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In 1928 Cunningham became the first woman from Texas to run for the U. S. Senate. Like most women who aspired to Congress in this period, she lost. This chapter argues that whilst prejudice against women political candidates and difficulty raising campaign funds were potent factors in keeping women out of elective office, political style has also played an important part. The disinclination of many, like Cunningham, to adopt the male model of electioneering rendered them politically ineffective. Female political culture, shaped by voluntary associations, favored educational campaigns focused on in-depth discussion of issues and rejected the attack-style combat that men used. Believing that the electorate shared her disgust with the status quo and would respond enthusiastically to an “intelligent” political campaign, Cunningham was deeply disillusioned when the male candidates ignored her and the voters elected the most aggressive contender.

This chapter confronts the conventional wisdom that money and organization really decide what happens in politics. It begins with media observations that collective sentiment is critical to both finances and the ground game. The chapter follows with an ethnographic account of grassroots organizing by Barack Obama's political campaign. When political professionals, journalists, academic intellectuals, and everyday citizens think of themselves as realists, as being practical rather than idealistic with their heads in the clouds, they are inclined to emphasize the absolute centrality of money and organization to political campaigns. There are the proverbs about money being the mother's milk of politics, about paying the piper and calling the tune, about the purse strings controlling the campaign. There is also the folk wisdom that winning depends on political organization. It is not a matter of symbolic representation but numbers and planning. Staffing and rational knowledge are alleged to be the keys to political success.

This chapter takes up two claims regarding political parties in American politics. First, the chapter contends with the conventional wisdom about the rise of candidate-centered campaigns sometime following 1950. The emphasis on candidate-centered campaigns obscures a much more fundamental transformation, especially for parties, from a campaign economy based mainly on labor to one based mainly on capital. Second, this chapter posits that parties' and candidates' goals, though overlapping, are distinct and separate. This has always been true, but the parties' transition from mobilizing election workers and volunteers to providing money or paid services exposes a fundamental conflict between the interests of parties and of candidates. This conflict has had immediate and serious ramifications for how parties allocate their resources, present themselves to the electorate, and mobilize voters, ultimately calling into question many of scholars' assumptions about parties.

Political campaigning has received relatively scant attention in the literature on public reason. This chapter examines the rhetoric of the four major candidates for U.S. president in 2008. These candidates serve as case studies of how American politicians present religious identities in public and how they address controversial issues concerning religion. It argues that while none of the candidates violated the basic requirements of public reason in their use of religious language, some of them created difficulties for themselves by using inauthentic or sectarian language. The candidacy of Barack Obama demonstrated the value of a capacious approach to public reason, an approach that makes connections between public purposes and the values that candidates and citizens hold dear.

Political campaigns are centralized battles run by generals, organized by captains, energized by foot soldiers, and disciplined, if possible, in the extreme. In order to gain power in democracy and society, one must win the formal consent of one's fellow citizens. It is these members of the democratic public—the “civil sphere”—who call the shots. As societies became larger, more complex, and more inclusive, this asking gradually took the form of an extended campaign. The struggle for power is democratic insofar as power becomes a privilege that must be campaigned for. One asks the members of the civil sphere to become their representative. In the course of political campaigns, those struggling for power are subject to a terrible scrutiny. This is critical because, once power is achieved, it gains significant independence from civil society.

This chapter deals with dispersed media. New information technology has created a more dispersed media that, in combination with empirical inquiry and prediction markets, have the capacity to create a politics more focused on the consequences of public policy. Just as the government in the nineteenth century helped distribute policy and political information through the post office, so today it should be careful to facilitate distribution of such information through contemporary technologies. It is argued that our laws should give as much protection to the new, dispersed media as to the old media. The government should also encourage universal access to the Internet—the portal to much of the dispersed media. Finally, the government should deregulate and subsidize the provision of information in political campaigns, because campaigns remain the most effective route for public policy information to reach the mass of citizens who do not follow specialized media or even the news more generally.

This chapter aims to shed light on the gates that keep workers out of office in the United States. Elections themselves appear to be the root cause. The analysis focuses on the two features of elections that seem to be behind the micro-level inequalities documented in Chapter 3, namely, the high and rising burdens associated with campaigning and the insular world of candidate recruitment. The practical anxieties that keep individual workers from running appear to stem from the very nature of elections in a representative democracy. The encouragement gaps that workers experience seem to arise from the basic logic of the candidate recruitment process, the fundamental challenges that lead many recruiters to simply look for new recruits within their own mostly white-collar personal networks.

This chapter examines the impact of the regulation of candidacy on the electoral system and democratic process. It suggests that controls over candidates fall into two main categories. These are the requirements to be recognized as a candidate and the restrictions on the campaign activities of candidates and their supporters which most often concern the raising and spending of political money. This chapter describes a set of requirements for candidacy which mirrors the standards of community membership, competence, and autonomy imposed for suffrage.

This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and goals. A key mission of the book is to help scholars of political communication and digital media contextualize and better understand the shifting practices by campaigns long before Barack Obama was a household name. To do so, this chapter borrows from the work of Robert Denton, looking especially at the political and social context, the organization, fundraising, and image construction of the candidates, as well as factoring in the role of journalists and the hybrid media environment and public opinion polling. The chapter also examines citizen involvement in the campaign, describing how campaigns’ use of DCTs, and the specific affordance of interactivity, highlights that the objective of a campaign is to win, not to genuinely engage citizens in the campaign. This chapter concludes by providing a brief outline of the book, underscoring the shifting campaign practices that occurred between 1996 and 2012.

