A front porch campaign is a low-key electoral campaign used in American politics in which the candidate remains close to or at home to make speeches to supporters who come to visit. The candidate largely does not travel around or otherwise actively campaign. The successful presidential campaigns of James A. Garfield in 1880, Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and William McKinley in 1896 are perhaps the best-known front porch campaigns.
McKinley's opposing candidate, William Jennings Bryan, gave over 600 speeches and traveled many miles all over the United States to campaign, but McKinley outdid this by spending about twice as much money campaigning. While McKinley was at his Canton, Ohio, home conducting his "front-porch campaign", Mark Hanna was out raising millions to help with the campaign.
Another president that had been known for his front porch campaign was Warren G. Harding during the presidential election of 1920.
The concept remains in use in American politics, and was used in June 2008 by U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions to describe his low-key renomination bid in Alabama's Republican primary where he received 92 percent of the vote. It could also be applied to the 2010 campaign of South Carolinian Alvin Greene, who captured the Democratic U.S. Senate nomination without appearing to campaign at all.
Famous quotes containing the words front, porch and/or campaign:
“It is an old saying in the town that “most any fellow with a chaw in his jaw can sit on his front porch and spit down the chimney of a neighbor’s house.””
—Administration in the State of Ariz, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“I press not to the quire, nor dare I greet
The holy place with my unhallowed feet;
My unwashed Muse pollutes not things divine,
Nor mingles her profaner notes with thine;
Here humbly at the porch she listening stays,
And with glad ears sucks in thy sacred lays.”
—Thomas Carew (1589–1639)
“The winter is to a woman of fashion what, of yore, a campaign was to the soldiers of the Empire.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)