Post-Election Conference Probed Impact of Political Ads, Messaging

A month after one of the most momentous national elections in recent memory, the Wesleyan Media Project hosted their 2024 Post-Election Conference at the Frank Center for Public Affairs on Dec. 6. The all-day event featured four panels, moderated by Government department faculty members: Associate Professor of Government Logan Dancey, Associate Professor of Government Alyx Mark, Professor of Government Erika Franklin Fowler, and Assistant Professor of Government Justin Peck.

More than a dozen scholars from institutions across the country presented their research to the audience of faculty and students. The topics of panel presentations ranged from political advertising in 2024 to specific issues such as Latinos and immigration, racial identity and racial attitudes, to the impact of the social media and the news media on elections.

In a presentation about political ads in the 2024 election cycle, WMP Co-Director Mike Franz of Bowdoin College shared that more than $5 billion was spent on ads in federal and gubernatorial races. Most of that ad spending paid for broadcast TV ads.

Comparing the two presidential campaigns, Franz said Harris outspent Trump on ads on in all mediums—TV, radio, and social media. However, the broadcast, network, and national cable spending was unusually close between the two candidates, as were their airings. Trump aired almost no positive ads, which WMP defines as ads that mentioned only him. He also aired no ads that focused solely on personal characteristics or that personally attacked Harris, but rather his ads focused more on policy with a very small percentage that included personal characteristics with policy. Harris’s ads also mostly focused on policy, though she did run some personally focused biographical ads at the beginning and drew some contrasts between the two candidates on personal characteristics.

In terms of policy issues, Trump focused heavily on economic issues such as inflation, oil and gas prices, and taxes. Harris’s ads were more focused on issues like health care and prescription drugs, as well as abortion. While Trump did air ads focused on transgender issues, he did not spend a lot of time on that topic despite the prominent media attention that the ads received.

WMP have long been weighing the question of how much political ad spending truly matters. While there was more ad spending in battleground states and the presidential race was closer there, there’s not much evidence that the ads had significant impact. “If you look at the ads themselves and you correlate ad buys at the market level with county-level vote returns, which we’ve been doing for a long time, we tend to find very small effects,” said Franz. “We find no real relationship between all that ad buying—TV broadcast ad buying—and the outcome [of the election].”

Drilling down into factors affecting elections

A few of the research presenters shared work exploring the influence of factors such as race, identity, and politics. Vanessa Cruz Nicols of Indiana University presented data about Latino voters, who have been leaning more Republican in recent elections. Her work explored the impact of emotions, such as fear and anger, on those voters and whether people felt fear in relation to the Republican candidate and hope toward the Democrat.

Her survey tested the impact of political messaging that conveys hope and opportunity—such as a path to citizenship—versus fear, such as deportation. What she found pointed to the complexity of emotions and voter behavior: “Combinations of threat and opportunity” provide a “more effective blueprint for mobilization” of Latino voters, she said.

Shifting gears, Benjamin Toff of the University of Minnesota shared research on how following news on social media impacted political engagement and trust. He studied residents of his state who were recruited to follow news from Minnesota Public Radio on Instagram to determine if consuming news that way, via social media, could reverse the widespread decline in trust in news. He recruited participants to follow news on MPR and compared them to a control group.

He found that “those who were following MPR News on Instagram … increased their own trust in that brand by very significant amounts,” he said. However, following MPR on social media did not change their perception of news in general, nor did it improve their political efficacy or voter participation.

Additional panelists presented on topics such as strategic language in campaigns, partisan branding, policy positions, and women candidates and advertising, among others. The wide array of topics provoked lively question and answer among researchers and students in the room, demonstrating the continued intense interest in understanding all the different influences on our politics and democracy now and going forward.