Political Communication & Strategy: Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections

By University of Akron Press

Some aspects of the 2014 midterm elections would have been unimaginable a decade earlier. SuperPACs spent unlimited amounts of money, candidates used Twitter and other social media to communicate with voters, and Democrats found themselves all but entirely cast out of federal office in the South. Other aspects of the midterm elections, such as primary elections, direct mail, and the hurdles faced by members of marginalized communities in making their concerns known, were more familiar. How did candidates and parties navigate these new and old realities of the campaign landscape? Top scholars examine the communications strategies of 2014 and their implications for future elections in this volume. The authors demonstrate that party branding, the social construction of group interests, and candidate rhetoric can have an important impact in midterm elections.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781629220956

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Bibliography

Introduction

Political Communication

and Strategy

Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections

Tauna S. Sisco, Jennifer C. Lucas, and Christopher J. Galdieri

As the 2014 elections loomed, each side professed optimism. Republicans had history on their side; the president’s party tends to do poorly in midterm elections, and the senators elected in 2008 would be up for reelection without Obama leading the ticket and the public’s frustration with the Bush administration to help them. Veteran Democratic senators in Iowa, Montana, South Dakota, and West Virginia retired, rather than seek reelection, and other incumbent Democrats in Arkansas and Louisiana looked ripe for defeat thanks to their ties to Obama. Democrats hoped they could thread the needle and hold on to the Senate through sophisticated voter identification and turnout techniques and solid candidate recruitment in states like Georgia and Kentucky. At the gubernatorial level, they hoped that controversial governors first elected in 2010 in states like Florida, Kansas, Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and other states would be vulnerable. As we know now, Republicans did extremely well in 2014; they won nearly every close Senate race and won control of that chamber, expanded their House majority, and all but one of the 2010 class of Republican governors won another term. Such a strong Republican national wave suggests that the campaign process, including the way candidates seek to communicate strategically with voters and the way voters respond to campaign appeals and candidates themselves, is becoming nationalized.

Why did Republicans do so well? How much is political communication strategy national and partisan, and to what extent is it regional or local? While much attention is given to presidential elections, it is important to ask how trends of stronger partisan polarization, more unified party branding, the growing sophistication of campaign technology, the increasing role of outside money, and the evolution of marginalized interests impact midterm elections. In March 2015, scholars gathered at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College to consider not just what had happened on Election Night 2014, but what those results suggest about the direction of American politics. The chapters in this volume are refined and revised versions of select papers presented at our conference, the second such postelection conference held at Saint Anselm College. The authors include some who are well-known scholars and some who are at the very beginning of their careers. Some take broad overviews of the election and others focus on very specific tactics or techniques used in the election. Most are political scientists, but some are scholars who study communications or sociology. Some perform historical analyses, while others examine the content of campaign communications, and others deploy sophisticated statistical models. The variety of our authors and of the methods they use to study the 2014 election and its consequences is, we believe, one of the strengths of this book, and makes the volume a deeper and richer analysis than it otherwise would be.

The book is divided into five sections, each exploring the ways that Republicans were able to be successful in the 2014 midterms. Most of the sections begin with a chapter that discusses the broader trends related to midterm elections, and is then paired with a more focused discussion of that theme in 2014. However, all the chapters are focused on the intersection of political communication, campaign strategy, and the 2014 midterm context. How and why were Republicans able to be so successful in campaign messaging when so many cases appeared to be up for grabs just a few months prior to the election? The chapters cover a range of media, from Twitter to direct mail, a range of issues, from gender and race to party branding, as well as covering elections from across the nation. The chapters are linked by key themes, but also highlight the diversity of messaging and strategy in various localized contexts.

The first section, Primaries and Political Communication, reflects the way midterm primary elections might influence strategy and communication. Robert Boatright argues that after several election cycles with major, high-profile primary challenges to congressional incumbents, 2014 was in many ways a year in which party establishments struck back against such challenges. After considering several explanations for the relative failure of most primary challengers in 2014, Boatright tentatively concludes that super PACs and other changes in the campaign financing system have strengthened the hand of incumbents seeking reelection against primary challengers. Kevin Parsneau and Christopher Chapp investigate the sources of polarized rhetoric in campaigns, and highlight the role that primary challengers play. They note that incumbents adopt extreme rhetoric to fend off challengers, so primaries play an important role in shaping the strong polarization in congressional races. Interestingly, they also note that among women, Republican women are more likely than their male partisan counterparts to use extremist rhetoric.

