Political Communication & Strategy

Description

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.

Informations

• Publié par: University of Akron Press
• Date de parution: 30 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629220956
• Langue: English

Extrait

Political Communication & Strategy
Bliss Institute Series
John C. Green, Editor
Tauna S. Sisco, Jennifer C. Lucas, and Christopher J. Galdieri, editors, Political Communication & Strategy: Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections
Christopher J. Galdieri, Tauna S. Sisco, and Jennifer C. Lucas, editors, Races, Reforms, & Policy: Implications of the 2014 Midterm Elections
William L. Hershey and John C. Green, Mr. Chairman: The Life and Times of Ray C. Bliss
Douglas M. Brattebo, Tom Lansford, Jack Covarrubias, and Robert J. Pauly Jr., editors, Culture, Rhetoric, and Voting: The Presidential Election of 2012
Douglas M. Brattebo, Tom Lansford, and Jack Covarrubias, editors, A Transformation in American National Politics: The Presidential Election of 2012
Daniel J. Coffey, John C. Green, David B. Cohen, and Stephen C. Brooks, Buckeye Battleground: Ohio, Campaigns, and Elections in the Twenty-First Century
Lee Leonard, A Columnist’s View of Capitol Square: Ohio Politics and Government, 1969–2005
Abe Zaidan, with John C. Green, Portraits of Power: Ohio and National Politics, 1964–2004
Political Communication & Strategy
Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections
EDITED BY Tauna S. Sisco Jennifer C. Lucas Christopher J. Galdieri
All Material Copyright © 2017 by The University of Akron Press
All rights reserved • First Edition 2017 • Manufactured in the United States of America.
All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the publisher, The University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
ISBN: 978-1-629220-93-2 (paper) ISBN: 978-1-629220-94-9 (ePDF) ISBN: 978-1-629220-95-6 (ePub)
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48–1984. ∞
Cover design and illustration: Tyler Krusinski
Political Communication & Strategy was typeset in Minion with Helvetica Neue display by Amy Freels, printed on sixty-pound white, and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Contents
Introduction
Political Communication and Strategy: Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections
Tauna S. Sisco, Jennifer C. Lucas, and Christopher J. Galdieri
Primaries & Political Communication
1 The Nationalization of Congressional Primaries
Robert G. Boatright
2 Partisan Extremity in the 2014 Midterm Elections: How Primaries and Incumbency Influence Polarized Position-Taking on Campaign Websites
Kevin Parsneau and Christopher Chapp
Political Communication & the Republican Wave
3 Party Branding, Marketing, and Mobilization in 2014 and Beyond
Kenneth M. Cosgrove
4 Selling the Donkey: Democratic Campaign Rhetoric and Framing in Republican States
Neal Allen and Brian K. Arbour
5 Pussyfooting around November? A Longitudinal Analysis of Politicians’ Twitter Use in 2014
Matthew A. Shapiro, Libby Hemphill, and Jahna Otterbacher
Outside Influence & Political Communication
6 Following the Money: The Impact of Outside Group Expenditures in the 2014 U.S. House Elections
Jeff Gulati and Victoria A. Farrar-Myers
7 You’ve Got Mail: Direct-Mail Strategies in the New Hampshire U. S. Senate Race
Dante J. Scala and Tegan O’Neill
Strategy, Issues, & the South
8 The 2014 Election and the Culmination of Southern Realignment
David A. Hopkins
9 The Solid South: Campaign Issue Strategies in the 2014 Southern Senate Races
Caleb Orr, Dylan Brugman, Suzanne Fournier Macaluso, and Cindy Roper
Construction of Marginalized Interests
10 The Social Construction of Women’s Interests in the 2014 and 2010 Midterms
Vincent Vecera and Danielle Currier
11 Racial Attitudes and Emotional Responses to Senate Candidates in New Jersey
David P. Redlawsk, Natasha Altema McNeely, and Caroline J. Tolbert
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