Campaign Strategy and Party Loyalty: The Electoral Relevance of Candidate Decision-Making in the 1964 Congressional Elections

The analyst of campaign strategy in American elections is usually confronted by the apparent impossibility of demonstrating that campaign behavior actually matters. Although candidates possess numerous options in strategy and tactics, it is clear that incumbent members of the majority party (commonly joint phenomena) usually win and opposition candidates of the minority party usually lose. Lewis Froman has even argued that “ … the behavior of the candidates during the campaign is one of the least influential factors in determining electoral outcomes. The effects, if any, of campaign behavior are the residue to be examined after the partisan distribution of the electorate, the nature of the times, the power of incumbency and any number of variables beyond the ready control of the candidates themselves have been employed to explain or predict the popular vote distribution. The perceived general ineffectiveness of candidate strategy and tactics is usually explained by the low public saliency of the typical election contest, in which most voters are unlikely to be aware even of the names of the candidates, much less their policy positions or, presumably, any other of their behaviors. But this circumstance may change when “ordinary” election contests are connected to contests of much higher saliency, especially that for the Presidency. It is at this time, at least, when the strategic decisions and behaviors of certain classes of candidates may attract the attention of voters otherwise preoccupied with that more dramatic battle for power.