Co-opting the Court: The “Kavanaugh Effect” on Facebook in 2018

• In Event: Courts and the (New) Media

Abstract

How did political actors mobilize voters with the “Kavanaugh effect” on Facebook? Leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, Republicans and Democrats thought that the splash of Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination would cause a wave of support. Both sides were expected to devote resources to turn out voters with the issue. This study draws on data from Facebook’s new ad archive to explore the political ads linked to Kavanaugh in the midterm campaigns.

We first develop a theory of Supreme Court Co-optation that bridges literatures on electoral coalitions, microtargeted campaign advertising, and judicial legitimacy. We hypothesize that opportunistic political actors co-opt the saliency of the Supreme Court with general disregard for judicial legitimacy. In other words, parties, candidates, and interest groups use the Court as a hot-button “wedge” issue to mobilize and cross-pressure key electoral groups (Axelrod 1972; Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002; Stanley and Niemi 2004; Hillygus and Shields 2009). As a result, the Court gets dragged into “politics as usual.” This politicization of the Court, unfortunately, can undermine its perceived legitimacy, especially when the messages come from credible sources (Gibson 2015; Nelson and Gibson 2018).

To assess the extent of co-optation, we investigate Facebook ads that mention Kavanaugh. We first categorize the groups behind these messages. We expect that many of these messages come from legitimate and credible partisan actors, such as parties, candidates, and interest groups. Next, we content analyze the messages to assess the topics and tone of the Court as a wedge issue. We expect to find groups grafting other salient issues onto the Court. We also expect that Democratic groups have a more negative tone than Republicans, given the partisan implications of Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Lastly, we investigate who was targeted. We expect that Democrats targeted the perceived coalition group of women disproportionately more than Republicans.

Our preliminary analysis of ads purchased and posted five days before the election support this co-optation theory. Many of the groups that purchased ads were legitimate parties, candidates, and interest groups. Their messages linked Kavanaugh and the Court to a host of other salient wedge issues like abortion rights and immigration. The tone of these messages also matched expectations with Democrats being much more negative than Republicans. Democratic groups also disproportionately targeted women—a perceived coalition and wedge group—with negative and affective ads about Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Their efforts more than doubled Republicans across every available metric (number of ads, money spent, and impressions).

This study extends our analysis to cover the entire time period from Kavanaugh’s nomination on July 9 to election day on November 6. We use an automated web scraper to gather the data from Facebook’s publicly accessible ad archive. Like in the preliminary analysis, we investigate the groups, messages, and targets of ads about Kavanaugh. Additionally, we examine the variation across these three components over time. We conclude with an extended discussion on Supreme Court legitimacy in the wake of the most contentious confirmation in recent memory.

Authors

• Levi Bankston, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Marcy Shieh, University of Wisconsin-Madison