...In congressional elections, Incumbency is imperative all together for the lion's share gathering to keep up control over either the Congress or House of Representatives. Incumbency has its own advantages including a decent record of administration, the advantages of being an individual from congress, and the fascination of more cash. More cash brings more achievement and so on. Being an incumbent most likely is an advantageous position in a congressional elections, as name acknowledgment is an essential figure voter choice. In this assignment, I support that, an incumbent member of Congress helps any given member of Congress to win reelection. I perceive this information as being very accurate. In the year 1998 the month of November, 401 of the 435 sitting individuals from the United States House of Representatives looked for reelection. Of those 401, everyone except six were reelected. So what are we seeing here, incumbent looking for reelection to the House had a superior than 98% achievement rate? U.S. Legislators looking for reelection were just marginally less blessed somewhat under 90% of the Senate incumbent who looked for reelection in 1996...
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...Voters in Florida will elect one member to the U.S. Senate in the election on November 8, 2016. Additionally, the congressional race for Florida’s is one various competitive races for which either will fall under the Republican or Democrat rule for the general election. After a failed bid to become the Republican Presidential nominee, Marco Rubio at first decided he would not be seeking to be reelected to the U.S. Senate. After some pressure from his fellow Republican collogues to seek reelection for office due the possibility that the Republican would possibly lose the seat to Patrick Murphy. Marco Rubio, running for reelection for the U.S. Senate born to a family of Cuban exiles, Rubio was raised in Miami, Florida. He earned a Bachelor...
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...Jeff Chandler Political Science 1 Mon/Wed 12:40-2:00 Assignment #3: Elections & Campaign Funding The articles I chose focus on congressional elections and campaign funding. The Supreme Court recently lifted the cap on amount donors can contribute in a congressional election. The courts decision threw out the $74,600 limit for donations to political parties and the $48,600 limit for House or Senate candidates in a two-year campaign season. However donors still cannot contribute more than $5,200 to a single candidate per election, but without the overall caps, those who can afford it can have an enormous influence by donating to many candidates. Donors could contribute up to 3.6 million dollars by giving to all 435 House candidates and the 33 candidates for Senate seats up for election, as well as each party’s national committees. Under current election laws the parties could redistribute the money, possibly even using the entire amount to benefit one candidate. Critic believe this could lead to a consolidation of political power to a wealthy few, as well as the party’s leaders, resulting in improper influence on Capitol Hill (L.A. Times). We already know that party officials and candidates will solicit these large contributions from wealthy donors because such contributions will help increase the party’s power, as well as candidates standing among his colleagues. Fund raising to meet the high costs of campaigning is the most important hurdle for any candidate for...
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...The Electoral College has been an efficient way to select the president for a very long time now. It has clearly proven itself an equally effective and sufficient way to run elections. But with all of these factors, there are still some revisions that could be made to the system to make it even better. While giving smaller states a bigger voice, increasing the certainty of the results, and preventing runoff elections are three reason the Electoral College is good way to elect the president, having each state distribute electoral votes using congressional districts would be a better and less complicated system. One of the best features of the Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to have a bigger voice. The amount of votes is determined by the number of electors which is based on population so a small state with a large population and a large state with a small population could have the same amount of electoral votes. In the states that do votes “Winner Takes All”, each vote in that state goes towards the decision on who gets the electoral votes for the state, being a major factor in who becomes President. It is more likely for the vote of an individual to be apart of the the final decision, made by electors, so each vote in the states truly matters. The Electoral College is clearly a smaller states best friend....
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...JS 5/1/2013 POLS 3315-001 Party Issue Valuations and Reassessments Why do political parties in the United States abandon or revisit specific issues? Moreover, what is the driving force behind a party making an issue politically salient? Some examples that could be correlated with these questions could be why the Republican Party has stayed silent on issues that many old-guard Democrats feel is contentious in the current administration, why the sudden recent ideological transformation of conservative party, or why many politicians steer clear from Wall-Street related subjects (even though lashing out against bankers these days is sure to garner some attention, and most likely support from the general public). All of these examples and more will be discussed in order to provide a sufficient answer as to why issues are left behind in the dust or put out prominently on display. There are numerous factors and variables to consider when trying answering such a question, one of which could be racial factors. It’s been largely documented that Latinos have been an increasingly growing electorate, going from 1 percent of voters from the 1950s to over 11% in the twenty-first century (Abramowitz 27). With this information in mind, it would make sense that the Democratic establishment is today trying to initiate immigration reform in the United States Senate, knowing that they’ll have an increasing amount of support from their Latino electorate. It should also be noted that although...
