Presidential coattails

Presidential coattails is a term that refers to the ability of a Presidential candidate to bring out supporters who then vote for his party's candidates for other offices. In effect, the other candidates are said to ride on his coattails. In the 19th century voters cast their ballots by taking a ticket provided by a party worker and putting it in the ballot box. The party-column ballot listed all candidates of the party in a single column and allowed the voter to mark off the party box at the top, which encouraged straight-party voting and the coattails effect. Straight-party voting was the norm, and winners in Presidential elections often had long coattails. They almost always began their term with majorities in the House and Senate.

In modern times voting machines have replaced the party-column ballot with the office-column ballot: candidates are grouped by office rather than party. Often there is no way to cast a party-line vote, and each office must be voted on separately. The proportion of voters choosing House and Presidential candidates of different parties increased from 13 percent in 1952 to more than 40 percent in the elections of 1972, 1980, and 1988. Consequently, Presidential coattails have been virtually eliminated in most elections, and a number of Presidents—including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush—have begun their terms with one or both chambers of Congress controlled by the opposition party.

Presidents may suffer from a “reverse coattail” effect, in which more votes are cast for their party's candidates for the House or Senate than are cast for them. In 1976, for example, Jimmy Carter won the White House and obtained a total of 40,828,587 votes, but Democratic candidates for the House that year received 41,749,411 votes. In 1992 almost all Democrats elected to Congress won more votes than the party's Presidential candidate, Bill Clinton.

There is also the “negative coattail” effect, in which an unpopular Presidential candidate may hurt candidates on the party's ticket running for lower offices. Barry Goldwater's poor showing in the Presidential election of 1964 led to the defeat of dozens of Republicans in the House of Representatives, leaving President Lyndon Johnson a large Democratic majority to pass his programs.

See also Election campaigns, Presidential; Johnson, Lyndon Baines

Sources

• Randall Calvert and John Ferejohn, “Coattail Voting in Recent Presidential Elections”, American Political Science Review 7 (June 1983): 407–419.
• James Campbell and Joe Sumners, “Presidential Coattails in Senate Elections”, American Political Science Review 84 (June 1990): 513–524