The next section, Political Communications and the Republican Wave, looks at the ways parties messaged in the 2014 election. Kenneth Cosgrove discusses the evolution of branding and marketing models in national campaigns. Situating his larger argument in the way that the two parties have learned from each other’s experiences with branding and marketing, he describes what the two parties did in 2014, particularly compared to the influence of the Tea Party in the Republican Party in 2010 and the continuation of the mobilization of the Obama coalition in 2014. In 2014 the Democrats launched a specific mobilization effort but not a specific marketing effort. However, Republican establishment branding was more successful since, as Boatright argues in chapter 1, extremely conservative primary challengers were less successful in 2014. In chapter 4, Neal Allen and Brian Arbour consider how Democratic candidates attempted to frame issues in Republican-leaning states. They find that while many Democrats stayed true to their party’s message in Republican states, suggesting there are significant rhetorical constraints for partisan candidates, they also criticized President Obama. Chapter 5 by Matthew Shapiro, Libby Hemphill, and Jahna Otterbacher analyzes the way congressional candidates from both parties moved away from talking about their issue positions in their social media–based messages leading up to the general election cycle. Each of these chapters highlights the ways that parties’ and politicians’ messaging are constrained by the political environment.

The third section, Outside Influence and Political Communication, considers the effects of changing regulations on campaign contributions and technological innovation are having on the way campaigns communicate strategically with voters. In the post–Citizens United (2010) era, many ask what role expenditures by outside groups play in shaping elections. Jeff Gulati and Victoria Farrar-Myers show that the answer depends on the context of the race. While in open-seat races outside spending had an impact on the outcome, such spending does not appear to have had an effect in incumbent-challenger races for the House of Representatives. Dante Scala and Tegan O’Neill focus on the role of outside groups in campaign messaging and communications. They demonstrate that, in the New Hampshire Senate race, there was significant variation in the messages that parties and outside groups highlighted in their direct mail. As many fear, outside groups were even more negative than political parties in their direct mail pieces. The two groups who sent the most mail were willing to deviate from their mission, and included a wide range of issues that arose during the campaign. On the other hand, most other groups’ mission statements were reflected in the issues they highlighted.

The next section, Strategy, Issues, and the South, examines political communication and strategy played out specifically in the South in 2014. David Hopkins examines how the 2014 election marked in many ways the completion of the South’s realignment from being solidly Democratic to solidly Republican. But he also demonstrates that cracks in the Democratic hold on the South began much earlier than many realize. Caleb Orr, Dylan Brugman, Suzanne Fournier Macaluso, and Cindy Roper evaluate the strategies used by both Republicans and Democrats in contested Senate seats in five southern states. Using a unique quantitative content analysis of campaign materials put out by the candidates’ official campaigns, they conclude that Democrats focused on state issues, while Republicans attempted to nationalize issues and tie Democratic candidates to the president. Democrats also responded by highlighting their support for women, and arguing they were the party friendlier to women.

Our final section, Construction of Marginalized Interests, considers the role of public policy in campaigns in 2014. Vincent Vecera and Danielle Currier consider the ways that media coverage addressed the interests of women during this campaign. They argue that the 2014 campaign was a critical moment that saw the beginnings of a major shift in the conception of women’s interests, thanks to factors including a shift in Democrats’ coalition of voters and the Affordable Care Act, many provisions of which have benefited women in particular. This shift, in turn, means that future campaigns may understand women’s interests much more broadly than they have been construed in the past. In the final chapter, David Redlawsk, Natasha Altema McNeely, and Caroline J. Tolbert examine the role racial attitudes play in American politics by studying the 2013 and 2014 elections of Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. Drawing on previous research into what they term emotive racism, and based on survey research conducted during Booker’s campaigns, Redlawsk, McNeely, and Tolbert argue that the enthusiasm created by an African American candidate’s campaign can potentially offset the effects of some voters’ feelings of racial resentment.

In sum, this volume allows for a thoughtful and considered empirical examination of not just what happened in the 2014 midterms, but why, and places the election in a broader context. Examining the 2014 election from multiple scholarly and methodological perspectives expands our understanding of this and subsequent midterm elections, especially the way that parties and candidates communicate strategically with voters.

