Just what do you have to do to successfully run for public office in the United States?

• In her first try at public office, a North Carolina musician and television personality with no prior political experience is steeling herself for the morning's round of “money calls” to potential contributors to her congressional congressional campaign, none of whom she's ever met.

• On the streets of Honolulu, savvy candidates for governor on down, know that the best way to reach their voters is to put on a colorful lei, grab as big a sign as they can carry, and stake out the corner with the busiest rush hour traffic passing by, to “sign wave.” If they don't do it, they'll never get elected.

• On the Crow Indian reservation in Montana—where one candidate for tribal leader describes local politics as cutthroat, “just like Mayor Daley's Chicago”—winning may be determined by which candidate throws the best venison feast or has the largest extended family of voters. And 80% of eligible voters will turn out on election day at the one polling place for 1700 square miles.

Is there an American political culture? Do Americans share a set of attitudes and assumptions powerful enough to shape their politics? A generation ago, most social scientists thought so. Important books bore titles like The American Mind (Henry Steel Commager 1950), The American Political Tradition (Richard Hofstadter 1948), or The Americans: The National Experience (Daniel Boorstin 1965). Critics occasionally damned the cultural consensus for its suffocating homogeneity (Hingham 1959), but few questioned its existence.

Today, agreement over a shared American culture has vanished. Some observers insist that it is still going strong. Americans, they argue, remain deeply committed to their core beliefs—things like individualism, equal opportunity, political rights, and government bashing. (Greenstone 1986, 1993; Huntington 1981) Others fear that centrifugal cultural forces bode serious trouble. America increasingly “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus,” writes Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Ethnic militancy “nourishes prejudices, magnifies differences, and stirs antagonisms…. Will the Center hold? or will the melting pot give way to the Tower of Babel” (1993 17–18)? And still others cheer precisely the diversity that Schlesinger laments. American political culture, they argue, was more the hegemony of the powerful than any real harmony among the people. From this perspective, that “Babel” is the welcome sound of overlooked voices. (Thelen and Hoxie 1994; Fox and Lears 1993; Foner 1990)

The United States has more elections than any other democracy. Voters not only fill positions that are typically appointive in other countries, such as judges, but they also select officials for many more layers of government, from the town or county to the federal level. Voters even select nominees for the ballot through primaries, instead of relying on party organizations to designate candidates. With the briefest intervals separating the close of one election cycle in November and the onset of another in February or March, Americans are never far from some candidate's plea: “Vote for me.”

Among the thousands of candidates who compete for elected office each year, those who run for Congress occupy a special place. The Congress is the crossroads of local and national politics, where representatives of state and district interests forge a national consensus on a staggering array of issues. Given this task, it is logical that most members of the House of Representatives and Senate begin their political careers in local and state government. In the House, for example, more than fifty percent of the members use the state legislature as a stepping stone to Capitol Hill. The House, in turn, serves as a proving ground for many who aspire to the Senate or a governorship, while the Senate fosters the ambitions of numerous presidential candidates. Thus, the Congress provides a useful vantage point for examining the experiences and goals of the men and women who become candidates in the United States.

What are the skills needed to serve effectively in Congress and how do politicians acquire them? Learning to be a member of Congress is unlike learning to be a plumber or a brain surgeon; there is no prescribed course of study and no certification process. The criteria by which we judge whether a brain surgeon or a plumber is good at his or her job are relatively clear and uncontroversial; there is less consensus about what constitutes doing a good job as a member of Congress. Thus, the question that begins this essay cannot be answered simply and directly.

The question can be approached by examining the job of Congress, how Congress has organized itself to do its job and then considering the skills members need to function effectively in that environment. First, however, we must decide what we mean by effectiveness. Members can be considered to function effectively when their behavior furthers their individual objectives. Alternatively, effectiveness can be defined relative to the objectives of the institution, and members can be considered to function effectively when their behavior furthers the Congress's capacity to do its job well. These two different ways of defining effectiveness lead to another important question: are the skills needed to get to, remain in, and get ahead in Congress the same ones needed to make Congress institutionally effective?

