Candidate-Centered Campaigns

Political candidates, through much of the nation's history, were highly dependent on their parties' organizations for the resources needed to run and promote their campaigns. In fact, most candidates for public office were handpicked by party leaders or caucuses closed to all but party officials.

This, however, is no longer the case. Political “machines” began to decline in the 1960s as parties, responding to voter demands for more say in the selection of candidates, increasingly turned to primary elections as an alternative to controlled caucuses. This, along with factors such as greater individual access to the media and decentralized campaign fund-raising, has essentially turned candidates into free agents who are no longer dependent on the parties' organizational resources.

Their campaign strategies are candidate centered and media oriented. Through television, and increasingly through new-media platforms, candidates can reach voters without party advertising. They can create their own campaign organizations by hiring political consultants who specialize in all the techniques of modern campaigning—polling, direct mail, creation and placement of TV commercials, and targeted appeals to various voter groups that today often include e-mail appeals, text messaging, and social networking.

Candidates can even deemphasize their party ties when doing so is advantageous, such as when the party's leadership or policy agenda is widely considered to be unpopular or controversial. Such candidate-centered campaigning shapes attitudes about the candidates, but it does little to reinforce partisan commitments among the electors and can render party identification a less powerful influence, as underscored by the growing numbers of voters who in recent years have declared themselves to be independents rather than a member of a party. Although voters see differences between the democratic and republican parties, issues and evaluations of the candidates themselves are looming larger in their decisions.

That does not mean, however, that parties no longer play a serious and integral role in shaping campaigns, especially for the higher-level offices such as president, U.S. representative or senator, and governor.

The decline of the iron-handed party “bosses” and the commensurate rise of self-starting candidates mean that party officials no longer dominate the electoral process by handpicking slates of candidates for all offices.

Yet the national party organizations—including the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee; their Senate campaign units, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee; and the House campaign organizations, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee—maintain significant influence by using their strategic expertise to decide to target those states and districts that look potentially winnable, working to recruit the strongest candidates for those races, urging partisan activists to contribute money to their high-priority candidates, and raising tens of millions of dollars in their own right, much of which is deployed in independent expenditures aimed at influencing the outcomes of races.

Federalism, the dispersal of authority to a wide array of government units and elected officials, has contributed to the decentralization of power in American politics. Parties must organize not only to win the presidency but also to win offices in the thousands of constituencies found in the fifty states. Each of these election districts has its own party organization, elected officials, and candidate organizations.

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