Instead, I’ve been doing some more thinking on , where I pivoted off by Thomas Schaller to talk about the relative democratic merits of how the American and Canadian election cycles work. But beyond fairly inchoate issues of democracy, let’s talk a bit about money.

In 1975 David Mayhew wrote on election-seeking behaviours, dividing them into three distinct categories: advertising, credit-claiming and position-taking. Between them, he wrote, they account for everything a politician might ordinarily do in the process of seeking re-election, though the theory can easily be applied to non-incumbents as well.

All three should be pretty self-explantatory, but just in case:

• Advertising means any activity designed to build name-recognition, be it mail-outs or public appearances.
• Credit-claiming is any accomplishment which the politician believes will appeal to a relevant actor (be it voter or donor) for which he or she can reasonably claim credit.
• Position-taking means saying things which will appeal to a relevant actor.

Incumbents are obviously significantly advantaged at all three of these, though most candidates for the Senate, at least, have previously held office and thus have a record on which to fall back for purposes of credit-claiming and position-taking.

But to get back on track, we’re talking about the problem with off-year elections, so let’s talk about advertising.  Credit-claiming and position-taking are largely tactical decisions in an election campaign; advertising is about money.

It’s not the nicest thing to think about, but money wins elections. Apart from the advertising issue, there’s the simple reality that money, lots of it and fast, will leave you not only with the snazziest campaign vehicles and the but also with the best talent on the market in campaign organizers.

There’s a reason nobody’s quite willing to count out Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev), despite his . Reid is .

So . How much and to what extent can be difficult to determine, though it clearly depends on the cost of the media and the size of the voting population.

You’d think this would be self-correcting, to an extent; after all, surely would-be and incumbent senators from bigger states have a bigger pool of donors to draw from? Well, the correlation as you’d think, and how much a candidate will actually end up spending depends a lot on his or her national prominence, the closeness of the race and the cost of the media market.

Reid’s polling is as low as -10 right now. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that that margin holds, his opponent will get maybe 52-53 per cent of the vote. In , about 582,000 people in Nevada voted, so in this scenario the Republican who beats Reid will do so with a bit more than 300,000 votes, with Reid clocking in at a bit less than a quarter of a million .

These numbers are made up, of course, but the real figures shouldn’t be far off regardless of who wins; it’s highly unlikely anyone will manage anything more than a barely comfortable victory in Nevada, and I’ve seen no real reason to believe turnout will be terribly different.

In any case, Reid has spent $7.6 million so far, and will easily spend that much again before he’s done.

This seems… excessive. Bad enough that not much more than 10% of the population of Nevada will vote for either candidate, with an expected difference in vote totals roughly equal to the population of , but to spend tens of millions of dollars in the process is a bit much even for Vegas.

in Canada too, though somewhat less per capita than the Non-fixed terms surely help, since our campaigns are .

I don’t really have a solution for any of this. But I think it’s a problem.

Turnout in 2006, in other words, was about . In 2008, it was about .

There are some interesting ramifications for individual senate races in these statistics. Conventional political wisdom, , holds that high turnout generally helps Democrats, since marginal voters (particularly the poor and minorities) trend democratic; this is one of the factors behind the Republican against ACORN, a collection of community organizations which, among other functions, holds voter registration drives in poor neighbourhoods. Certainly it will impact Democratic candidates in 2010 if/when voters Obama drew out for 2008 stay home.

But let’s back away from individual races for a second and think about what this means more broadly: in half of the elections in the United States of America, well over half the population doesn’t bother to vote at all. For both the House and the Senate, every second race a candidate runs in will be a midterm election, so any member of congress who wins election twice (and the of them do) will be seated at least once with the support of a potentially tiny fraction of his or her constituency.

Turnout rates in the United States are than those in Canada to begin with, but in midterm elections the gap is substantially larger. And as important as the president is, Congress is where laws are actually made; the president only participates directly in legislation when exercising a veto.

The point I’m getting around to is that the attention the president gets actually harms the democratic process in the America, by implying that “off-year” elections (even the label is telling) are unimportant. Think about it. If the advantages of incumbency are strong enough, as per the Newsweek article above, that as many as 90% of incumbents are re-elected, and as presumably about half of newly elected congresspeople are elected for the first time in off-years, then a considerable number of sitting legislators, the men and women who actually write laws and put them into effect in the U.S., are in office with alarmingly thin mandates.

Canada doesn’t have off-year elections. Incumbency is a factor here, of course, though seemingly than in the states, but every federal election in Canada is  a “real” election, and a reasonable portion of the population participates in each. And I think this speaks well of our democracy, all else being equal.