Campaigning in the final days before Oregon's special Senate election in January 1996, Democratic nominee Rep. Ron Wyden was introduced at each event with a song written in 1944 and recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive … E-lim-in-ate the negative…”

The sudden enthusiasm with which Wyden embraced his new theme song struck more than a few Oregonians as ironic. Wyden had adopted his positive campaign posture after reading polls that showed a plurality of voters more concerned about the negative tone of the campaign than about any other issue. That negative tone had largely been established by Wyden himself (Wells 1996).

The Wyden campaign—both on the attack and on the defensive, in repentance and in victory—offers a microcosm for the state of campaigning for Congress in the mid-1990s.

Wyden, an eighth-term member from Portland, won his Senate nomination in November over another House Democrat from a more rural district who was unable to raise comparable amounts of cash. His Republican rival, state Senate President Gordon Smith, had made himself wealthy in food-packaging and won the nomination by heavily outspending two statewide officeholders (Gruenwald 1995).

Big city political machines hold an important place in the nation's political lore. They gave us interesting characters with colorful names—John “Bathhouse” Coughlin, “Red Mike” Hylan, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “Slippery Dick” Connolly, “Old King Cole” (Boss Cole), “King” James McManes, “Iz” Durham (the “dying boss” who confessed to Lincoln Steffens), George Washington Plunkitt, James Michael Curley (“Mayor of the Poor”), and many more. Long before television, they gave us memorable sound-bites—“I seen my opportunities and I took 'em,” “reformers [are] only mornin' glories,” “we don't want nobody nobody sent,” “honest graft,” “don't make no waves, don't back no losers” and “study human nature and act accordin’” along with many others.

In their prime the urban machines were often condemned as the weakest link in American democracy, but they came later to be viewed nostalgically as a humanizing and benevolent force that had taken the rough edges off the experiences of immigrants as they settled into a newly industrializing America. After Edwin O'Connor (1956) romanticized the urban machine in his novel, The Last Hurrah, it was inevitable that the movie version feature a lovable Spencer Tracy as Sheffington, the fictional boss.

The most remarkable change in American politics in recent generations has been the emergence of partisan competition that has transformed the once solidly Democratic South. After almost a century of unswerving Democratic loyalty, the South gave near unanimous support to GOP presidential nominees in four of five elections between 1972 and 1988 which gave rise to the belief that the GOP had a lock on the region's electoral votes (Black and Black 1992). In 1992, Bill Clinton picked the lock and made off with four states; however, the South remained George Bush's strongest region. Nonetheless, 1992 was the best presidential year for Democrats since 1976 when Georgian Jimmy Carter carried the region, except for Virginia.

Beneath the tidal wave that saw Democrats win only 51 of 553 electoral votes from the 11 southern states from 1980 through 1992, are several currents. One element has been the seeping of GOP influence further down the ticket. Initial Republican successes in the South came in voting for president even as most southerners steadfastly supported state and local Democrats. No longer, however, do GOP presidential nominees like Richard Nixon sweep the South's electoral votes while Republicans manage to win only a third of the congressional seats and half as many state legislative seats. Nonetheless differences remain in the success of the GOP for various levels of offices and variations persist in the degree of support given the two parties by different groups in the South.

The cry of “Black Power” shook American society three decades ago. “Black Power” was a slogan that energized a generation of young African Americans, troubled their elders such as Dr. King (who agreed with many of the goals, but saw the slogan itself as divisive), and appalled the great majority of whites. As seriously as the slogan divided blacks, the intra-racial gap was small compared to the inter-racial gap as Aberbach and Walker documented in the pages of the APSR decades ago (1970). Blacks and whites understood black power to represent very different concepts. Where blacks understood the concept to mean either fairness or black unity, whites saw the slogan as representing blacks' demand that white supremacy be replaced with black supremacy.

