Senate Candidates Research Articles

Political Campaigns’ Use of E-mail vs. Television Advertising

This research explores how political campaigns use e-mail and television advertising differently. The data consist of 267,675 television ad airings sponsored, and 2,164 e-mails sent, by the forty-seven U.S. Senate candidates who used both communication channels during the 2014 general election cycle. Major findings include that fundraising requests and get-out-the-vote messages were more commonly found in campaign e-mails than in television ads; that campaigns were more likely to use partisan appeals in their e-mails while they often used bipartisan appeals in their television ads; and that campaigns sometimes mentioned issues owned by the other party more frequently than their opponents did when using television ads whereas they tended to focus on issues owned by their party in their e-mails. Campaigns’ use of multiple communication channels within a single election cycle should be monitored more systematically and thoroughly.

Outside of the Old Boys Club? Gender Differences in Outside Groups’ Advertising Support for U.S. Senate Candidates

Since 2010, televised campaign ads have proliferated, raising questions about gender differences in the number of ads outside groups air. Assuming incumbent Democratic women and Democratic women with prior office-holding experience run with support from their party and interest groups, we expect Democratic-leaning groups air more favorable ads supporting Democrats in races that include experienced or incumbent Democratic women than they do in races that include experienced or incumbent Democratic men. Conversely, we assume Republican women receive less support from their party and interest groups. We expect outside groups air more favorable ads supporting Republicans in races featuring experienced or incumbent Republican men than races including experienced or incumbent Republican women. Given the potential for backlash to attack ads, we expect Democratic- and Republican-leaning groups air more ads in races including experienced or incumbent male opponents than in races that include experienced or incumbent female opponents. We test these hypotheses by focusing on 2010–2018 U.S. Senate races and combining original data with data from the Wesleyan Media Project, the U.S. Census, and the Cook Political Report. Democratic- and Republican-leaning groups both sponsor significantly fewer ads in races featuring experienced female Democratic candidates compared to races including experienced male Democratic candidates.

Study of Political Campaign on TikTok

Minnesota State Senate candidate Matt Little uses an app that few other politicians use, TikTok, to try to distinguish himself from other politicians and often devotes a lot of time to "branding" efforts. This article looks at how Matt Little is using this new app that has emerged in recent years - TikTok - to communicate and civilly educate people in a new way. The results of the study show that Matt Little has achieved good results by communicating with young people on their favorite platforms during the campaign, gaining many fans and growing in popularity. It made him turn from an obscure candidate to an internet celebrity. But in the end Matt Little did not win the election, showing that success on TikTok does not automatically translate into political success. This study helps us gain a deeper understanding of the impact of social media on political elections.

Examining spread of emotional political content among Democratic and Republican candidates during the 2018 US mid-term elections

Previous research investigating the transmission of political messaging has primarily taken a valence-based approach leaving it unclear how specific emotions influence the spread of candidates’ messages, particularly in a social media context. Moreover, such work does not examine if any differences exist across major political parties (i.e., Democrats vs. Republicans) in their responses to each type of emotional content. Leveraging more than 7000 original messages published by Senate candidates on Twitter leading up to the 2018 US mid-term elections, the present study utilizes an advanced natural language tool (i.e., IBM Tone Analyzer) to examine how candidates’ multidimensional discrete emotions (i.e., joy, anger, fear, sadness, and confidence) displayed in a given tweet—might be more likely to garner the public’s attention online. While the results indicate that positive joy-signaling tweets are less likely to be retweeted or favorited on both sides of the political spectrum, the presence of anger- and fear-signaling tweets were significantly associated with increased diffusion among Republican and Democrat networks, respectively. Neither expressions of confidence nor sadness had an impact on retweet or favorite counts. Given the ubiquity of social media in contemporary politics, here we provide a starting point from which to disentangle the role of specific emotions in the proliferation of political messages, shedding light on the ways in which political candidates gain potential exposure throughout the election cycle.

