Congress is the legislative branch of the American government that is divided into two separate chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. As stated per the reading, Congress: The Electoral Connection written by David R. Mayhew, all congress members must be vigilante with their day-to-day activities to insure that they are always mindful of their continued reelection efforts. According to Mayhew, in order for congressional incumbents to gain a favorable advantage over potential challengers there are three types of activities they will focus on while in office: advertising, credit claiming and position taking.

The first area of focus a congressional member must be concerned with is advertising, defined by Mayhew as, “any effort to disseminate one’s name among constituents in such a fashion as to create a favorable image but in messages having little or no issue content” (1). A congressman’s main objective for advertising is to become better known to their constituents and provide his or her district voters with name recognition for future electoral races. A few popular ways a congressman can gain recognition throughout their constituency is to perform nonpolitical speeches, exercise their franking privileges by free distribution of information delivered through the federal postal system, generate news or opinion columns, participate in radio or television broadcasts and become proficient with internet, text or other electronic media pursuant to today’s technology. Again, the main objective is name recognition and, preferably, to present it on a platform that is non-politically oriented.

Another focus area of a representative or senator is on credit claiming, defined by Mayhew as, “acting so as to generate a belief in a relevant political actor (or actors) that one is personally responsible for causing the government, or some unit thereof, to