Our theme in this book, then, is that as the role of political parties and
interest groups in American politics has changed, elections have become the
modern battleground. Candidates, parties, and interest groups all seek to
dominate the media and influence skeptical voters in order to gain a hold
on what has become an increasingly volatile issue agenda. We define the
concept of campaigns broadly to include both candidate and issue cam-
paigns that occur in electoral, governmental, or public opinion arenas. The
changes that have produced a new style of American political campaigns
have in some ways changed the nature of our democratic process. Parties
began to lose control over electoral campaigns with the rise of candidate-
centered campaigns in the 1950s. In recent years, they have lost even more
of their once nearly total control to rising numbers of interest groups with
seemingly limitless amounts of money and all the consultants, modern po-
litical tools, and media they can buy. Clearly, contemporary American
political campaigns, whether designed to elect a candidate to public office
or sell a policy preference to the public, have changed along with the
relationship between political parties and interest groups. This book ex-
plains how political organizations and political processes have come to this
point.

Returning to the "good old days" of past political eras, when the parties
ruled the political scene, or even to the days of candidate-dominated elec-
tions, is not a realistic option. We have entered a new political era in which
parties and interest groups are both deeply involved in political campaigns.
As James Reichley ( 1996, 12) has concluded:

We are not going back to the times in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries when the major parties were like great popular armies, almost
churches, which fought in well-drilled and enthusiastic ranks in each cam-
paign. Other forces--the media, interest groups, citizen watchdog organiza-
tions, professional campaign consultants--will continue to rival the parties for
influence in our politics.

Political parties and interest groups have long been (and still are) funda-
mental to American politics; thus it is fair to ask if their involvement in
campaigns has really changed. We illustrate our general argument with a
brief comparison of two presidential campaigns, the elections of 1896 and
1996. Although a hundred years separate the campaigns, it is fair to com-
pare them because in many ways the election of 1896 signaled the begin-

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