The Brookings Institution All Rights Reserved. We live in the age of the permanent campaign. Campaigns are nonstop and year-round, and governing is intimately linked to the campaigns in a continuous loop. Campaign consultants move without pause from the campaign trail to work for the victorious elected officials, helping to shape their policy messages and frame issues for advantage in the next campaign. Legislative proposals, routinely subject to intense polling and focus groups before they are launched, are monitored by tracking polls thereafter.
Outside groups run advertising campaigns that are indistinguishable from electioneering.
Private groups orchestrate legal challenges to laws they oppose, sue government and their adversaries, and use the discovery process to troll for politically embarrassing revelations about their opponents. Party leaders and other elected officials devote more and more of their energies to building campaign war chests, which both distracts from and shapes their governing responsibilities. Reporters increasingly cover policy battles in Congress and the White House as campaigns, with the focus on who is winning and losing and not on the stakes involved. Campaigning is governing is campaigning. It was not always so.