Once, presidential candidates didn’t campaign
It’s hard to believe that early American presidents did no personal campaigning whatsoever. They thought it was beneath them and the office they held. I talked to Brendan Doherty, a professor of political science at the United States Naval Academy and author of “The Rise of the President’s Permanent Campaign,” why didn’t early presidents personally campaign?
Doherty: It was seen as unseemly to seek the office to which they hoped to be elected. But that didn’t stop them from finding other ways of communicating with voters. While early presidential candidates didn’t actively campaign, their supporters got the word out on their behalf.
Newspapers were openly partisan in the early republic, and many of their articles openly praised or criticized various candidates. Supporters made the case for their preferred candidates in ways that drove news coverage.
In the late 1800s, some presidential candidates mounted what were called “front porch campaigns.” They would speak to supporters at or near their homes, and newspapers would cover these speeches and spread their messages across the country.
How did we get here? Wolf:
What are some key moments in the rise of the current model of campaigning?
Doherty: In 1866, President Andrew Johnson broke from precedent and actively campaigned in the midterm elections. His travel to give a series of speeches was called the Swing around the Circle, and he was criticized both for actively campaigning and for using inflammatory rhetoric while doing so.
In 1896, Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan actively campaigned across the country, while the eventual winner, Republican William McKinley, conducted a front porch campaign. In 1948, Harry Truman actively campaigned across the country, giving speeches from the back of a train in what became known as his whistlestop campaign.
Wolf: Who was, in your view, the best natural campaigner who ran for president? What did they do differently?
Doherty: Two who come to mind are John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan.
Kennedy was widely seen as charming and eloquent on the stump. Reagan channeled his years of performance as an actor and his sense of humor to campaign effectively for the presidency. His voice, his timing, and his telling of stories and jokes to connect with his audiences won him much praise.
When questioners implied that being an actor wasn’t adequate preparation to be president, Reagan would respond that he didn’t know how someone could be an effective president who hadn’t been an actor.
Wolf: Is active campaigning — holding rallies and flying from stop to stop — effective in a country of more than 335 million people? A candidate can only shake so many hands. Plus, most people already lean toward one party or the other.
Doherty: Their campaigning can drive news coverage, which has a multiplier effect when it comes to getting their message out. Political science studies have shown that local news coverage is often more favorable to presidents and presidential candidates than national news coverage is, so candidates campaign in part so that local media outlets will amplify their campaign messages.
While it’s increasingly difficult for candidates to grab and hold the public’s attention given our increasingly fragmented media landscape, that certainly doesn’t stop presidential hopefuls from trying.
Campaign first, governing second
Wolf: I suppose the inverse of candidates who don’t campaign is our current system, in which they only briefly stop campaigning to govern.
Doherty: While presidents used to try not to appear to be overly focused on campaigning too early in their term in office, that’s no longer the case.
In the summer of his third year in office, Ronald Reagan refused to tell an interviewer whether or not he would run for another term because he said that he didn’t want everything he did as president to be seen through a political lens.
In contrast, Donald Trump filed paperwork establishing his reelection campaign committee on the day in 2017 when he was inaugurated as president, and he held his first reelection fundraiser less than six months later, in June of his first year in office.
When presidents begin their explicit campaigning earlier and earlier in their term in office, they are responding to the incentives of our electoral system. But time is the president’s scarcest resource, and time spent campaigning is time not spent doing the important job to which he, and someday she, was elected.
For better or worse, there are no readily apparent realistic fixes that could stop are election focused president from campaigning for reelection throughout hist ermin office.
Next, micro-targeting Wolf:
Where do you see campaign methods heading next?
Doherty: Advances in campaigns’ ability to micro-target voters in key states with messages designed to appeal to issues they care about, have led campaigns to shift away from broadcasting appeals in favor of narrow, targeted outreach to potentially persuadable voters.
I expect that this micro-targeting will become ever more precise, allowing campaigns to tailor increasingly specific messages to the voters they are trying to reach.