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...Gerrymandering is the practice of redrawing congressional district lines so that one political party has an advantage over the other. In most states the state legislature has control over redrawing district lines, thus the majority party has control of congressional districts. The party in control of the state legislature will redraw district boundaries to give them more seats in Congress. The U.S. Constitution calls for a national census to be taken every ten years for reapportionment purposes (which is determining how many representatives each state gets based on its population at that time). This means that the federal redistricting process takes place the year after each census is taken. For example, the last national census was in 2010, and the redistricting process started to take place in 2011....
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...legislative branch of government was one of the compromises devised by the founding fathers at the Philadelphia convention. This essay will discuss whether Congress is the broken branch or not. The idea of increased partisanship as a result of ideological polarisation of the parties since the 1980s is an argument that supports the above statement that the Congress is a broken branch. In 1960 the South was intact, whether you were black, white, liberal or conservative you would vote Democrats, so they were sometimes known as yellow dog democrats meaning that even if the Democrats put up a yellow dog as an election candidate they would still vote democrats. In the 1960 election, of the 106 members of the House of Representatives from the South, 99 were Democrats. All 22 southern senators were also Democrats. However the South disintegrated as statistics from the 1992 and 1996 election show that the Democrats could not even win the South with a presidential ticket made up of 2 southerners, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Partisanship has been fuelled by the growth of partisan media outlets, gerrymandering and ideological interest groups. The increased role of partisanship has also led to an increase in party votes. The 2 mainstream parties in America, Democrats and Republicans have very different views of many major issues. For example where Republican believe in strong national defence, the Democrats believe that they should advocate scaling down American military and reduce the money spent...
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...partisanship, notes that as new issues arise party elites become polarized on the issues, which then is transferred to the masses—then the masses polarized creating a cyclical pattern by which elites become more polarized given that the public, voters, and constituents are crystallizing their positions on issues and policy preferences. A primary cause is the growing congressional polarization that has occurred from 1956-2008. This coincided with the APSA Report, arguing for greater responsibility of political parties to differentiate on the issues. Brunell, Grofman, and Merrell (2016) argue that this growth in differentiation and polarization of the two parties occurs at the congressional-district level with greater homogeneity of ideological preferences within a district, greater heterogeneity between districts, and increasing divergence of candidate positions in similarly situation districts. Yet, it is voters, donors, and the party activists seeking uniformity of issue positions that constrain candidate positions, for having positions too far from the voters diminishes the changes of winning the election (Merrill, Grofman, and Brunell 2014). This, in turn, promotes an adherence among candidates to follow the national party positions, and less on local political conditions. Due to structure changes of party organization, party agendas are largely concentrated at the national level (Herrson 1986). This demonstrates that the adage that “all politics is local” may no longer...
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...him have a better chance to win a spot for congress. This loophole was found because in the Constitution there is nothing specifically talking about the primaries or getting nominated for them. The only specific guidelines are that you have to be at least 25 years of age, you have to be a resident of the state when you become elected, and a US citizen for at least 7 years before running. There has never been a law that has stated that you cannot run in more than state or saying that you can. As long as Levene keeps his funding accounts for his election separate from each state then it is legal. So he cannot get money from Hawaii and then go spend that money for his campaign in the other states that he is running in. The way Levene sees it is this, "No matter where you win a seat in Congress, you go to the same...
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...In the United States, voter apathy has been a consistent theme. Many eligible Americans fail to participate in elections. Between 1960 and 2008, the average voter turnout was approximately 49% to 63%. This means that close to half of the Americans do not really care which candidate will become their resident. In the United States, the lowest voter turnout was recorded in the year 1996 when only 49.1% of eligible Americans turned to vote. The low turnout in the country is an international disgrace. It is worrying that democracy in America has lost meaning. According to Fulton (16), one may not understand what happened to the government that Abraham Lincoln used to call “government of the people, for the people and by the people.” People should not be satisfied when...
