Party Committee Targeting and the Evolution of Competition in US House Elections

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of the increased role of party organizations in the recruitment and funding of congressional candidates in the US House post-1994. The recent uncertainty over which party will gain majority control of the House has transformed the role of party organizations in House campaigns. Despite the new resources devoted to each competitive seat in the House we find minimal changes in the overall competitiveness of US House elections. Additionally, the vast majority of potentially competitive seats do not draw a high quality challenger. Our results suggest that if parties recruited more quality candidates in the full range of these conceivably winnable seats this effort could produce more competitive seats or more seat turnover in the House.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Democrats gained a majority following the 2006 elections. Republicans recaptured the majority following the 2010 elections.

2. The increased fundraising pressure on members has been linked to rising levels of partisanship in Congress (Heberlig, Hetherington, and Larson 2006). In addition, contributions to party fundraising efforts have displaced other concerns such as seniority or descriptive representation when selecting committee chairs (Deering and Wahlbeck 2006; Heberlig and Larson 2007, 2012; Cann 2008). Party fundraising has also become important for those members who want to move up in the extended congressional leadership organization (Heberlig, Hetherington, and Larson 2006; Cann 2008; Heberlig and Larson 2012). It is estimated that more than four hours in a member's day are now spent fundraising for the party (Grim and Siddiqui 2013). Some members have cited this new environment as a contributing factor in their retirement decisions. For example, at his retirement press conference, former Ohio Representative Steve LaTourette expressed his increasing dissatisfaction with the demands of his job in relation to partisanship and fundraising, declaring that, in order to succeed in Congress, a member had to hand over “your voting card and your wallet” to the party (Helderman 2012). LaTourette proclaimed that he was no longer interested in participating in these tasks and thus would not be seeking another term in Congress. Overall, few aspects of how the day-to-day life of members of Congress have been left untouched by the permanent campaign to win or keep the House majority (Heberlig and Larson 2005; Cann 2008; Heberlig and Larson 2012).

3. Figure 1 shows a drop in Republican fundraising support in 2008 and 2010. We expect this decrease is the result of losing majority status and the loss of several party leaders who were instrumental in fundraising (DeLay, Hastert, and Blunt).

4. A quality challenger is defined as a challenger who has previously won an elective office (Jacobson 1989). This is the standard definition used in the US congressional elections literature and has proved to be as effective as other, more nuanced, measures of candidate quality (Carson, Engstrom, and Roberts 2007; Carson and Roberts 2011).

5. The BCFR altered the methods used by party committees to fund congressional elections. The act banned so-called “soft money” or unlimited donations to political party committees. Since the law was enacted the party committees have shifted their focus to independent expenditures on behalf of candidates (Jacobson 2013). Due to these changes we combine all elements of party committee activity in Figure 1.

6. For the 2012 electoral cycle the dues structure for House Democrats ranged from $200,000 for the most junior members to $1.5 million for ranking members of exclusive committees to more than $25 million for Minority Leader Pelosi.

7. Jumpstart began on 9 May 2013 and runs in conjunction with the DCCC's Red to Blue Program. According to DCCC Executive Director Kelly Ward, “The newly created Jumpstart program provides early financial, communications, operational and strategic support to help top-tier candidates get a head start in highly-targeted races” (Isenstadt 2013).

8. In the analysis presented below, we use these party programs and the candidates they choose to support as our measure of whether or not the district is being targeted by a party.

9. Red to Blue, Jumpstart, and Young Guns provide a website for their candidates and an easy way for a donor to contribute to any or all of the candidates. They also make available an email form letter, which they encourage donors to send to their friends asking that they also contribute.

10. Other factors affecting an individual's decision to run included the incumbent's previous vote share, district party balance, the party of the incumbent, and the prospect of success in an election (Maisel et al. 1994).

11. Data drawn from the website www.opensecrets.org/bigpicture/incumbs.php.

12. We employ the standard dichotomous challenger quality measure. Candidates who have held previous elective office are considered “quality” others are coded non-quality (Jacobson 1989).

13. The role of redistricting in the development and continuation of an attainable House majority for both parties is less than one might expect. First, there is no reason to suspect that politicians have become more or less likely to draw incumbent-protection maps over time. Second, both in 1994 (for Republicans) and 2006 (for Democrats) majorities were gained despite the other party having somewhat of an advantage in redistricting for that decade. Overall, although we are open to the potential for partisan redistricting to affect the attainability of the House majority post-2010, there is not substantial evidence to suggest a major role for partisan redistricting in the years covered by our data (Abramowitz, Alexander, and Gunning 2006).

14. We also fit models with incumbent party vote share as the dependent variable. The results were quite similar to what we see in Table 2. We find strong relationship between party targeting and vote share. In particular, targeting by the out-party has a strong negative effect on the incumbent party's vote share – it outweighs the effects of incumbency. It is also worth noting that adding the targeting variables boosts the adjusted of the vote share models by a considerable margin. These models can be seen in the appendix.

15. For example the predicted probability of a majority held seat with an incumbent running and a non-quality challenger changing hands in 0.009 in the pre-1996 time period and 0.005 post-1994. This difference is statistically significant, but does not suggest that the fundamental dynamics of these races are different in the two time periods.

16. We used out-party targeting as the treatment variable, but find near identical results if we use both parties targeting as the treatment condition.

17. We coarsened previous margin of victory and presidential margin at the following values: 1, 2, 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25. We coarsened the two spending variables at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles of the data. These parameters return us 111 cases that did not receive party targeting and 46 that were targeted.

18. These results use the candidate spending variables. We also generated results with the total party spending variables and they were virtually identical.

19. As Franklin and Weber (2010) note, the widespread use of the “locality rule” in the USA may limit the base of candidates that parties can recruit from. This may well be true as there are some widely known cases of non-residents successfully seeking Senate seats – Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) and Hillary Clinton (D-NY). There are also examples of candidates running in districts they do not reside in for House races, but with limited success. In Colorado Andrew Romanoff (D) ran and lost in 2014, in Ohio John Boccieri (D) won in 2008, in Nevada John Oceguera (D), ran and lost in 2012 and is trying again in 2016, in California Tony Strickland (R), ran in two different seats in 2012 and 2014 and lost both races.