Marathons not Sprints: The Effects of Long Campaigns and Big Fields in Primaries

• In Event: Elites in the News

Abstract

Candidates in presidential primary contests, like candidates in all types of elections, attempt to convey a political agenda through the media. But those vying for party nominations contend with conditions unlike those in other elections. The races almost always feature multicandidate fields and the campaigns are long, serial affairs. Do these different conditions affect the success candidates have in transmitting their agenda through the media? Drawing on the ethnographic literature of journalism norms, I argue that the format of presidential primary rules affects reporters’ senses of timeliness and conflict. As such, I expect that media responsiveness to a candidate’s agenda will, on average, decrease as the primary campaign goes on and the candidate’s agenda becomes old news. I also hypothesize that the media will become more responsive to a candidate’s agenda the more candidates are in the race, on average, as the greater number of candidates results in greater potential for conflict between a candidate’s and a rivals’s agendas. I will test these hypotheses using a novel dataset of more than 2600 speeches by presidential primary candidates from 2000-2016 and the media coverage of those candidates by The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, Fox, and MSNBC. The results will have implications for how the rules of party nomination contests are evaluated in the era of highly media-oriented campaigns.

Author

• Zachary Scott, University of Maryland