Paper Information
(30% of your grade)
Congressional Elections
Spring 2000
Each student will pick a Congressional campaign from the 1998 elections. Using the background gained in the course, students will write a paper of approximately 10 pages examining why your candidate won or lost. Your choice of a candidate must receive my approval--or your paper will not be accepted. You must select a race before Spring Break and hand in a short paper (one page will do) describing the race. You must hand in the paper by March 16. You may hand it in any time before that date. The paper itself is due on May 4, 1998. Each student will make a brief (no more than 7 minutes) presentation about his/her paper beginning in mid- April. Following each presentation, there will be about five minutes for other students to ask questions. The presentations are not meant to be summaries of final products. They are designed to give others an idea of the race you picked, the key issues, and to give you feedback about issues that others in the class believe to be interesting or important.
Your paper should include the following:
(1) a brief description of the candidates; describe the incumbent's record and the challenger's qualifications. Is the challenger a "quality challenger"? Has the challenger run for the seat before? Did either candidate face a primary challenge? How might this affect the November race?
(2) a description of the district, including its demographics and electoral history. How long has the incumbent served? Has (s)he faced strong challengers in the past? Has the incumbent generally won by big or small margins? How did the three Presidential candidates do in the district in 1996? Do these results give you any clue to the 1998 results? Describe the two candidates' campaigns. Which candidate ran the stronger campaign? Did both candidates conduct negative campaigns--or did either?
(3) an analysis of campaign spending. How much did the incumbent and challenger spend? Was the challenger competitive in spending? Why or why not?
(4) an analysis of the issues in the race. What were the key issues? Did they benefit the incumbent or the challenger?
(5) an analysis of the incumbent's record. Was the incumbent a strong supporter or opponent of the President? On what committees did the incumbent sit? How might the incumbent's record affect the primary and general election voting?
You should use the descriptions of the campaigns in the Herrnson text as models for your paper. You can find information on the candidates and the campaigns from the following sources:
Politics in America 2000
Almanac of American Politics 2000
http://www.lexis-nexis.com.Nexis--a research service available at McKeldin; look under "campaigns"; you can do specific searches under the names of your candidates. You will find the Hotline available on Nexis to be a particularly valuable resource. There is also a web version called Academic Universe that is a great resource. It’s at
Congressional Quarterly Weekly
National Journal
and the many election web sites. The best are:
http://www.webwhiteblue.org
http://cnn.com
Web White and Blue also has links to almost every other election-oriented Web site you could imagine. And you can get complete data on campaign finance for any race at the Federal Election Commission’s web site,
http://www.fec.gov.You will also find that the national press often covers Congressional races. Check the New York Times and the Washington Post in our libraries. You might also want to check the local press in your district, although this will require a visit to the Library of Congress if Nexis doesn’t cover them or if the local paper doesn’t have an on-line source with a search engine. You should check to see if there is a web site for newspapers in the district. A convenient way to find this is to use Yahoo (
http://www.yahoo.com) and then to go to "News and Media," then click on "Newspapers" and then on "Browse by Regions." Next go to "States" and choose your state and browse.