It has been nearly thirty years since our colleague Charles V. Hamilton co-authored the extremely influential Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America with Stokely Charmichael (1967). They forcibly argued that “before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks.” (Charmichael and Hamilton 1967, 44, emphasis in original). However, blacks generally rejected nationalist programs and opted as they had in the past for what many such as Guinier have labeled a civil rights agenda (Guinier 1994). Instead of rejecting traditional politics, black empowerment strategies embraced during the 1970s by both integrationist and nationalist forces concentrated on the electoral arena. Black power moved from confrontations in the streets and on college campuses into the electoral arena during this period. This “New Black Politics” was celebrated by many blacks and whites inside the academy. The “new” electoral successes were heralded as representing true black power, the institutionalization of the mass movement, the exercise of power in the real policy forums of the nation.

A recent essay by Ralph Reed (19%), Executive Director of the Christian Coalition, proves that religious conservatives are still divided over the propriety of political activism, nearly two decades after the rise of the Christian Right. Reed's principal message is that the Christian Right must be willing to compromise to retain its political relevance, but his admonition at the end is that “at heart, what America needs is not political revolution but spiritual renewal.” Which matters more, collective political goals or individual spiritual commitment? Which better serves religious conservatives, practicing or eschewing politics? Those questions have bedeviled religious conservatives throughout the 20th century, (Jelen 1991; Wilcox 1992) with the theological fault line running so deep that Christian-Right leaders still straddle the fissure.

Reed's essay also illuminates some of the political tensions within the Christian Right. He argues for a pragmatic approach to politics, criticizing “purists” for their exclusionary language, inflammatory rhetoric on the social issues, and immutable goals in the face of certain defeat. He suggests “the religious right must give ground or risk irrelevance,” calling for language in the 1996 Republican Party platform that stresses the moral dimension of abortion, but drops the long-standing plank calling for a constitutional amendment banning the procedure.

Will Latin American migrants bring with them the tradition of the “mordida,” the lack of involvement in public affairs, etc.? … ‘Gobernar es poblar’ … Can ‘homo contraceptivus’ compete with ‘homo progenetiva’ if borders aren't controlled?.…perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught by those with their pants down!…

(John Tanton, founder of the interest groups FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform), U.S. English, and ZPG (Zero Population Growth), 1988)

Clearly, Latino population growth has made its presence known among those who concern themselves with U.S. political culture. With half of the Latino population boom attributable to international migration, the Latino foreign-born have come under particular fire. John Tanton, a Michigan opthamologist and outspoken policy activist, served as the 1980s prelude to equally-heated debates throughout the 1990s—debates that engaged far more formidable political and policy figures, from the immigration restrictionism of California governor Pete Wilson and economist George Borjas to the immigration advocacy of National Council of La Raza director Raul Yzaguirre and economist Julian Simon.

At the core of Tanton's “warnings” in the 1980s are a provocative mix of half-truths. It is a fact that Latino population growth has outstripped that of non-Hispanic whites since 1980—by a factor of nine, to be precise. By the turn of the 21st century, one in ten U.S. residents will be Latino-origin (Baker 1996). It is a fallacy, however, that this burgeoning population growth presages a new millenium in which “lack of involvement in public affairs” will characterize the Latino contribution to politics in America. That fallacy is revealed most succinctly in the slogan of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, launched in 1974 in San Antonio, Texas: “Su voto es su voz” (Your vote is your voice). The operational result of that principle, backed up by decades of diligent voter registration training in towns and cities across the United States, has been the registration of over 2 million Latino voters and consistent increases in both registration and turnout over time, relative to African-American and non-Hispanic white voting patterns (Southwest Voter Research Institute 1996).

In the United States, as in most of the world, lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals are outnumbered and despised. Unlike most other potentially political groups, gay people are further disempowered by virtue of being born as if into a diaspora—probably randomly distributed about the population at birth. Their quest for political power is disadvantaged by barriers to the formation of political community as well as by lack of access to significant power resources. The relative political powerlessness of gay people stands in a contradistinction to their depiction by advocates of “traditional values” as a powerful movement advancing a “gay agenda” in American politics.

