Do Campaigns Matter?
Julia: Today’s elections have the potential to say something about a couple of big questions in political science. Matt Grossmann offered a few this morning, and my take on the stakes for poli sci overlaps a little, but also differs. Like Matt, I’m interested in what we can learn about how campaigns matter — ads versus ground game, negative ads versus positive ones, a national versus local strategy. Here in the data-driven world — political science and data journalism alike — we hesitate to give too much credit to campaign strategy. But, obviously, voter attitudes matter, and it makes sense that campaigns would play a role in close races. So as we eventually sift through tonight’s results, I’ll be thinking about whether there’s any kind of pattern in campaign choices and election outcomes or whether specific strategies appear to be effective in mobilizing new voters.
Seth: Pundits have an annoying tendency to claim that any campaign activity by a losing candidate didn’t work. There’s some nice pushback on this in Sides/Tesler/Vavreck’s book, where they discuss some research on advertisements, ground games, and other campaign activities in 2016. Some of Hillary Clinton’s ads, for example, definitely worked, raising favorability scores for her and lowering Trump’s among the audiences that saw them. But such effects are pretty ephemeral, and even if they work, that’s no guarantee that they’ll be enough to deliver a victory.
One thing we have seen this year is some very creative — and expensive — advertising. I know others have talked about her campaign today, but M.J. Hegar’s “Doors” ad is really striking for both its content and its quality. We won’t get immediate answers on this, but I’m curious how much the quality of advertisements matter. With viewers that are quick to ignore the standard attack ad with a grainy B&W photo, a negative headline, big red letters, etc., do better advertisements actually help a campaign break through?