Primaries & Political

Communication

Chapter 1

The Nationalization of

Congressional Primaries

Robert G. Boatright

The last three congressional election cycles have featured a high number of primary challenges to incumbents. Most of these have taken place within the Republican Party, and many have featured challengers who alleged that the incumbents were insufficiently partisan. Although few challenges resulted in defeats of these incumbents, some primary challengers raised substantial amounts of money, drew media attention, and likely forced their incumbent opponents to campaign harder and in a more partisan fashion than they were accustomed to doing.

In my 2013 book Getting Primaried, I argue that what matters most in regard to primary challenges is not how many there are, but how much attention they garner. In this sense, a small number of high-profile challenges can be more consequential than a large number of less dramatic ones. This makes primary challenges particularly important for interest groups, for whom they are a low-cost way of sending a message, provided they can coordinate among each other and with their members. The 2014 primaries provide some evidence for this; while primary challenges increased, the dominant story was that this was the year the establishment struck back. As I will show, there is some evidence that this was the case. Although there were many primary challenges, and a smattering of high-profile, victorious challengers, there is less evidence of coordination behind their campaigns than in prior years. These were either challengers who had deep roots in the states or districts where they ran (that is, they looked like normal politicians), or their victories were flukes.

In this chapter, I document this shift and evaluate four explanations for it: the decline of the Tea Party, the quality of the candidates, the preparations of incumbents, and changes in campaign finance law. I find the fourth of these most compelling: the rise of super PACs has altered the financing of primary challenges. I am agnostic about whether this is a positive or a negative development, but in the closing section of the chapter I raise some normative issues related to this shift.

THE 2014 PRIMARIES IN PERSPECTIVE

In the early 2000s the number of primary challenges to congressional incumbents began to climb. The number of challenges described by Politics in America and the Cook Political Report as ideological in nature—that is, waged by challengers who argued that the incumbent was insufficiently liberal (for Democrats) or conservative (for Republicans)—increased even more rapidly over this time period. Figure 1.1 shows this increase for the House; Senate primaries are more idiosyncratic but follow a similar pattern. The first few years of this increase look unremarkable in comparison to the 1970s, or even to the 1990s. Even 2010 might be written off as a temporary assertion of Tea Party fervor were it not for the continued increase in 2012 and 2014.

Figure 1.1. Primary Challenges to House Incumbents, 1970–2014

Simply looking at the incidence of primaries masks, however, the change in the ability of nonparty groups to marshal resources behind select candidates. The ideological challengers who raised large amounts from out-of-state donors from 2002 onward were also the beneficiaries of substantial independent expenditure campaigns, and all these candidates appear to have received so much attention from outside their states because of bundling efforts conducted by the Club for Growth, on the right, or a constellation of liberal advocacy groups headed by MoveOn.org on the left. Such organizations could spend large sums to promote their favored candidates, but they were also among the earliest groups to master the art of Internet fundraising, using email and social media to encourage members to contribute directly to the candidates. For these groups, knocking off a centrist incumbent served as a means to show their clout and to threaten other centrists. In order to do this effectively, such groups did not actually need to win elections, but they did need a credible enough showing to draw attention to the campaign. And in order to do this, they needed to choose their targets carefully. If they focused on too many candidates, their efforts would be diluted. Hence, although there was an increase in the number of challenges over this time, the number of challengers who had extensive group support, as measured through out-of-state contributions and independent expenditures, stayed relatively constant at one or two per side per year.

In 2010 the number of ideological challenges exploded, but the number of well-funded ideological challenges did not. Liberal groups poured money into primary challenges to Senator Blanche Lambert Lincoln of Arkansas and Republican-turned-Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. There were some upsets in Republican primaries; however, no Republican primary challengers received very much money from out-of-state donors. Some analyses of the 2010 election argued that the grassroots clout of the Tea Party enabled many poorly funded conservative candidates to triumph; others alleged that the independent spending made possible by the Citizens United v. FEC decision enabled stealth donors to dump large amounts of money into primaries so late that incumbents were caught unaware (Mummolo 2013).

Since 2010, however, the increase in unrest in primaries has not been matched by an increase either in the average spending by these candidates or by the emergence of primary challengers who galvanized a national following. In 2012 there was arguably one primary challenge that drew national attention, the Indiana Republican Senate primary which resulted in the defeat of veteran Senator Richard Lugar. Lugar’s opponent, Richard Mourdock, presented himself as an uncompromising conservative, arguing that bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view (Bernstein 2012). Mourdock was, however, a veteran of Indiana politics and had a strong donor base in

Reviews for Political Communication & Strategy

[Hyacinth Bangero · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nice reference if you wish to have an idea about American politics.