Competitiveness of Senate Seats and Voting Behavior in Senate Elections

Most recent studies of congressional elections have depicted Senate elections as hardfought contests in which both candidates are familiar to voters. Evidence from state-level surveys indicates, however, that although some Senate elections are hard-fought, a substantial proportion are low-key races in which one candidate is unable to garner the resources necessary to mount a real challenge. In low-key elections, voters are much less familiar with the challenger than with the incumbent, and defections favor the incumbent. In hardfought races, both candidates are well-known, and the incumbent has no advantage in defections. Constituency-based explanations for why some Senate races are more competitive than others are questioned; an explanation focusing on decisions of the candidates is suggested. Until recently, research on voting behavior in congressional elections focused almost exclusively on House races. Occasionally, Senate elections have been mentioned as points of contrast; more often they have not been considered. Within the last several years, attention to Senate elections has increased. The 1978 Center for Political Studies National Election Study contained for the first time a battery of questions on voting for Senate candidates, leading to a number of articles comparing voting patterns in House and Senate contests. The tendency in this new literature is to portray Senate elections as hard-fought, highly publicized races, which, unlike House races, are highly salient to the electorate. This new literature also claims that the vast majority of voters acquire some information about both candidates in Senate elections and that this leads to voting patterns quite unlike those in House elections. This article disputes this newly emergent wisdom about Senate elec