Congress by Benjamin Ginsberg;Kathryn Wagner Hill;

Author:Benjamin Ginsberg;Kathryn Wagner Hill;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Electoral Complexity

When it comes to policy issues, the relationship between the Congress and the president is more often antagonistic than cooperative. To begin with, the electoral process guarantees that the president and many members of Congress will disagree, often strongly, on national priorities and directions. The president is independently elected in a set of fifty-one separate contests across the nation—fifty states plus the District of Columbia—taking place on the same day. Senators are elected in states, one-third on the same day the president is chosen, and two-thirds elected in previous years, following the constitutional principle of staggered terms. House members are elected in districts, which are subdivisions of states. The framers of the Constitution believed that subjecting the principal officers of the government to separate elections, even at different times, would serve as a precaution against mass movements or unwise policies in response to some sudden shift in the public’s mood. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 71, the complexity of the electoral system would prevent “an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive.”10

Electoral complexity means that the president is likely to have different priorities than many members of Congress, subscribe to political beliefs that differ from those of many members of Congress, and often, since the president’s electoral coattails are generally short, to have a different party affiliation than the majority in one or both houses of Congress. Presidents are far more likely to receive support from members of their own party than from members of the partisan opposition and are often frustrated when one or both houses of Congress are controlled by their partisan opponents. Divided government has become quite common in recent years in part because demographic changes have given the Democrats an advantage in presidential elections while the redrawing and gerrymandering of congressional district boundaries have given the GOP an advantage in House races.11 Since 1995, Republicans have held majorities in the House during eight of ten elections, while the Democrats have won three of five presidential contests. For only two brief, two-year periods in this time did one party control the White House and both houses of Congress. The Democrats between 2009 and 2011 and the Republicans from 2017 to 2019.

The difficulties caused by electoral complexity have been exacerbated in recent years because in several states each party has sought to create safe congressional seats for itself by drawing congressional district lines in such a way as to create heavily Democratic and heavily Republican districts with few “swing” districts inhabited by voters with differing points of view.12 As a result of this strategy, members of Congress have less incentive to moderate their stands to appeal to a broad range of voters in their districts. To the contrary, Democratic members have become more liberal while Republican members have become more conservative.13 Elected by an ideologically diverse national constituency, Republican presidents may have difficulty pleasing their more conservative copartisans in the House, while Democratic presidents are likely to be criticized by their more liberal Democratic House colleagues.

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