Campaign Spending in Contests for Governor

Abstract

HE AMERICAN governorship is a political prize of major importance. Governors are more salient to the citizens of their states than any other political figure save the President. Nominating battles occur more often for candidacies for governor than for other offices, even when incumbents are running for reelection. In general, gubernatorial elections are more competitive than other contests, and this has become increasingly true in the past two decades. In one way or another, governors are the principal leaders of their state political party. Moreover, governors face a wider array of public policy problems than ever before, as the governing role of the states has grown. Commensurately, the national standing of governors has magnified, witnessed by the 1980 presidential contest between former governors Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.l Yet gubernatorial nominations, campaigns, and elections have not been investigated very extensively. Accordingly, the outcomes of gubernatorial elections appear as an alloy of the routine and the idiosyncratic. Systematic investigation of state election outcomes at the aggregate level has centered around three major influences-the effect of partisan strength, the incumbency effect, and the impact of the campaign. Measures of partisan strength aim to capture the baseline support which candidates can expect to receive because of the predisposition of voters to confirm their partisan attachments in the choices they make in the polling booth. Estimates of the "normal vote" for a party indicate what its proportion of the vote would be if the long-term effect of party identification were the only influence on the electoral outcome.2 Aggregate indicators of partisan strength serve as approximations of the normal party vote. Incumbent candidates in an election have an advantage over their challengers both because incumbent status may give them greater visibility to voters, and because the political resources at their command may allow them to conduct more extensive campaigns.3 Thus, incumbency may serve as a positive cue which voters use to make their electoral choices. Moreover, incumbents may be able to amass disproportionately large campaign war chests in order to widen and deepen their reelection efforts. Nevertheless, the