Substance and Symbolism: Race, Ethnicity, and Campaign Appeals in the United States

Using data from the 2002 Wisconsin Advertising Project and a Democratic direct mailing firm, we ask if candidates publicly court African American and Hispanic voters through the inclusion of these groups in their campaign advertisements or through appeals to their substantive policy interests. We find evidence that Democratic and Republican candidates make symbolic and substantive appeals only when these appeals are very unlikely to be viewed by White voters. These findings lend credence to studies that conclude that candidates are hesitant to publicly court minority voters due to concerns that such activities may harm their existing electoral coalitions, particularly their standing with White voters. Keywords: raceethnicitycampaignsadvertisingelections Acknowledgments The authors thank Nick Barton and Laurie Roberts for their research assistance and the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for its support of this article. We also thank Jim Thurber at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University for providing access to the direct mail dataset. Notes 1. This example comes from the direct mail data set that we describe below. The data set explicitly describes how the mailers intended for the minority audience had the same information as the one designed for all voters, with only cosmetic changes. 2. We limit our analysis to advertisements aired during the general election campaign, which we define as September 4 through election day. 3. This amounted to 1.6% of all advertisements aired during that year. 4. While the shows catering to African American audiences were scheduled from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m., television advertisers often purchase advertising during the hour leading in to prime time to capture audiences waiting for prime-time shows to begin. 5. Values issues were those coded as focusing on abortion, homosexuality/gay and lesbian rights, moral/family/religious values, or creationism. The jobs category was constructed from ads mentioning minimum wage, unions, employment/jobs, poverty, or globalization. Health care issues were those coded as health care, Medicare, or prescription drugs. There was just a single category for education (education/schools) and immigration. 6. Our coders also coded more contextual information about each particular issue mention. Specifically, if the advertisement mentioned an issue like immigration, the coders were instructed to code whether the ad was presenting a message that was generally in favor of or against immigration. However, neither coder detected any instances where an advertisement was against one of the five issues we examine here. 7. While we present simple comparisons of proportions and means in this section, we conducted a supplementary analysis to ensure that the findings were robust when candidate fixed effects were implemented in a multivariate framework. In each case, the findings presented in this section were unchanged by controlling for differences across candidates. 8. The direct mail firm Winning Directions (http://www.winningdirections.com/) donated the dataset to American University. 9. We also conducted a supplementary analysis of the direct mail data where candidate fixed effects were included in a multivariate framework. This analysis revealed that once cross-candidate differences were controlled for, mail targeted for African Americans did not differ significantly in issue content. However, mail targeted for African Americans was 50 percentage points more likely to include pictures of African Americans. Advertisements targeted to Latinos were significantly more likely to focus on the issues of jobs and education, and those mailers were also more likely to feature pictures of Latinos.