which is framed by the term of office, the partisan context of each district, and a dozen other variables that add up to 435 distinct House contests and 33 or 34 distinct Senate races every two years. The second kind of permanent campaign comes in the highly politicized attempts to win partisan control of both houses of Congress in an age of partisan parity. Most members of Congress cope reasonably well with their individual versions of the permanent campaign; the impact of the institutional-level version may be less evident and more profound.
Writing in 1960, Representative Clem Miller reflected on how he spent his days back in his Northeastern Ohio district:
What a recess trip home . . .means is that my capacity, as any congressman's, is taxed to the limit. . . . This is the schedule for more than two months, seven days a week. It is a life of constant movement and relentless physical activity. It imposes a constant vigilance, unrelieved, hour upon hour. An inappropriate off-hand remark, a misplaced flippancy, or a flash of irritation are not easily forgiven…. As a representative, I am constantly exposed to the represented - to our mutual education and benefit.1
Forty years later, the grind of winning reelection has not abated, at least in a competitive seat:
Representative Dennis Moore (D-Kans.) completed his [initial] two-year congressional cycle with a 3-percentage point victory over an aggressive, conservative Republican challenger…. Marked for defeat by Republican strategies and various interest groups, Moore survived by returning to the Third District almost every weekend, compiling a moderate voting record, and raising almost $2 million…. Still, the Moore organization had little choice but to begin preparing immediately for the 2002 race. For a Democrat, at least, this seat does require a permanent campaign.2
Although electioneering has changed dramatically over the years, the basic elements of running an individual campaign have remained roughly the same. At the heart of many campaigns are edgy politicians, who worry -- often more than they should -- about reelection.3 We know a good deal about these campaigns and have observed them taking increasing amounts of time, money, and effort, especially when they are truly competitive. Even senators' six-year terms have not kept them from becoming much more campaign oriented throughout their entire term of office.
What, then, are the major implications at the individual level for the institutionalization of the permanent campaign? First, campaigns have become more professionalized. Herrnson notes that almost all incumbents hire professional campaign managers to run their reelection efforts.4 This means that more funds are required than were often needed in the past, when incumbents often survived with a friends-and-neighbors campaign made up of volunteers. Moreover, the members' enterprises increase in size as incumbents create their own political organizations. The great growth of congressional staffing levels occurred in the 25 years after the enactment of the Legislative Reorganization Act in 1946. House office staff grew from about five in 1946 to around 16 by the early 1970s, and committee staffing rose at a similar rate. Ditto for the Senate, but there has been no significant expansion since the mid-1970s. At the same time, the electoral side of congressional enterprises has continued to expand -- in part through full-time staff, but also in the contracting out of services, from polling to consulting to fund-raising to accounting.
On Capitol Hill, the most important implication of the incumbent's permanent campaign is that most legislators remain captains of their own candidate-centered reelection efforts, and party leaders have little or no electoral leverage over most members. Nonetheless, political parties have grown steadily stronger in both the House and Senate, at precisely the same time that individual campaign enterprises might well have allowed lawmakers more latitude in their legislative activities.
Legislators' leeway in their actions has gone unexamined (or at least under-emphasized) in recent years; despite some occasional focus on individual entrepreneurs, congressional scholars have focused the lion's share of their attention on the parties, especially in the House. Yet on scores of issues, precisely because there is both partisan parity and high levels of electoral security, in part due to incumbents' own permanent campaigns, individual legislators can exercise considerable influence, especially as legislation is formulated within the bowels of the Congress. For example, many rank-and-file members played central roles in pushing forward the Campaign Finance Reform bill that passed the House in February. Beyond its mid-level sponsors, Representatives Chris Shays (R-Conn.) and Marty Meehan (D- Mass.), various other legislators stood up to immense partisan pressure from GOP leaders to move the bill forward.
Indeed, the broader question here is whether the individual-level permanent campaign can protect lawmakers who take visible -- and potentially risky -- positions on policy, political, or even internal matters.5 In the 1980 Reagan landslide, several aggressive members of the Democratic Class of 1974 lost their seats, despite having devoted considerable resources to constituency service and having conducted (for the time) well-funded campaigns.6 Likewise, in 1994, good constituency service did not insulate Democratic legislators from defeat. Strong constituency work had become a necessary, but scarcely sufficient, condition for survival in close races. But in an age of parity, when competent service is combined with an expensive, highly professional, and virtually continuous campaign operations, individual risk-takers may be more insulated from electoral defeat.
In addition, lobbyists can assist members' legislative enterprises to serve a variety of constituencies. Richard Hall suggests that lobbying can be understood as a form of subsidy to individual legislators.7 Organized interests may well support both the official and campaign sides of an individual congressional enterprise. Thus, the two most valuable resources a legislator can have, money and information, can come from the same source - an interest that is making a concentrated, long-term investment in a lawmaker's career.
The "investment" metaphor permeates the financial side of the permanent campaign. Both interests and individuals "invest" in both the large-scale, institutional permanent campaign and in its manifestation on an individual-by-individual legislator basis. So do broad industries. The incumbent's congressional campaign becomes permanent as it attracts funds over time from given donors (oil company executives), from particular organized interests (an oil company PAC), and from an overall industry (all oil-related contributions from PACs and executives). From 1993 through 2001, for instance, the combined investment of the closely related insurance, financial services, and real estate industries in Representative Clay Shaw (R-Fla.), a Ways and Means subcommittee chair, came to almost $900,000.8 That sum is just a single industry's "investment" in a single legislator, albeit a significant one who faced an extremely strong challenge in the 2000 election (but who still received more than a half million dollars in total 1998 contributions, when he was unopposed).
Individual permanent campaigns become institutionalized in part because they receive increasing percentages of their campaign funds from organized groups rather than individuals. For example, Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-Kans.), first elected in 1994 with $34,000 in overall PAC funds (13 percent of his total), received $313,000 (34 percent) in PAC contributions in 1996, $307,000 (40 percent) in 1998, and $385,000 (40 percent) in 2000. Tiahrt can count on at least $300,000 in interest-group contributions as he plans his campaign budget for the next election. Indeed, the congressman 2001 figures show that he received $129,000 in PAC funds, or 41 percent of his total receipts. The Tiahrt enterprise was right on track as it headed toward the 2002 election.
In sum, most legislators develop their own separate, permanent campaigns that extend out from and often build upon their congressional office enterprises that are easily worth about $1.5 million per year to each House member and far more than that to the average senator.9 The continuous campaign organization supplements the base congressional enterprise with hundreds of thousands of dollars that can be used far more flexibly than official funds. A competitive seat House member who raises $2 million for her campaign thus commands an individual enterprise worth more than $5 million over her two-year term of office -- a sizeable set of resources that helps ward off all but the most attractive, best-funded challengers.
The Permanent Campaign Writ Large:
Congressional Parties Nationalize the Campaign
Assessing the development of the permanent campaign in Congress, David Brady and Morris Fiorina note:
Elections today have become more "nationalized." Members of both parties -- themselves increasingly extreme -- believe it necessary to have a leader who can help the party electorally -- to raise money, to fire up the activists, and to get out the message. Such leaders have less interest in legislative accomplishment -- a festering issue may be more useful than a completed compromise. And election results increasingly are the test of their leadership.10
The national congressional parties have grown consistently stronger, first in legislative matters, then in electoral ones, in the years after 1981.11 Still, neither congressional party in either chamber seems capable of redefining electoral issues in a way that will substantially alter the partisan balance of power.12 This partisan parity forms the context of the permanent campaign within the Congress as a whole. Although this state of affairs has important policy implications, the focus here falls on the two main ways that the permanent campaign affects members of Congress: (1) through the framing of issues and (2) in the growing importance of campaign money as an element of internal legislative politics on Capitol Hill.
Framing Issues: Electoral Posturing or Policy Resolution?
