This maybe a skewed view from a Millennial, but it seems like today political campaigns are a never ending feature of American political life. While this may not be a new phenomenon, it has become more integral in recent years. I think this partially has to do with President Obama’s embrace of populism and mobilizing public opinion for political issues, with the fiscal cliff and sequester being two recent and obvious examples.
Using the systems that are left in place from campaigns not only helps the representatives with getting their message across, but more importantly (in terms of survivability of the candidate) it allows the infrastructure from the campaign to stay in place and be built upon rather than starting from scratch during the next campaign cycle. It will be interesting to see how incumbents will use this advantage in the 2014 midterms. While this can lead to an uphill battle for challengers in terms of building infrastructure, it does allow the challenging campaigns to think outside of the box and utilize present technology with no previous conceptions of its uses (think how Twitter dramatically evolved between 2008 and 2012).
The problem that politicians now face, and it is a similar problem that I found in entertainment, is that they must keep voters constantly engaged with their message and create a brand identity that lasts more than a campaign cycle, the campaign must transcend those few months to a continual process, not only does this benefit the incumbent, but more importantly it allows voters to be constantly involved in the political process, creating more transparency and a government that is more representative of the people. While the current, and most likely future, focus of campaigns seems to be about winning, the process of continual campaigns will hopefully empower voters and fix the current stagnant political process.
Ron Thompson 