I cannot imagine my work on the U.S. Congress without David Mayhew's little book. When I discovered it in Trevor's bookstore in the fall of 1974, I was a 27-year-old newly minted Ph. D. who had just spent two years “teaching Congress” at the University of Texas and was on Capitol Hill working as an APSA Congressional Fellow. It was a heady time, both in Congress and in congressional studies. Vietnam was focusing attention on how the action and inaction of Congress affected the lives of ordinary citizens, particularly the young. Nixon's resignation a few moths earlier had helped sweep into office a new generation of Democratic legislators who then activated a period of dramatic legislative reform. An extraordinary generation of congressional scholars—Cooper, Davidson, Dexter, Fenno, Froman, Huitt, Jones, Kingdon, Lowi, Manley, Oleszek, Patterson, Polsby, Price, Rieselbach, Ripley, Truman, Wildavsky, Wolfinger, Young, and others—was etching out the details of congressional politics in a richly compelling manner. In the broader discipline, the works of Dahl, Downs, Easton, and Riker were holding out the promise that rigorous theoretical analysis could enable political scientists to make parsimonious and even predictive sense out of politics. And a new generation of young scholars had been drawn to the study of Congress by the conditions of the time and the intellectual ferment of the field. Into this swirl came The Electoral Connection.