The United States has more elections than any other democracy. Voters not only fill positions that are typically appointive in other countries, such as judges, but they also select officials for many more layers of government, from the town or county to the federal level. Voters even select nominees for the ballot through primaries, instead of relying on party organizations to designate candidates. With the briefest intervals separating the close of one election cycle in November and the onset of another in February or March, Americans are never far from some candidate's plea: “Vote for me.”

Among the thousands of candidates who compete for elected office each year, those who run for Congress occupy a special place. The Congress is the crossroads of local and national politics, where representatives of state and district interests forge a national consensus on a staggering array of issues. Given this task, it is logical that most members of the House of Representatives and Senate begin their political careers in local and state government. In the House, for example, more than fifty percent of the members use the state legislature as a stepping stone to Capitol Hill. The House, in turn, serves as a proving ground for many who aspire to the Senate or a governorship, while the Senate fosters the ambitions of numerous presidential candidates. Thus, the Congress provides a useful vantage point for examining the experiences and goals of the men and women who become candidates in the United States.

What are the skills needed to serve effectively in Congress and how do politicians acquire them? Learning to be a member of Congress is unlike learning to be a plumber or a brain surgeon; there is no prescribed course of study and no certification process. The criteria by which we judge whether a brain surgeon or a plumber is good at his or her job are relatively clear and uncontroversial; there is less consensus about what constitutes doing a good job as a member of Congress. Thus, the question that begins this essay cannot be answered simply and directly.

The question can be approached by examining the job of Congress, how Congress has organized itself to do its job and then considering the skills members need to function effectively in that environment. First, however, we must decide what we mean by effectiveness. Members can be considered to function effectively when their behavior furthers their individual objectives. Alternatively, effectiveness can be defined relative to the objectives of the institution, and members can be considered to function effectively when their behavior furthers the Congress's capacity to do its job well. These two different ways of defining effectiveness lead to another important question: are the skills needed to get to, remain in, and get ahead in Congress the same ones needed to make Congress institutionally effective?

How far in advance can one predict the next presidential election? Forecasting as late as election eve is trivially easy, at least since the advent of polling. Forecasting as early as two or four years in advance is virtually impossible (see, e.g., Norpoth 1995). It is at some time between the previous midterm election and election day that electoral expectations come into focus.

The evolving expectations of the 1996 election cycle offer a familiar example. A year ago, Clinton was widely considered unelectable. As of this writing (November 1995), Clinton is perceived as a mild favorite for 1996. By the time you read this essay in spring 1996, a new consensus may emerge. Expectations will harden by election day, when the verdict is not likely to surprise (Gelman and King 1993).

“Trial heat” polls are one way to predict elections (see, e.g., Campbell and Wink 1990), but they are notoriously unreliable when conducted more than a year in advance. A year in advance of the two Reagan elections, for instance, Reagan trailed Carter in 1979 and Mondale in 1983 in the polls. We can, however, examine other early indicators of election “fundamentals.” These indicators include the results of another poll question that is asked regularly throughout the electoral cycle: the president's approval rating in the Gallup poll. Various earlier models of the presidential vote have incorporated a measure of approval (Sigelman 1979; Brody and Sigelman 1983; Abramowitz 1988; Lewis-Beck and Rice 1992).

Since January 1995, when the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) went into effect, people have been registering or updating their voting addresses at the rate of nearly one million per month in 42 states. Based on early figures, we expect that the rolls will rise by 20 million before the 1996 election and 20 million more by the 1998 midterm election when the full four-year drivers' license renewal cycle will be completed. The resulting increase would be far and away the largest among already eligible voters (as contrasted with the enfranchising of new groups, such as women and 18-year-olds) since the personal voter registration system was introduced in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

The NVRA requires that states offer to register people to vote when they get or renew drivers' licenses (called “motor voter”), or when they apply for AFDC, Food Stamps, Medicaid, WIC, and disability services (called “agency-based” voter registration). Roughly eight million enrolled or updated their voting addresses in the first nine months—four million of them in drivers' license agencies, one million in public assistance agencies, and three million by mail.

Campaigning in the final days before Oregon's special Senate election in January 1996, Democratic nominee Rep. Ron Wyden was introduced at each event with a song written in 1944 and recorded by Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters: “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive … E-lim-in-ate the negative…”

The sudden enthusiasm with which Wyden embraced his new theme song struck more than a few Oregonians as ironic. Wyden had adopted his positive campaign posture after reading polls that showed a plurality of voters more concerned about the negative tone of the campaign than about any other issue. That negative tone had largely been established by Wyden himself (Wells 1996).

The Wyden campaign—both on the attack and on the defensive, in repentance and in victory—offers a microcosm for the state of campaigning for Congress in the mid-1990s.

Wyden, an eighth-term member from Portland, won his Senate nomination in November over another House Democrat from a more rural district who was unable to raise comparable amounts of cash. His Republican rival, state Senate President Gordon Smith, had made himself wealthy in food-packaging and won the nomination by heavily outspending two statewide officeholders (Gruenwald 1995).

Years ago, when Robert Caro's magisterial biography of Robert Moses was first published, I remember reading it with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it reinforced every lesson I tried to convey in my course on urban politics. On the other hand, it taught those lessons in a way that was so vivid, and so engaging, that it made my conventional textbooks and lectures seem hopelessly abstract and lifeless. There was only one thing to do: throw out the old texts and make The Power Broker (Caro 1975) the centerpiece of the course. I redesigned everything from scratch.

Recently, one of the students in my course on the history of city planning (offered in the University Honors Program at the University of Maryland at College Park) ambled up after class. “Have you ever played sin city?” I thought I heard him ask. He set me straight—“SimCity” he said, enunciating carefully—and then offered a demonstration, during which I was reminded of Caro's book. Here we go again, I though to myself as I purchased the Windows version of the simulation.

Big city political machines hold an important place in the nation's political lore. They gave us interesting characters with colorful names—John “Bathhouse” Coughlin, “Red Mike” Hylan, Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna, “Slippery Dick” Connolly, “Old King Cole” (Boss Cole), “King” James McManes, “Iz” Durham (the “dying boss” who confessed to Lincoln Steffens), George Washington Plunkitt, James Michael Curley (“Mayor of the Poor”), and many more. Long before television, they gave us memorable sound-bites—“I seen my opportunities and I took 'em,” “reformers [are] only mornin' glories,” “we don't want nobody nobody sent,” “honest graft,” “don't make no waves, don't back no losers” and “study human nature and act accordin’” along with many others.

In their prime the urban machines were often condemned as the weakest link in American democracy, but they came later to be viewed nostalgically as a humanizing and benevolent force that had taken the rough edges off the experiences of immigrants as they settled into a newly industrializing America. After Edwin O'Connor (1956) romanticized the urban machine in his novel, The Last Hurrah, it was inevitable that the movie version feature a lovable Spencer Tracy as Sheffington, the fictional boss.