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Article Excerpt
During the early days of the presidential nomination campaign cycle, before the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, candidates aspiring to win one of the two major party nominations compete for financial resources. Damore (1997) reported that in the 1984, 1988, and 1992 Democratic nomination contests, 42 percent of campaign funds were raised even before the primaries or caucuses were held. Hinckley and Green (1996), who concurred with these findings in their study of the 1988 presidential nomination fundraising cycle, concluded that the Republican candidates raised between 67 and 87 percent of their total funding during the pre-primary period. While many factors influence the outcome of presidential nominations, early fundraising activity is among the most important. The principal research question explored herein is what factors affect the success of pre-primary fundraising of presidential aspirants in their efforts to become their party's nominee? The answer to this question may, in turn, lead to a more detailed understanding of the dynamics of successful candidacies in post-reform presidential nomination politics.
Candidates winning the money primary also tend to win the presidential nominations of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Specifically, the term money primary refers to the competition of candidates for financial resources contributed by the partisan elites before the primaries begin. The strength of the relationship between winning the money primary and winning the nomination is very robust in the post-reform period. Since 1980, with one exception, the candidate raising the greatest total receipts by the end of the money primary went on to become the nominee of the party. (1) As the campaign expenditure reports from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) indicate, it is no accident that Reagan, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Dole (1996), Bush (2000), and Gore (2000) all led the money primary and all won the nomination.
A quarter century ago, Keech and Matthews (1976) recognized the importance of pre-primary campaign activity during the exhibition season. (2) They found that in presidential nomination contests from 1936 to 1972 (with 1972 being the primary exception), the front-runners at the beginning of the presidential nomination process tended to win because of the importance of campaign activities in the three years preceding the election (p. 227). Following those reforms, Aldrich (1980a) established that the new rules put into place shifted the power in presidential nomination selection away from party elites to primary and caucus voters "before the convention." Subsequently, the dynamics of presidential campaign strategy also changed, fueled primarily by the triumph of relatively unknown candidates garnering the Democratic nomination like George McGovern and Jimmy Carter and the ability of other second-tier candidates like George Bush and Gary Hart to perform well (even though they came up short in the end). Building on these arguments, the next wave of scholarship led by Aldrich (1980a, 1980b) and Bartels (1985, 1988) linked candidate performance in early primaries and caucuses to winning the nomination in what became a very dynamic, sequential primary process. Given the dramatic changes in the methods of nominating presidential candidates during the 1970s and 1980s, Cook (1989) adeptly characterized the process with the phrase, "the only constant is change."
More recent scholarship views the presidential nomination process as stabilizing into a relatively predictable pattern. Barilleaux and Adkins (1993) contended that there is now a recognizable "rhythm to the race." In support of this principle, Mayer (1996c) wrote,
Recent presidential nomination contests have, in fact, been less chaotic than they might appear at first glance; that nomination races are actually conducted under a system of rules and norms that give considerable structure and regularity to the process. (P. 45).
Among the most influential aspects of this system of rules is the growing number of states that frontload their primaries or caucuses within a few weeks after the first delegate selection event, the Iowa caucuses (see Table 1). For example, in the Democratic and Republican nomination battles in 1984, both parties took more than two months after the Iowa caucuses to pick a majority of the delegates to their respective conventions. As recently as the 1992 Democratic race, 56% of the delegates were selected by the tenth week following Iowa. However, in 1996 and 2000, the Democrats chose approximately 80% by the same time (Mayer 2001). Obviously, frontloading the primary schedule means that candidates must not only raise money earlier but also simultaneously organize multi-state campaigns in the bellwether and battleground states in which they hope to compete.
As the presidential nomination calendar became increasingly frontloaded, the accumulation of pre-primary financial resources grew in importance to winning nomination campaigns. The escalation of early fundraising paralleled the skyrocketing cost of running for president over the past three decades, particularly in 2000 (Corrado 2001). While immense sums of money are still spent on opening state offices, hiring professional staff, and contracting political consultants, much of the astronomical growth can be attributed to the increased use of paid advertising in key states during the year before the presidential election (Broder and Balz 1999). In summary, winning the money primary is increasingly important to winning the presidential nomination of either the Democratic or Republican Parties.
Raising early money gives nomination hopefuls four distinct advantages. First, the more money aspirants can raise, the easier it will be to hire skilled personnel and set up campaign organizations in early battleground states. Brown, Powell, and Wilcox (1995, 3) have argued that for candidates to be competitive in the initial delegate selection events, performing well in the money primary "gives them the luxury of starting early to build effective campaign organizations in states whose primaries and caucuses come shortly thereafter." Second, in their effort to turn the process into a "horserace," the media track fundraising and tend to distribute press coverage in the early months of the process to those candidates able to secure such resources (see Mayer 1987, 1996c). Third, Hinckley and Greene (1996) and Damore (1997) have demonstrated that early money is a sign of support that helps raise additional funds in the ensuing months. Finally, early money also allows candidates to survive setbacks in bellwether contests. As Table 2 demonstrates, Bill Clinton in 1992, Bob Dole in 1996, and George W. Bush in 2000 all encountered "bumps in the road," losing early primaries and caucuses (for elaboration on the concept, see Adkins and Dowdle 2000b). In summary, the more early money candidates can raise, the more competitive they will be in the expensive and grueling campaign that follows.
Previous Research
Considering the apparent importance of early campaign fundraising to determining party nominees, one would expect this niche in the literature to be well mined; however, existing scholarship on presidential nomination fundraising is limited in one or more respects. First, rather than explaining how financial resources are accumulated, the money raised by the campaign is most often used as an explanatory variable in modeling individual primary and caucus results (Goldstein 1978; Grush 1980; Norrander 1993; Haynes, Gurian, and Nichols 1997), cumulative primary vote total (Adkins and Dowdle 2000a, 2001 a, 2001b; Steger 2000), or the winnowing of candidates during the primary season (Norrander 2000; Hanson 2000). Second, much of the scholarship on presidential nomination politics models the strategic allocation of campaign funds by state (Gurian 1986, 1990, 1993a, 1993b, 1996; Gurian and Haynes 1993). Generally, few scholars devote significant attention specifically to fundraising, which is one of the more critical aspects of presidential nomination campaigns. Damore (1997) has written that this may reflect either an assumption that fundraising and success travel in tandem or that the dynamics of fundraising present severe methodological obstacles to credible analysis. Finally, research on presidential nomination politics tends to focus on fundraising as it occurs during the primary and caucus season (Mutz 1995; Hinckley and Green 1996; Damore 1997; Hanson 2000). However, both Damore (1997) and Hinckley and Green (1996) demonstrated that candidates for both party nominations raise substantial sums of money before the first primary or caucus votes are even cast. Therefore, an analysis of the dynamics of early fundraising is certainly warranted. In the next few paragraphs, this research will explore previous scholarship relating to presidential nomination fundraising followed by an analysis of the factors affecting campaign fundraising in the post-reform era.
The link between successful fundraising or strategic campaign spending and garnering the party nomination is well documented from both the scholarly and practical perspectives of presidential politics in the post-reform era. Even studies of the race for the 1976 Democratic nomination, the first nomination cycle to follow the campaign finance reforms, demonstrate the importance of early fundraising. Goldstein (1978) concluded that in 1976, fundraising efforts started earlier than in prior elections and that campaign funds appeared to flow to the candidates with the greatest chance of winning. In an effort to extrapolate the influence of campaign effects such as political advertising, Grush (1980) concluded that campaign expenditures among other factors significantly affected individual primary results. Although dated,...
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