Intuitively, this makes some sense. Given the way rhetoric tends to flow in presidential campaigns, an actual human in the role can’t help but be a bit of a letdown to the country. Presidential approval ratings thus almost always decline after inauguration.

And since successful presidential candidates have “coattails”, the ability to attract votes for down-ticket members of the same party, once the president is no longer on the ticket and a bit less popular balance of power drifts back towards the status quo.

All this, of course, assumes a district where the president is popular. Winning candidates are, by definition, pretty well-liked nationally, but the situation can be quite different locally.

This is the funny thing about national versus local candidates; we talked a bit last week about Kentucky, which was never really in play for Barack Obama, but might yet elect a local Democrat to the senate in November.

Obama isn’t popular in Kentucky. Indeed, in 2008 Democratic challenger Bruce Lunsford infamously aligned himself with John McCain in his race against Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the other member of Kentucky’s Senate delegation. This year, whichever Democrat runs for Bunning’s seat will probably be just as happy not to have Obama on the ticket.

But we’re getting off track. The point is, the President’s party almost always loses seats in the House in midterm elections. As it puts out far fewer candidates in any given year, the trend isn’t as strong in the Senate, but the fact remains that it would be decidedly unusual if the Democrats made gains in the Senate this year.

Not that they will, you understand. But that’s kind of the point. Both parties have 18 seats up for grabs this year, but it’s the Democrats who are going to lose out substantially, even though they’re running pretty even when it comes to generic voting preferences and have a consistent advantage in party identification.

One of the starkest comparisons to be made between American and Canadian politics is that clear statements like the above are not easy to make in Canada. The U.S.A. has, for most purposes, exactly two candidates in any contested election, and their relationship in terms of support is basically zero-sum. Except in certain unusual situations, votes for third party candidates are no more significant in the ultimate election result than spoiled ballots.

Things are not so simple in Canada. Though many Canadian races come down to two favourites, there are almost always other legitimate candidates waiting in the wings. And some races have several strong contenders. This extra complexity makes tracking where support goes and why much more difficult.

Actually, Bunning may be a bad example. This past week, the Hall of Fame pitcher and Republican senator from Kentucky achieved a measure of widespread notoriety by single-handedly filibustering an extension of unemployment benefits and making an obscene gesture at an ABC reporter.

The point is, even if you didn’t follow Senate politics obsessively, there’s a chance you’d at least recognize his name.

But Bunning’s intemperance, intransigence and shady financial dealings aren’t what brought him to my attention. His name first hit my radar in early 2009, as the sprawling American political blogosphere began to make eyes at the 2010 midterm elections. Bunning is among the most conservative members of the Senate, but is personally unpopular, a marginal campaigner and from a state that is by no means a Republican stronghold. He’s extremely electorally vulnerable. His retirement, announced last summer, is in fact pretty unabashedly good news for the GOP, though it’s still far from clear that they’ll keep his seat in the upcoming midterm election.

The way the math works, by the way, is that if the Democrats can take the Bluegrass State in November, it’s exceedingly unlikely that they’ll lose their Senate majority.

So because I pay attention to U.S. Senate races, I know who Jim Bunning is. Which kicks the question down the line, I suppose, to why I would ever pay attention to such a thing. Why should a Canadian care at all about the messy political details of one half of another country’s legislature?

There are a few ways to answer this:

• I could talk about how America’s business is the world’s business, about how Canadians in particular live in our big, weird neighbour’s shadow.
• I could talk about the influence of American politics on Canadian, possibly deploying some sort of rubber sheet metaphor.
• I could talk about how, given the intimidatingly low odds of your personal vote actually affecting the outcome of an election, it’s irrational to become monomaniacally attached to the national polity in which you happen, by chance or choice, to live.
• I could talk about how, this year at least, the Senate is where the meat hits the metal in American political sausage, a perpetual dysfunctional old white guy soap opera which, at least in theory, produces legislation which governs the world’s largest economy.
• I could talk about how, for an outsider without a direct political stake in its operation, a body of 100 is much more manageable than a body of 438 and much more interesting than a body of one. The Senate is simply more approachable than the House, more dynamic than the presidency.
• I could talk about the voyeuristic joy of politics, the dirtier and more personal the better, and how there aren’t many places more political, personal or dirty than the United States Senate in the throes of election season.
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I think these are all conversations worth having, and as we stumble towards what promises to be a doozy in November, now seems a pretty good time to have them. So welcome to my blog.