Congress and the Electoral Connection, Essay Example

In Congress and the Electoral Connection, author David Mayhew offers his conjecture that, based on legislators’ professional and public behavior, a case can be made that legislators seek reelection alone as their primary, overriding professional goal. The behaviors discovered as justifying that idea are 1) personal advertising; 2) credit claiming; and 3) position-taking.

I find Mayhew’s argument both trivial and unconvincing. First, “legislators seek reelection” is arguably a truism, just as “legislators seek election” would be. Second, both elections and reelections are dependent on successful fund raising. If Mayhew wrote “legislators seek campaign contributions” the obviousness of his idea would be clear, but Mayhew mentions such contributions only in passing. Third, the three categories can’t be put in order by some objective standard of importance, and so sound like re-phrasings of the same thing — which amounts to living a public life. Those three categories are applicable to any public personality where election or reelection is not necessarily the goal, as in the case of business leaders and entertainment personalities who seek to enlarge their public profiles without seeking public office. Fourth, his argument has what I think is a flawed logical justification.

Mayhew writes that only about half the electorate knows the name of their representative in Congress, and then immediately follows by stating that House incumbents have the advantage of being much better known than their November-election challengers. That isn’t necessarily true of course, its validity is strictly theoretical. But the bigger problem is that it doesn’t address the matter of how wider name recognition is achieved — scandals produce it too, as does the widely perceived failure to be effective for the home district. The weakness of Mayhew’s incumbent-popularity argument can be seen if we imagine he had written that House incumbents have the advantage of being much better regarded than their November-election challengers. With this in mind, consider Mayhew’s statement (no doubt correct at the time) that the House in 1971 reached its (then) all-time high of twenty percent members having served at least ten terms. That’s twenty years — a career. One could argue that such a statistic argues either that most Representatives do not seek reelection as their primary goal, or that the longer a Representative is in office, the lower their public regard becomes until they are defeated. As an individual practical matter, and factoring in luck, pluck, and natural talent, a legislator’s positive public profile primarily must be — is — dependent on funding. We’re back to square one.

My legislator of choice, Jay Inslee, coincidentally achieved his first elective office (in the Washington state legislature) when the incumbent resigned to become a political commentator for a TV station. Beyond that, Inslee’s career can, possibly, be interpreted as fulfilling Mayhew’s theory, but doing so I think it points out its hollowness and lack of underlying logic. Below I present several examples of a publicly noticed event in the Congressional career of Jay Inslee. But which events are advertising, which are credit-claiming, and which are position-taking? Rep. Inslee:

• Voted YES on more prosecution and sentencing for juvenile crime. (June 1999)
• Voted NO on federal crime to harm fetus while committing other crimes. (Apr 2001)
• Voted NO on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime. (Feb 2004)
• Published a book, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy. (2008)
• Was thanked by the World Wildlife Fund for his leadership on bill HR1957, which would permanently ban oil and gas leasing in the North Aleutian Bay. (2007)
• Took issue with the Air Force awarding a contract to European Airbus instead of Boeing, which is headquartered in Inslee’s home state, Washington. “Bigger isn’t always better,” Inslee said, regarding Airbus’ larger size. Inslee also criticized the decision because it would cause a “loss of jobs,” and that Airbus received “illegal subsidies.” (2008)

In a sense, this is a fairly straightforward list. The roll call could be position-taking, the book would be considered a form of both advertising and position taking. Receiving thanks from the World Wildlife Fund is a form of credit receiving, if not credit taking. And the Airbus tanker award was advertising and position-taking. But roll-call votes are deceptive. For one thing, Inslee of course made many more roll-call votes than the three I’ve chosen to list in order to deliberately put a false spin on his total output. So right away we see that selection of a legislator’s record has much to do with what is decided to be advertising, etc. And votes are often the subject of horse-trading. It’s not always possible to tell which votes a legislator actually supports and which he has to hold his nose to make. Inslee was co-author of the book (and probably did little writing of it), and his complaint about the Airbus award would have been made by any Representative from Washington, Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative. On balance, the examples are not particularly helpful in deciding whether or not Inslee had an overriding goal of reelection during his career. In fact, at last report, congressional reelection was not his overall goal. Like the incumbent of Inslee’s first elective Washington state office, Inslee resigned before his term was out — to run for Washington state Governor.

Inslee had a distinctly liberal profile as a Congressman, matching the strong liberal character of his district, the 1^st Congressional District in Washington state. Although it had previously been a Republican stronghold, the changing demographics of Seattle and Redmond (Microsoft’s headquarters) made it a fairly safe seat for Inslee. However, a redistricting in February of 2012 included more rural districts to the Canadian border, and it is now expected to become more competitive. This probably played a role in Inslee’s decision to run for Governor, his hoped-for future electoral connection.