This final chapter recaps the arguments and discussed implications of how campaigns have used digital communication technologies (DCTs). By only looking at digital practices of political campaigns, we may fail to see that for most campaigns digital media are still only a small part of the overall focus of campaigns, and greater appreciation is needed for understanding DCT use in the context of other factors of a campaign. Relatedly, greater understanding of how a variety of candidates, not just the winners, adapted to and adopted DCTs is needed. One positive consequence of networked campaigning is that we may see less fragmentation over time with more accidental exposure to diverse views. That benefit aside, although affordances of DCTs enable greater involvement by citizens in political campaigns, they strive to control and harness citizens as a means to an end: winning. Paradoxically, political campaigns are inherently undemocratic affairs.

Chapter Three explores the organizing, recruiting, and canvassing of the Freedom Vote and covers the months of August, September, and October of 1963, when the campaign evolved from an idea to a tactical engagement: from the drawing board out into the field. The textual artifacts analyzed become more frequent and include news articles, internal memos, and press releases. The chapter delves into the competing representations produced by news media and the campaign itself. Local, regional, and even a few national news sources produced and ran stories covering the campaign. These texts reveal the different perceptions of the campaign circulating in the news media, creating an interesting inside/outside thematic dichotomy.

This chapter examines the effect of political campaigns on contemporary perceptions of mass incivility online. More specifically, it considers how presidential election campaigns influence the nature of citizens' political discussions about politics in social media. It first defines what civility is before discussing the opportunities and challenges provided by social media with respect to promotion of democracy and mass participation online. It then explores the effect of campaigns on civic discourse and on new forms of Internet-based political participation and suggests that the effects of citizens' exposure to campaign messages may spill over to their conversations and social civility in general. It also asks whether living in a battleground state, with intense exposure to advertising, canvassing, visits, and media attention, affects the level of political incivility in online comment forums. The chapter shows that campaign spillover accounts for the relative negativity of comment forum rhetoric.

Chapter 6 attempts to explain the prominence of these frames in the media coverage, based on insights from interviews with broadcasters and their sources. It proposes five factors which played a role in shaping media frames: the influence of political campaigns, professional routines relating to balance, journalists’ views of their own role in the coverage of a contested issue, broadcasters’ perceptions of what attracts audiences and what constitutes a contribution to public debate, as well as previous experience of covering election campaigns. The discussion is contextualized within broader academic literature about frame building.

This chapter focuses on what candidates concretely spend their money during presumably expensive campaigns. Specifically, it is interested in two questions. First, to what extent is this expenditure illegal—that is, unaccounted for officially? Second, and more importantly, to what extent is this illegal and unaccounted spending directed towards illegitimate tactics or tactics that potentially threaten the fairness of elections? Estimates from two recent campaigns suggest that gifts are neither the only nor the main reason why electoral campaigns are expensive in Mumbai. Other kinds of expenses, such as the short-term wages that candidates pay to their workers and to the crowds these workers in turn recruit, or even simply ‘politics as usual’ expenses, place equally important constraints on candidates. This suggests that the perceived increase in the cost of campaigns does not have one cause but several, and that the narrative assigning the rise in the cost of campaigns to increasingly illegitimate tactics may be simplistic, or simply erroneous.

This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and goals. A key mission of the book is to help scholars of political communication and digital media contextualize and better understand the shifting practices by campaigns long before Barack Obama was a household name. To do so, this study borrows from the work of Robert Denton, looking especially at the political and social context, the organization, fundraising, and image construction of the candidates, as well as factoring in the role of journalists and the hybrid media environment and public opinion polling. I also examine citizen involvement in the campaign. I describe how campaigns’ use of digital communication technologies and the specific affordance of interactivity bring to light that the objective of a campaign is to win—not to fully engage citizens in the campaign. This chapter concludes by providing a brief outline of the book, underscoring the shifting campaign practices that occurred between 1996 and 2016.

This chapter presents a reinterpretation of the rise and fall of the Workingmen's Party of California (WPC). The WPC has often been interpreted as the eruption of class conflict into mainstream party politics. However, a close narrative analysis of political campaigns in the 1870s suggests that a politics of class was the creation of mainstream party politicians and journalists who introduced a language of class in the effort to mobilize voters. It clarifies that the electorate began voting by class long before the creation of the WPC.

This chapter argues that the Maoist version of factory life was less egalitarian and collectivist. Maoist asceticism is a poor test of anyone's theories about the viability of collectivist and egalitarian practices in modern industry. Wage austerity created new kinds of inequalities and a widespread perception that the principles of income distribution were unfair. There were five different factors that contributed to a marked decline in worker performance in the early 1970s. The political campaigns of the period contributed to the problem. The central Maoist conception of moral revitalization was itself deeply flawed. Revitalization speaks not to the root causes of systemic drift, but to its symptoms. Maoism succeeded in undermining the politicized reward systems that were supposed to be its essence and served primarily to reinforce the evolution toward neo-traditional social forms.

This chapter delves into the planning and organizing that led to the election of David Dinkins as New York City’s first African American mayor in 1989 and the role that organized labor and Latino activists played in that effort. Dinkins’ coalition was made up of black and Latino supporters who hoped that a black mayor would politically empower minorities citywide. His opponent, Republican nominee Rudolph Giuliani cleverly used Dinkins’ supporters against him by using their images to stoke the fears of white, wealthy, and Jewish voters who were already anxious about the rise of street crime and the drug trade. The chapter also discusses Dinkins’ failed reelection campaign in 1993.