The Democratic-CIO Alliance: The Benefits of Friendship

The Democratic-CIO Alliance: The Benefits of Friendship

The intersection of race and party: voter perceptions and candidate selection in U.S. Senate elections

ABSTRACT Previous literature suggests that Democratic candidates of color receive less support than white Democrats on Election Day. It has been suggested that this reduced support is due to voters’ ideological perceptions of people of color being more liberal than whites, which translates into perceptions of candidates. However, these studies are frequently limited to white voters’ perceptions of Democratic candidates of color, and the full relationship linking race/ethnicity, to ideological placement, to vote choice has rarely been tested. In the current study, we examine how both the race/ethnicity and party affiliation of Senate candidates shape perceptions of their ideology and vote choice among people of all race and ethnicities. Using the 2006–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find support for our hypothesis that Black Democrats are generally perceived as more liberal than white Democrats. These perceptions have real consequences, resulting in fewer votes. Conversely, Black Republican candidates are perceived to be just as conservative—and Hispanic Republicans even more conservative—than white Republican candidates. Findings suggest that the link between race/ethnicity, perceptions of ideology, and electoral success vary according to the race/ethnicity and party of candidates.

After the ballot box: How explicit racist appeals damage constituents views of their representation in government

Recent scholarship finds that the use of explicit racial appeals can be an effective mobilization strategy in some situations. Consequently, U.S. politics has witnessed the resurgence of such appeals. Yet, the effects of racial appeals are not ensconced in electoral contexts, but may have potential downstream effects on interest representation and the ability for politicians to build broader coalitions This study uses a survey experiment to test the effect of exposure to racist comments used by a 2018 U.S. Senate candidate on perceived interest representation among Black and White respondents. The results show that Black and liberal White respondents who are exposed to these comments feel that the candidate is less able to represent their interests. Thus, we find that the use of explicit racial appeals potentially alienates a substantial proportion of people which could potentially lead to greater dissatisfaction with government.

Let’s Get Ready to Tweet! An Analysis of Twitter Use by 2018 Senate Candidates

To what extent did the 2018 Senate candidates adapt their Twitter strategy to match electoral realities during the campaign? Previous literature on the political use of social media suggests that Twitter is a gauge of “word of mouth” popularity and can be seen as an indirect proxy for votes. As such, Senate candidates have an incentive to be strategic in their use of social media during the election season. Relying on the framework set forth by Gainous and Wagner (2014), we categorized senatorial candidates’ tweets using an Artificial Neural Network and analyzed them over time to see if political party, presidential vote margin, incumbency and Senate race competitiveness predict the types of tweets that candidates were likely to send. Senate candidate tweets were also examined to determine under what conditions candidates opted to attack, stay quiet about, or align themselves with President Trump. We found that incumbents tended to talk about policy more and attack less, while challengers attacked their opponents to level the playing field. Democratic candidates followed a conventional strategy of tweeting about Trump where it made strategic sense, and using social media in competitive races to attack their opponents and to encourage supporters to get involved. Republicans followed a base-mobilization strategy consisting of aligning themselves with Trump and attacking their opponents when they were underdogs.

Strategy Framing in News Coverage and Electoral Success: An Analysis of Topic Model Networks Approach

ABSTRACT Past studies examined the prevalence of strategy framing in news coverage and its effects on cynicism, knowledge, and content evaluation. Missing from the literature is an examination of the relationship between strategy framing in news and electoral success, the actual goal of political campaigns. Similarly, factors that shape media use of strategy framing on the candidate and race levels were rarely examined. We argue that these gaps in knowledge are due to taxing coding procedures required for systematic estimation of strategy framing in large corpora. We use a recently developed unsupervised computational method (ANTMN) to automatically code the news coverage of 312 U.S. Senate candidates in 156 races between 2008 and 2016 in a corpus of 181,725 articles. We found that strategy framing is negatively associated with electoral success. Strategy-oriented news coverage is associated with the competitiveness of the race; candidates’ experience; and for Democratic candidates only, the conservativeness of the state.

Strategic position taking: optimal strategy for Senate candidates in the Obama era

ABSTRACT In this paper, we test the optimal position taking strategy for senators running for reelection vis-à-vis their party’s president. Using data from a survey experiment conducted using a national sample, we examine the responses towards three hypothetical Democrats: (i) ‘embracing’ or supportive of Barack Obama (ii.) ambiguous about their attitude towards Obama (iii.) ‘eschewing’ or opposed to Obama. Comparing participants exposed to the ambiguous and the embracing Democrat, we find some evidence of a difference in candidate preference, but little evidence to suggest that the strategy gains votes. Comparing participants exposed to the eschewing Democrat to the embracing Democrat, we find that the strategy does yield some gains but these are offset by losses amongst the base. Overall, these findings suggest that the optimal reelection strategy for Democratic candidates is to remain supportive, unless they are running in areas with a high concentration of Republicans—then the eschew strategy can yield some gains.