Similarly, the attention paid to the occasional electoral victories of openly lesbian and gay candidates distorts the reality that fewer than one tenth of 1% of all elected officials in the United States are openly lesbian, gay, or bisexual. With only two exceptions—Wisconsin and Minnesota—every state that has passed legislation banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is either on the Atlantic Coast or on the Pacific Coast (including Hawaii). Political scientists long have understood that rare local victories—whether they be the enactment of nondiscrimination legislation or the election to office of a member of a group—do not translate into national political power for the group.

In the pages that follow, I will attempt to measure the access gay people have to meaningful political resources and to discuss how differential access to these resources disadvantages gay people in the political process.

During the past thirty-five years many commentators have expressed concern about declining support for the American political system, noting familiar evidence of the steady erosion in electoral turnout (Stanley and Niemi 1995, 78; Teixeira 1992), falling participation in political parties (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), plummeting levels of political trust (Lipset and Schneider 1987), and weakening civic engagement (Putnam 1995a). Evidence for declining confidence in American government is well-established. The standard National Election Study measures show that in 1954 three-quarters of the American public trusted government in Washington to do what was right ‘just about always or most of the time’. By 1994, a quarter of the public proved as trusting. Moreover how far Americans trust each other—or social trust—has also fallen by more than a third since the early sixties (Uslaner 1995; Putnam 1995a).

Not all the evidence points in the same direction, and some alternative forms of political activity may have risen over time (Verba et al. 1995, 70–71). Moreover comparative research (Klingemann and Fuchs 1995) provides no evidence for a uniform secular decline in electoral turnout and confidence in government across advanced democracies, as sometimes assumed by observers. Nevertheless it is widely believed that American democracy has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, with angry voters disillusioned by Washington politics as usual.

An examination of presidential voting patterns between 1828 and 1992 for all counties and most large cities in the continental U.S. (approximately 135,000 cases altogether) confirms that there has been a decline in turnout rates since 1960, as most commentators have suggested. For the nation as a whole, turnout in presidential elections dropped 20% from 64% in 1960 to 51% in 1988. Turnout rebounded slightly in 1992 to 55%, due perhaps in large part to the interest generated by Ross Perot.

As striking as these data appear, they must be put in historical perspective to be properly understood. Graph 1 displays the turnout rate for every presidential election between 1828 and 1992 (See Table 1 for a listing of the actual rates). It shows that while turnout in the presidential election of 1988 was the third lowest since 1828, surpassed only in 1920 and 1924 (with turnout rates of 44% in each election), the 1960–1988 decline is not unprecedented in U.S. electoral history. In an earlier 28-year period (1896–1924), turnout rates in presidential elections declined from 72% to 44%. This is a 39% decline in turnout almost double that experienced between 1960 and 1988.

Graph 1 also shows that while most commentators use the 1960 election as a basis for gauging changes in turnout, it is a somewhat misleading baseline. Turnout in 1960 was 64%, which was the highest turnout rate for U.S. presidential elections since 1900. The 1960 election capped a 36-year rise in turnout rates, and represented a 45% increase over the low points registered in 1920 and 1924. Indeed, with the exception of 1944 and 1948, when the nation was preoccupied with World War II and its aftermath, the period between 1928 and 1968 shows a steady increase in presidential turnout rates.

For at least two decades, it has been conventional wisdom among political guras that our system of choosing presidents through electoral votes, accumulated state by state, offers Republicans a substantial edge. Representative is a comment by a Democratic strategist to Newsweek (7/27) in the summer of 1992: “It's the same map we've had to deal with for years—and the results haven't been good. You need all the breaks with a map like that….”

The notion that Republicans have an “electoral lock” on the White House has been received wisdom among pundits ever since Horace Busby, a former aide to President Lyndon Johnson, coined the phrase. The idea is that even if Democrats fare well in the popular vote, the electoral map is skewed against them.

There is only one problem with the idea. The election numbers just don't support it.

It is obvious that, in presidential contests of the 1970s and 1980s, major regions went overwhelmingly Republican. From 1972 through 1988, the Democrats did not once carry a single state among the eight of the Mountain West. They did little better in the South: Jimmy Carter dominated the region in 1976, but Democrats carried a total of just one old Confederacy state in the other four elections. Clearly these have been regions of deep Democratic weakness at the presidential level.