96 Politics and elections
of Eisenhower’s name? And yet four years later Eisenhower was re-elected
with an even greater percentage of the poll, but the Democrats retained the
control of House and Senate that they had won in the mid-term elections of
- The lustre of Eisenhower’s name seemed to do Republican candidates
little good on that occasion. Because John F. Kennedy performed less well
as a vote-getter than his party as a whole in 1960, does this mean that he
rode into office on the coat-tails of his party, or perhaps that congressional
Democrats did less well because of his candidacy than they might otherwise
have done? In 1994 Democratic candidates for the Senate and the House
of Representatives seemed to gain little advantage from the popularity of
President Clinton. The so-called ‘coat-tails effect’ provides one of the enig-
mas of American politics. The evidence suggests that a popular presidential
candidate may have a considerable effect upon the turnout of voters at the
elections, but probably does not have much effect upon the way in which
the electorate cast their votes in congressional contests. Voters’ reactions
to congressional candidates seem to depend much more upon local factors
than upon the influence of the national leader of the party. If this is the case,
it is of the greatest importance for the working of American politics, for it
is the Congressman’s or Senator’s perception of constituents’ attitudes that
will determine the extent to which he or she supports presidential policies in
Congress. If re-election depends more upon local issues and attitudes than
upon the appeal of the presidential candidate to the voters, then Members
of Congress will react accordingly in the legislature, giving the president
support when, and only when, they feel that this is what their constituents
want.
Thus the gulf between presidential and congressional politics that was
created by the makers of the Constitution in 1787 has been widened in a
number of ways.
There is one other important way in which the tensions in the American
political system between Congress and president were aggravated: the impact
of gerrymandering and the mal-apportionment of congressional constituen-
cies. Gerrymandering is the practice of drawing constituency boundaries in
such a way that one political party gains an unfair advantage over the other.
Congressional district boundaries are drawn up by the state legislatures, and
they could be drawn in an irregular way so that pockets of strength can be
linked together in one constituency. Alternatively, boundaries can be drawn
so that the concentration of the supporters of one party in a few constituen-
cies where it will receive large majorities will enable the other party to take
a relatively large number of constituencies with small majorities. Another
way of giving one party an unfair advantage over the other is to provide
for constituencies of very different sizes, so that congressional districts are
mal-apportioned among the population. This can be done by deliberately
drawing boundaries in such a way that one constituency may have two or
three times as many voters as another, or it may be done simply by ignor-
ing movements of population. The mal-apportionment of state legislatures