Gender, Political Participation and Representation: The Nigeria Story

Aims: This article aims to examines women's political participation and representation in Nigeria. The study employed the 2019s Nigeria general election data with an emphasis on the number of men and women candidates for various seats and posts.
 Study Design: The study implemented quantitative and qualitative research approach.
 Place and Duration of Study: The study was held in Nigeria between February and March 2019 within the duration of the General Elections (GE).
 Methodology: Data dwelled more on the secondary data from the Nigeria Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) such as Final List of Senatorial Candidates, Final List of Governorship Candidates, Final List of Presidential Candidates, Final List of State House of Assembly Candidates, and Final List of Candidates for House of Representatives followed by interviews.
 Results: The findings indicate that even though women in Nigeria are politically active, they are not considered equal to their men counterparts - a product of patriarchal inclination. Certainly, Nigerian society still subscribes to the senseless connotation of: ‘women’, what do they know? A common phrase employed even in an ordinary family conversation. Besides, women participants lack financial backup and social support for political positions.
 Conclusion: Women’s low proportion of political representation at the highest levels of politics is a persistent issue in gender stratification in Africa, but paramount in Nigeria. Despite advances in women’s educational level and economic participation, the findings in this study have shown that women in Nigeria have little or no significant progress with respect to political representation in the country’s political sphere.

Will Access to Information on Political Dynasties Alter Voting Behavior? Evidence From a Philippine Youth Voting Experiment

Many young democracies are characterized by the proliferation of political dynasties, i.e. elected politicians from the same clan spanning across time and across different elected positions. In the Philippines, there has been growing concern that political dynasties are on the rise, as more elected officials hail from political clans. Lack of information on political dynasties could be a potential reason behind this. Using a randomized control trial framework, this paper seeks to evaluate the impact of young voters’ access to information on political dynasties (i.e. the socio-economic correlates of this phenomenon) vis-a-vis their voting choices for top local government positions and the Senate in the Philippines. The two main delivery systems for the information are: a) a five-minute cartoon highlighting the main findings of a study on political dynasties in the Philippine Congress; and b) a lecture by one of the co-authors of that study. This paper finds some evidence that the lecture and the cartoon had an effect in terms of reducing votes for dynasties. Second, the lecture has a much greater impact than the cartoon in terms of its estimated effect on the voting preference of the participants. The study findings suggest that access to information on political dynasties has potentially large effects on electoral outcomes, should the result hold for a large share of young voters. Based on a simplified illustration, the lecture on political dynasties could potentially result in about less than half a million fewer votes for dynastic politicians for the top senate spot; and up to five million less votes for dynastic senatorial candidates for the 12 slots. Again, it should be emphasized that this is a mere illustration and not a projection of effects on actual elections. Nevertheless, the results are compelling in their potential magnitude, should these estimates hold true for the larger youth population.

Trump on the Trail: Assessing the Impact of Presidential Campaign Visits on Voting Behavior in the 2018 Midterm Elections

AbstractIn this article, we examine the impact of President Donald Trump's visits on the campaign trail in the November 2018 midterm elections. We find that President Trump's visits failed to either boost overall state‐level turnout or support for GOP U.S. Senate candidates in these elections. The results reinforce the notion that presidential capacity to influence voting behavior is limited, especially in an era of deep partisan polarization when partisan identity and other, more fundamental considerations shape vote choice and turnout decisions.

Media Effects in the Viewer’s Choice Era: Testing Revised Agenda-Setting and Priming Hypotheses

ABSTRACT One of the not-so-minimal effects of media exposure is the ability of the media to set the agenda for political discussion and debate, to tell voters what to think about, if not what to think. Most experimental studies of agenda-setting probably over-estimate its actual effects, however, by forcing exposure to a story on some particular topic – an especially unrealistic setting in today’s viewer’s choice media environment. We avoid this problem by exploring agenda-setting and priming in a more realistic campaign environment, a 10-wave panel study where we randomly varied the opportunity to learn particular policy stands from competing gubernatorial, House, and Senate candidates in a mock off-year election campaign. We find correlational evidence that explicit attention to stories about a particular political issue is associated with greater perceived importance of that issue, but random assignment of exposure to such stories has no causal effect on perceived importance. We find weak evidence that agenda-setting is limited to in-party partisans.