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...Monday of November, the election for the next President and Vice President of the United States takes place. Although thousands of individuals cast their vote for their candidate of choice on this day, it is really Electors that they are voting for. The electors that are selected will go on to choose the next President and Vice President of the United States. For example, the candidate that could win the popular vote of a state is not guaranteed because election is actually decided by the group of electors, called the Electoral College. The U.S Electoral College is the division of the government that selects the President and Vice President of the United States. It consists of 538 electors, where the amount from each state equals its number of members in its congressional delegation. In two states, Nebraska and Maine, the candidate is determined by majority vote and the winner of the popular vote receives 2 electoral votes (“What is the Electoral College?”). Allotting a number of votes to each state in this way is inaccurate and doesn’t properly represent the vastly larger or smaller states. Although the use of an Electoral College during a presidential election is considered a key element to democracy, its application to the process makes it unrepresentative of the voters and elections should instead be based on the popular vote of the people. When the constitution was created in 1787, the founders proposed several different ways to conduct the election process. The idea of having...
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...gain a voting advantage over the opposition. Gerrymandering is a commonly used practice in order to get that advantage. The term was coined as a combination of “gerry” and “salamander” after Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts signed a bill in 1811 that created a district that resembled a salamander. By definition, gerrymandering is the act of redrawing the lines of a congressional district to give one political party a voting advantage over the other. Rather than creating compact and clear district lines, it creates oddly shaped boundaries. Gerrymandering generally exists in two methods: packing and cracking. Packing is when a legislature chooses to concentrate another group’s members into fewer districts in order to weaken them elsewhere. On the contrary, cracking is making the opposing party the minority by breaking up their bloc, making it impossible for them to win elections. Although it is a commonly used tactic by some political parties, it is illegal, but in a way that is hard to prove. In essence, gerrymandering is nothing more than gaining a manipulated advantage over the outcome of elections since the altercation of district lines does not show an accurate and...
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...around democracy to flourish, the voice of every citizen to must be heard. If the integrity of a republic and its election process were compromised, not all voices would be heard and those in power would unfairly hold their positions. It seems preposterous that such an injustice would exist in today's society, but it is already occurring in some areas of the nation. For decades, politicians have utilized the infamous method of gerrymandering to manipulate the composition of a population within the district for their own advantage. This involves shaping congressional districts to include a majority of citizens who agree with the politician responsible for gerrymandering. As a result, the politicians who use...
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...electoral gain at the cost of minority parties. Texas Senate redistricting was passed in May of 2011 and signed by the governor in the 82nd legislative session. The Texas attorney general petitioned a declaratory case under section five of the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court ruled that the coverage formula for determining states and local governments fall under the Voting Right Act. Following these rulings, Texas County was allotted 36 congressional districts which paved the way for a congressional redistricting bill which was passed during the first called session in June of 2011. The process for creating a Congressional...
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...Caden Jenkins English 2010 February 21, 2016 Annotated Bibliography Berns, Walter. “Should The Current Electoral College Be Preserved?” Congressional Digest, 80. (2001): pg.16. EBSCOhost. Web. 21 February 2016. From being one of my databases I thought that it would be a good idea to have both sides of the argument, so that is why I selected to put another pro of the electoral college. The reason for this is to simply receive more credibility from my audience that I have looked at all sides of this and from all of this information was able to draw my own conclusion. Furthermore the audience is always pleased with the fact that you do not simply hammer on the topic but show the good things about it as well. It answers key questions as to why it should be kept what good things it does for the smaller states in giving them power. It argues that if we were to take it away it would mean that the smaller states would then become more over powered by the larger ones. Durbin, Richard J. “College System Be Preserved?” Congressional Digest, 80. (2001): pg.17. EBSCOhost. Web. 21 February 2016. This article is a little bit older being published in 2001 but it still holds very good information on whether or not the college should be preserved or not. This is a very credible source to me simply because it comes from a man who has been working in politics for quite sometime. The audience would be pleased reading about this as well because they will be able to receive the opinion of a man...
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