Political Communication and Affective Polarization in the 2014 Midterm Elections for the US Senate: The Cases of Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia

Abstract

At the height of the 2014 US midterm elections, the Pew Research Center published a report on polarization in the American public (Dimock, Doherty, Kiley, & Oates, 2014). In their report, they argued that ideological division and party antipathy between Democrats and Republicans is higher now than at any point in the past few decades. Though political science has long debated whether ideological polarization is on the rise (Abramowitz, 2010; Fiorina, Abrams, & Pope, 2011), Iyengar, Sood, and Lelkes (2012) have demonstrated a rise in affective polarization, or the extent to which feeling (affect) toward candidates and political parties is separating such that people increasingly like their own party and dislike (or even hate) the opponent. A great deal of research has demonstrated the role of partisan media in fostering polarization (Feldman, Myers, Hmielowski, & Leiserowitz, 2014; Garrett et al., 2014; Levendusky, 2013; Stroud, 2010), and some have examined the effects of campaign communication on affective polarization (Iyengar et al., 2012; Warner & Greenwood, 2014; Warner & McKinney, 2013). However, as with much of political communication research, these studies have neglected midterm and down-ballot elections. This chapter offers a corrective to this by exploring the role of political communication in three hotly contested campaigns for the US Senate in the 2014 midterm elections. Residents of Iowa, North Carolina, and Georgia were surveyed to assess the relationships among political communication, political interest, political confidence, and affective polarization toward the candidates for US Senate.