When issue ownership is not enough: A look at the battle for the U.S. Senate in television advertising (2008-2014)

Abstract

This study seeks to broaden the understanding of the issues in which political
candidates utilise in campaign television advertising in the United States. Specifically,
this includes political party ‘owned’ issues and the interaction of issue salience and
public opinion upon the types of appeals that candidate use. This is examined in a
sample set of competitive U.S. Senate election campaigns in 2008, 2010, 2012 and
2014. The hypotheses presented based on prior research stated that issues categorised
as salient would constitute a majority of television ad issue appeals and that public
opinion would closely mirror those results by no more than ten per cent. Instead,
what the analysis found was that issue salience only constituted a majority of issue
appeals in 2008 and a plurality in 2012. Secondly, public opinion issue appeals
aligned within 10 per cent of issue salient appeals in the midterm elections of 2010
and 2014, but not in the Presidential election years of 2008 and 2012. Why is this?
This study suggests that issue appeals in television advertising may be contextualised
not solely by national issue salience and opinion but depending if the election is a
Presidential or a midterm. In addition, issues in Senate elections are suggested to be
dependent not only on national but local constituency issue salience.