Since the mid-1980s, first among House Republicans and then, after 1994, among both House and Senate Democrats, almost every major domestic issue has forced legislative leaders to consider the trade-offs between framing major issues in terms of gaining electoral advantage or resolving those issues through deliberation and compromise. These decisions have important implications for individual legislators, who may well want to reach some compromise accord, only to have their leaders frame an issue in all-or-nothing partisan terms. Contributing to this tendency has been divided government, in which all legislative leaders, aside from Democrats in the 103rd Congress (1993-1994) can legitimately think of themselves as part of the "opposition." Both Gingrich and Gephardt played the public, free-media game of opposition leaders to the hilt, as they called attention to their partisan agendas in the policy-making process as well as in national campaigns, especially in 1994 (Gingrich) and 2000 (Gephardt). More generally, the parties' message politics have become part of the legislative process, while "being inseparable from the process of party campaigning."13
The very absence of a legislative record can become a positive element of an opposition campaign. As one long-time Gephardt colleague noted, the minority leader "has perfected the art of wining by losing, to paint his opponents as extreme partisans.14 In addition, deadlock allows the opposition to decry the lack of progress as the work of a "do-nothing Congress."
To be sure, much of the issue-based message politics of the 1990s and beyond has resulted from the existence of two sets of partisans from homogeneous constituencies opposing each other in the Congress. In these circumstances, a handful of moderate legislators should hold substantial leverage,15 but the margins are so small, the number of available votes so few, and the pressure of party leaders so great, that the campaign orientation of issue politics has often trumped the possibility of deliberation or compromise. Party leaders, especially from the House minority, have placed tremendous emphasis on winning back the House -- to the virtual exclusion of other goals. In such circumstances, the politics of Congress turns toward campaigning and fund-raising with a vengeance.
Electioneering, Fund-Raising, and Claiming Credit
In an October 2000 House Democratic Caucus, with its members fueled by pizza and high expectations, Speaker Dick Gephardt called out the names of one legislator after another to come forward and receive ceremonial gavels, in honor of their contributing $100,000 or more to their party colleagues. Near the end, the name "Charlie Rangel" rang out, and the would-be chairman of the Ways and Means Committee shuffled forward to receive his gavel. This little scene was noteworthy in several ways. First, it recognized the internal importance of redistributing campaign funds from safe districts to competitive ones. Gephardt anticipated wielding the Speaker's gavel if enough seats changed hands. Second, the ceremony demonstrated a sea change in funding patterns, in that Rangel, traditionally reticent in giving up control over much of his campaign funds, had moved into the top ranks of fund-raisers. His star was tied to that of his colleagues, and he had the means - from his committee perch seat and safe congressional district - to make a difference. In the 1999-2000 cycle, Rangel gave $578,000 (sixth among all legislators in member-to-member giving) to his Democratic colleagues, with funds flowing both from his leadership PAC and his own campaign.
The caucus scene also demonstrated the complexity of credit-claiming in this environment. Representative Rangel and all the other fund-raisers received full credit from Gephardt, the leadership, and the caucus for their donations. At the same time, Gephardt and his leadership team won credit from both individual recipients of the funding and the caucus as a whole for their overall efforts on behalf of both given candidates and the collective interests of the congressional party. And each legislator who made large donations gave credit to his or her contributors, many of whom knew that their funds would be used far beyond the lawmaker's own district. In sum, the Democratic effort, led by Gephardt, was collective, but the credit was doled out on a member-by-member basis. Although many members contributed willingly to the collective good, they all kept their separate chits.
