Getting the Message Out: Candidate Communication Strategy during the Invisible Primary

Haynes, Audrey A.; Flowers, Julianne F.; Gurian, Paul-Henri

doi:10.2307/3088034

Cited by 17 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…Empirical work treating negative campaigning as a dependent variable has focused on press releases (Flowers, Haynes, and Crespin 2003 ;Haynes, Flowers, and Gurian 2002 ), campaign advertisements (Hale, Fox, and Farmer 1996 ;Kahn and Kenney 1999 ;Damore 2002 ), and news reports (Haynes and Rhine 1998 ;Djupe and Peterson 2002 ;Peterson and Djupe 2005 ). In the 2016 US presidential primary season, social media have emerged as an important weapon in the campaign messaging arsenal, with Twitter 1 taking center stage.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump

Gross

Johnson

2016

APSC

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What drives candidates to "go negative" and against which opponents? Using a unique dataset consisting of all inter-candidate tweets by the 17 Republican presidential candidates in the 2016 primaries, we assess predictors of negative aff ect online. Twitter is a free platform, and candidates therefore face no resource limitations when using it; this makes Twitter a wellspring of information about campaign messaging, given a level playing-fi eld. Moreover, Twitter's 140-character limit acts as a liberating constraint, leading candidates to issue sound bites ready for potential distribution not only online, but also through conventional media, as tweets become news. We fi nd tweet negativity and overall rate of tweeting increases as the campaign season progresses. Unsurprisingly, the front-runner and eventual nominee, Donald Trump, sends and receives the most negative tweets and is more likely than his opponents to strike out against even those opponents who are polling poorly. However, candidates overwhelmingly "punch upwards" against those ahead of them in the polls, and this pattern goes beyond attacks against those near the top. Sixty of 136 dyads are characterized by lopsided negativity in one direction and only one of these 60 involves a clearly higher status candidate on the off ensive.

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confidence: 99%

Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump

Gross

Johnson

2016

APSC

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“…Scholarly research recognizes two dominant message strategies for the conduct of presidential campaigns: messages designed to wage war (competitive) and messages intended to market or sell the candidate (substantive) (Scammell 1998; Bowler and Farrell 1992; Collins and Butler 1996; Haynes, Flowers, and Gurian 2002). We add a third category to this dichotomy—information dissemination.…”

Section: Theory and Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior research indicates that campaigns recognize two distinct competitive strategies (Haynes, Flowers, and Gurian 2002). Positive competitive messages attempt to define the horse race or tout prestigious political endorsements.…”

Section: Theory and Evidencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Media, the Campaign, and the Message

Flowers¹,

Haynes²,

Crespin³

2003

American J Political Sci

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This article examines the 1996 press releases issued by Republican presidential nominee candidates during the invisible primary and the subsequent stories generated by these press releases in newspapers. We systematically examine how campaigns structure their messages, which messages are transmitted by the press to the voting public, and what factors influence the transmission of the campaign's message. We find that campaign organizations disseminate a variety of messages to the media. Our analysis demonstrates that national media organizations are most receptive to informative (logistical) messages disseminated by candidates who are at the head of the field and most hostile to substantive (issue-oriented) messages regardless of their campaign of origin. By contrast, the state press is most open to substantive messages issued by lower-tier candidates. It appears from our results that the media, more than the campaign, bear the responsibility for the emphasis on the horse race.We focus our analysis on the role of both media norms and routines and the campaign process itself in shaping the campaign information environment. Determining which campaign messages are more likely to reach the public through the news media provides insight into the effect each of these institutions has on the election process; specifically we should arrive at a better understanding of how campaigns and news organizations interact to structure the campaign agenda. In the next section we discuss the theoretical underpinnings and research pertaining to the nature of campaign messages, media norms and routines, and the interplay between them. Theory and Evidence The Invisible PrimaryThe collapse of the primary season has made the invisible primary 2 an increasingly critical period for campaigns. It

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“…Just et al (1996) and Haynes et al (2002) found that horserace coverage does not eliminate issue coverage, although it dominates the discourse. Journalists often refer to issues when presenting news about candidates' strategies.…”

Section: The Horserace Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Media and Presidential Nomination Campaigns: When Bad News Becomes Good News (or at least a little better)

Haynes¹

2008

ARP

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This paper examines the research in media and presidential nomination campaigns as it has emerged during the post-reform era and moved into the new millennia. While there has been ample progress in the field, most notable has been the change in tone in the research from “bad” news to “good” news. Interpretations from the most recent research in the area suggest that the news media do not perform as poorly as judged in the earlier decades, at least in terms of providing information to voters. Moreover, voters are now portrayed not as naïve citizens who are easily manipulated by the media, but rather more resilient to media manipulation, and active consumers of information for political learning purposes.

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Getting the Message Out: Candidate Communication Strategy during the Invisible Primary

Cited by 17 publications

References 4 publications

Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump

Twitter Taunts and Tirades: Negative Campaigning in the Age of Trump

The Media, the Campaign, and the Message

Media and Presidential Nomination Campaigns: When Bad News Becomes Good News (or at least a little better)

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