Most political candidates, win or lose, display remarkable
support for the American political system.
For the second election cycle in a row we have conducted focus groups and
in-depth interviews with candidates from both major political parties as part of
an ongoing project sponsored by Campaigns & Elections maga-zine and
the University of Maryland through a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
These candidates’ basic evaluation of the political process is
straightforward – since you cannot rely on the press to cover your campaign,
you need to raise money to control the communications of a largely comparative
message. The candidates frankly discussed the positive and negative
aspects of the American electoral process.
Campaign
Positives: Meeting voters, making an impact.
As one losing candidate said, “In spite of everything, I
still encourage people to [run for office].”
The candidate summed up the electoral process by paraphrasing Winston
Churchill: “Democracy is the worst form of government—except for every other
system we’ve tried.” Without
exception, the candidates from Florida with whom we spoke after the November
2000 election said the high point of their campaign was the opportunity they had
to talk about public policy and to meet people they otherwise might not have
met.
One state legislative candidate who spent 10 months
campaigning door-to-door agreed that meeting voters was the most enjoyable part
of the campaign:
“I really had a good time just talking to people, and I
think people appreciate the fact that you take the time to literally go to their
door and ask their opinion and ask for their support or at least to look at your
issue…. I really appreciated the fact that the voters reacted really strongly
to that.”
Candidates enjoyed the opportunity to discuss public policy
and have a voice on issues that they cared deeply about.
Campaign Negatives: Hard work, stress of fundraising, lack of
press interest.
Several candidates acknowledged that a candidate’s schedule
is physically and mentally draining, regardless of the level of office sought or
success or failure of their campaign. One
unsuccessful congressional candidate said about running for office, “…it’s
the hardest I worked at anything in my whole life with the worst results.
If I had put that much effort into anything else…oh, my!
What I could have accomplished!”
Without exception, the candidates we spoke with disliked
fundraising, albeit to varying degrees. These
candidates estimated that they spent between 50 percent and 70 percent of their
time fundraising. As one candidate said, “It’s like asking someone out on a
date, and on top of that, they pay.”
Candidates were split on the role of money in politics.
One candidate pointed out the absurdity of a candidate for the Florida
state legislature raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for a job that pays
$27,000 a year. However, another
candidate summed up the role of money in campaigns by saying,
A lot of people like to complain that there’s too much
money in politics…. [They say] We want to know what candidates really think
and all the ads say is what we want to hear.
And I [ask], ‘Who did you vote for?
You voted for the one that had the most ads, nine times out of ten….’
The reason people spend money is because it works.”
The press received mixed reviews from these candidates, but
most agreed you could not communicate with voters through the press—thus the
need for advertising. A majority of
the candidates we spoke with over the past two cycles said the reporters they
encountered in their local papers didn’t seem to want to do any actual
reporting. One first-time
congressional candidate said, “I had no idea how lazy reporters are, that if
you asked them to go look for something, they weren’t going to do it…You
better write the press release, you better have the documentation and everything
you want accompanying it…. I was absolutely dumbfounded…. They just don’t
do any homework.”
One of the most surprising aspects of this project has been
the consistency of the campaign experience expressed by the candidates with whom
we have spoken. Candidates become
fairly quickly socialized to a common language about how campaigns are run. Any
attempts at reforming our political system must address candidates’ concerns
that reform would radically alter the rules by which they have learned to play.
David Beattie is president of Hamilton Beattie & Staff, a Washington, D.C.-based survey research firm.
|
4201
Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 212 |