Likewise, among the ranks of the Republican Conference, prospective committee chairs employed the same kinds of tactics to curry favor with party leaders, the conference as a whole, and individual GOP members, including prospective first-termers. Much as the context of partisan parity has encouraged the development of the permanent campaign, so have the internal decisions of congressional Republicans, who in 1995 adopted six-year term limits for committee chairs. Thus, as the 107th Congress approached, GOP legislators had to compete with one another for these slots, and prospective chairmen made their case both in terms of governing and electioneering. For example, Representative Bill Thomas (R-Cal.) outmaneuvered the more senior Phil Crane (R- Ill.) to chair the Ways and Means Committee. Thomas was seen as the stronger legislator, but he also contributed $410,000 to fellow candidates and party committees as he outstripped Crane's $252,000 donations. In the end, Thomas won the seat both as a legislator and a source of campaign funds.16
In 1960, Clem Miller felt pressure to maintain personal contact with his constituents as he returned to his Ohio congressional district, but his individual efforts -- while functionally much the same as those of a contemporary legislator -- did not take place in the context of a high stakes set of continuing, highly professional campaigns. Miller put pressure on himself to be a first-class representative, but he felt no pressure to fund-raise as part of a national campaign or to worry continually about how much money he and his organization had raised. In 2000 Dennis Moore knew he was a target both locally and nationally, as hundreds of thousands of dollars rained down on his campaign, and those of his opponent. The Moore enterprise -- worth about $5 million over the 1999-2000 period-- held off a rugged challenge, only to begin fund-raising for the next, post-redistricting onslaught. And once Moore returned to Capitol Hill, he knew that every vote, every position would come under scrutiny, both by prospective Republican opponents and by his colleagues and supporters in Washington. Congress remained within the Democrats' grasp, and every seat was important.
But it was not just competitive seat members like Moore who felt the constant pressure. Top leaders, those on the middle rungs of the leadership ladder, such as deputy whips, and ordinary members all felt the pinch, whether in holding an extra fund-raiser or in refraining from working out a compromise on an issue that might prove a winner in the next election. Day to day, the permanent campaign offers continuing opportunities for individual legislators -- to claim credit, to score political points -- but it also imposes costs, as every action becomes politicized, every statement assessed for its political content. In the end, like trench warfare in World War I, the permanent campaign takes its toll on all the combatants, all the while denying them the real victories or accomplishments that make the legislative job worthwhile.
1. Clem Miller, Member of the House (New York: Scribner's, 1962), 77.
2. Burdett Loomis, "Kansas's Third District: The 'Pros from Dover' Set Up Shop," in The Battle for Congress, James Thurber, ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2001), 156.
3. Thomas Mann, Unsafe at any Margin (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1978)
4. Paul Herrnson, Congressional Elections: Campaigning at Home and in Washington, 3rd ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2001).
5. In Legislative Entrepreneurship in the U.S. House of Representative (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), Gregory Wawro addresses the possible linkage between legislative entrepreneurship and both constituency response and fund-raising, but does not directly address the permanent campaign phenomenon.
6. Burdett Loomis, The New American Politician (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
7. Richard L. Hall, "Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 31-September 3, 2000.
8. opensecrets.org, Center for Responsive Politics, accessed on February 28, 2002. All campaign figures, unless otherwise noted, come from this source and were accessed on February 28, 2002.
9. Roger Davidson and Walter Oleszek, Congress and Its Members, 8th ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2002), 149
10. David Brady and Morris Fiorina, "Congress in the Era of the Permanent Campaign," in Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann, eds., The Permanent Campaign and Its Future (Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 2000), 154.
11. David W. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Gary C. Jacobson, The Politics of Congressional Elections, 5th ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2001), 213-215.
12. Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, "Congress and the Emerging Order: Assessing the 2000 Elections," in Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, Congress Reconsidered (Washington: CQ Press, 2001), 377.
13. Lawrence Evans, "Message Politics: Party Campaigning and Legislative Strategy in Congress," paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., August 31-September 3, 2000.
14. Karen Foerstal, "Gephardt's Charge," CQ Weekly, November 4, 2000, 2578-81
15. Dodd and Oppenheimer, "Congress and the Emerging Order," 377.
16. Richard Simon, "Californian Thomas Gets House Ways and Means
Chairmanship," Los Angeles Times, January 5, 2001, A15.