Partisan search behavior and Google results in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections

ABSTRACT This research shows that members of different ideological groups in the United States can use different search terms when looking for information about political candidates, but that difference is not enough to yield divergent search results on Google. Search engines are central in information seeking during elections, and have important implications for the distribution of information and, by extension, for democratic society. Using a method involving surveys, qualitative coding, and quantitative analysis of search terms and search results, we show that the sources of information that are returned by Google for both liberal and conservative search terms are strongly correlated. We collected search terms from people with different ideological positions about Senate candidates in the 2018 midterm election from the two main parties in the U.S., in three large and politically distinct states: California, Ohio, and Texas. We then used those search terms to scrape web results and analyze them. Our analysis shows that, in terms of the differences arising from individual search term choices, Google results exhibit a mainstreaming effect that partially neutralizes differentiation of search behaviors, by providing a set of common results, even to dissimilar searches. Based on this analysis, this article offers two main contributions: first, in the development of a method for determining group-level differences based on search input bias; and second, in demonstrating how search engines respond to diverse information seeking behavior and whether that may have implications for public discourse.

Policies, profits, networks, or duty? Donors’ motivations for contributing to parties and interest groups

ABSTRACT Understanding variation in donors’ motivations for contributing to parties, interest groups, and candidates is increasingly important for fundraising success in an era in which joint fundraising committees and online bundling platforms provide expanded opportunities for collaborative fundraising efforts. However, the motivations of party and interest group contributors remain understudied. Using questions from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study of 2016 in a series of logistic models, I investigate donors’ self-reported motives for contributing to parties, interest groups, and congressional candidates. I find party and interest group donors share a distinct desire to socially network with other donors whereas donors to House and Senate candidates respectively seek to influence public policy and to help their businesses. Civic duty is the only joint motivation underlying candidate and party contributing; otherwise, motivations for contributing to congressional candidates versus parties and interest groups are found to be distinct from one another.

The 2019 midterm elections in the Philippines: Party system pathologies and Duterte’s populist mobilization

The May 13, 2019 midterm elections were generally seen as a referendum on the first three years of the presidency of Rodrigo R Duterte. The elections tested and consolidated the political strength of Duterte as the country’s populist strongman president. Most of the national and local candidates he endorsed won their contests for the 18,066 national and local positions. The election also resulted in a victory for the administration’s nine senatorial candidates (out of 12 seats) and a majority of its governors, mayors, and local legislators. The results follow the historical patterns of midterm elections in the post-authoritarian period. But unlike previous Philippine presidents, Duterte did not personally endeavor to consolidate his political support under his dominant party solely through the systematic mobilization of patronage. Duterte eschewed patronage-based political party building in favor of populist mobilization or the rallying of mass supporters toward contentious political action with minimum institutional intermediation. With a record high trust rating, Duterte was not only an active endorser of candidates, but he was also both a staunch defender of his allies and a relentless attacker of the opposition. In the end, the biggest winners in the 2019 midterm elections were not the candidates but Duterte himself.

Gun Violence and Mental Illness: It’s Time to Change the Status Quo

Gun Violence and Mental Illness: It’s Time to Change the Status Quo

Reprehensible, Laughable: The Role of Contempt in Negative Campaigning

Negativity is common in political rhetoric and advertising, but its effects are variable. One important moderator may be the specific emotions communicated by the messages and potentially in recipients. Contempt may be the emotion often conveyed by uncivil ads, which have attracted considerable interest, particularly in light of increased partisan polarization. Using data from web-based surveys in New Jersey and Iowa, we examine the role contempt played in two U.S. Senate races in 2014. We find respondents perceived contempt—more than anxiety or anger—in four televised negative campaign ads and in candidates’ statements about opponents. Moreover, respondents’ feelings of contempt toward candidates, though less intense than feelings of anger, were of equal or greater significance than anger or anxiety in predicting voting intentions regarding three of the four Senate candidates across the two elections.

Who Needs the Wealthy? The Effects of Size Scaling on Money in Senate Elections

A large body scholarship demonstrates that the population size of an electoral district affects elections in important ways, yet little is known about the implications of population size for campaigning and fundraising. I posit that the challenges of running a campaign in a populous electorate require candidates to focus their fundraising efforts on the wealthy. I analyze campaign finance records published by the Federal Election Commission during the 2006–2014 Senate elections and find that Senate candidates running in large states receive fewer donations per capita from in-state donors, but they tend to receive larger donations on average and more money from contributions of $1,500 and above. In sum, candidates running in populous states appear to rely upon comparably smaller pools of wealthy constituents writing larger checks to finance their campaigns. In the context of rising campaign costs, these findings suggest that constituency population growth may exacerbate representational inequalities between citizens and contribute to the growing influence of the wealthy in U.S. politics.