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Do issues matter? This article extends recent research on issue voting and campaign agenda-setting to voting decisions in congressional elections. We use a unique data set that includes information from a survey of candidates and campaign aides who competed in the 1998 House elections and a survey of individuals who voted in them. The study assesses the impact of campaign-specific variables on citizens’ voting decisions, while controlling for relevant attitudinal and demographic factors. We find that when a candidate and voter agree on what is the most important issue in the election, the voter is more likely to vote for that candidate if that candidate’s party “owns” the issue. The effects of shared issue priorities are especially strong for independent voters.

We know that state legislative election campaigns have become increasingly expensive in recent years, but have they also become more professionally run? We assess the degree to which campaign professionals have proliferated in state legislative election campaigns and explain this development in terms of the institutional changes in state legislatures and the “congressionalization” of state legislative elections. Nearly one-half of all state legislative candidates answering our survey had hired professionals for their campaigns, using them mostly for direct mail, media advertising, campaign management, and polling. Open-seat candidates waged more professional campaigns than incumbents or their challengers. We find that campaign professionalism in state legislative elections is primarily a function of campaign spending, but that challengers hire professionals at lower spending levels. We also find that employing professionals improves the electoral performance of challengers, but not that of incumbents or open-seat candidates.

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