The Tone and Timing of Super PAC Campaigning in House and Presidential Elections

• In Event: Campaign Finance

Abstract

Even before the Supreme Court’s decisions in the 2010 Citizens United and Speech Now cases, political scientists had demonstrated that independent expenditures could have an effect on legislative contests (Engstrom and Kenny 2002). By 2016, the FEC had estimated that independent expenditures in federal contests had outpaced direct spending by both presidential and congressional candidates combined.

A number of studies have shown how Super PACs interact with other actors (Magelby et al. 2007; Herrnson 2009; Franz 2013; Magleby 2014; Dowling and Wichowsky, 2015; Kolodny and Dwyre 2018), the general strategies that they utilize, (Dwyre, Diana, and Evelyn Braz. 2015.), as well as an assessment of their electoral effectiveness (Miller; Baker 2018). However, little research has been conducted showing how the electoral activities of independent entities differ in their approach to presidential and congressional campaigns.

Using FEC records of independent expenditures, we examine how groups use independent expenditures to support and oppose candidates in the 2016 House and Presidential general elections. We do expect some general patterns to be consistent across the two types of contests. We expect to find that the ratio of oppositional to supportive funding peaks during the most competitive stages of the nomination processes and during August and September of general elections. Given patterns of political polarization, we expect that independent expenditures are more likely to be supportive in the nomination campaign than during the general election campaign.

At the same time, we expect to see some important differences in how Super PACs participate in House and presidential contests. We would expect independent group activity to be both earlier and more dispersed in presidential races, given front-loaded nature of presidential primaries and the increased activity during the subsequent interregnum period between the end of presidential primaries and the start of the general election (Mayer and Busch 2003). We also propose that the Lau and Pomper’s (2004) finding that competitive contests saw greater negativity in advertising may mean less negativity in House contests, since they are less competitive on average than their presidential counterpart.

Authors

• Andrew J. Dowdle, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

• Joshua L. Mitchell, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

• Karen Denice Sebold, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville