Garrett 1
INTRODUCTION
Political campaign crises are as old as campaigns themselves. Political and popular
folklore are replete with stories of candidate gaffes, extramarital affairs and, occasionally, even
candidate deaths. All these events, and others like them, shape modern political campaigns and
affect trust in government. On the surface, these “campaign crises” are a disparate collection of
political missteps, unified only by the exasperated tones in which political professionals and
political scientists later recount their disastrous consequences. But, as this paper demonstrates,
the preceding view of campaign crises is incomplete.
This paper broadens the dialogue about campaign crises by asking how political
professionals—especially political consultants—conceptualize and define campaign crises. The
paper enhances our understanding of congressional campaign politics on two fronts. First, rather
than treating campaign crises as a dichotomous, independent variable (presence of crisis or not),
I allow the political professionals who combat campaign crises to define what the term means in
a practical sense, which sheds light on academic constructs of campaign crises and related
concepts. Second, I examine campaign crises from an internal perspective by exploring how
campaign professionals perceive campaign crises and react to those crises within the campaign.
This approach marks a departure from existing scholarly work which focuses mainly on external
outcomes, such as the mere presence of crisis (usually operationalized as “scandals”) and the
impact on fundraising and vote margin.
The data demonstrate that political professionals view campaign crises as complex,
interactive events. Campaign crises often contain more unifying factors than popular case
studies and the sparse academic literature suggests. Yet, the interview data also uncover a
paradox in that campaign crises are more unique than the academic literature suggests. Although
Convention