(iPoster) Democratic Campaigners: How Congressional Candidates Talk about Democracy

• In Event: Poster Session: Elections, Campaigns and Voting Behavior & International Perspectives on Networks and Political Engagement
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Elections, Campaigns and Voting Behavior

Abstract

How, when, and why do candidates for the U.S. House and Senate frame democracy as an important issue? Following the Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and Shelby County, the rise of Donald Trump, and the January 6 Insurrection, democracy has been a potent issue in modern American politics. Numerous polls showed democracy as the top concern for many voters in the 2024 election. Each Democratic presidential candidate to run against Trump has emphasized this issue to some degree, but we know less about how this issue is framed and deployed in Congressional campaigns. Is democracy "on the ballot” in these elections? In this paper, I investigate how candidates for the House and Senate have prioritized (or ignored) democracy in their campaigns. Specifically, I ask how House and Senate candidates have discussed issues of democracy (voting rights, campaign finance, anti-gerrymandering, etc.) on their campaign websites in recent elections. What factors explain when candidates frame democracy as an important issue? Do they focus on democracy at the expense of other issues? And how has this changed over the last two decades? To build a dataset of campaign issues, I scrape archived campaign websites for all major House and Senate candidates from 2008 through 2024. Examining the full corpus of the issues these candidates emphasize, I study who discusses democracy, how highly they prioritize it, and whether it pays electoral and monetary dividends. I also undertake a content analysis, looking into the different ways that candidates frame democracy.

Author

• Alexander Cohen, University of California, Davis