Campaigning Through Cable: Examining the Relationship Between Cable News Appearances and House Candidate Fundraising
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231175675 |
| Author | Seth Benson,Scott Limbocker |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
American Politics Research
2023, Vol. 51(5) 633–654
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231175675
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Campaigning Through Cable: Examining the
Relationship Between Cable News
Appearances and House Candidate
Fundraising
Seth Benson
1
and Scott Limbocker
1
Abstract
Appearances of elected officials on cable news have become a regular feature of American politics. Do candidates going on cable
news see a subsequent bump in fundraising? We evaluate all television appearances for every major party candidate running for
the House from 2009–2020 on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. We match these with FEC records of every individual campaign
contribution made during the same period. We find evidence that candidates who appear on cable news do see a spike in
fundraising on the day of the appearance. We find incumbents raise more money from in-state donors while nonincumbents see
a bump from out-of-state donors. Also, this money comes more from appearances in primetime slots, not daytime appearances.
Given that candidates see a bump in fundraising for TV appearances, it remains likely that this facet of American politics will
persist.
Keywords
cable news, congressional elections, money in politics
Tip O’Neil is most famously associated with the idea that in
the United States, all politics is local. It has been 40 years
since the O’Neil campaign made the nationalized debate
about economic policy localized to providing fixes to the
infrastructure woes facing Peoria, Illinois. As Matthews
notes, “by hitting his rival where he lived, O’Neill translated a
wholesale debate over national economic policy to the local,
retail level”(Matthews, 1999, pg. 53). While this quip still
makes the rounds as canon for how to run an election, the
passing years make it less clear that this adage still holds true.
Increasingly, recent scholarship has demonstrated that elec-
tions are nationalizing, with state elections following national
trends (Rogers, 2016), especially during the 1990s (Hopkins
et al., 2022). This change created partisan divides at the
lowest levels of government (de Benedictis-Kessner &
Warshaw, 2020) with state legislators failing to be punished
for not representing their district’s interests (Rogers, 2017).
This is true for nearly all major elections in the United States.
Presidential and Senatorial elections are more partisan today
than any period in history, while gubernatorial elections are
partisan at levels not seen in over 100 years (Amlani &
Algara, 2021).
Cable news, rather as the driver of this trend or the natural
offshoot of the underlying mechanism, is a component part of
the nationalization of American politics (Trussler, 2021) and
can even change legislators behavior in Congress (Trussler,
2022). With the growing role of cable news in American
political discourse, it is unsurprising to see officials holding
federal office appear with regularity on these networks (see
Figure A6 in our Appendix for just how much this trend has
increased). There are several reasons why House members
might flock to cable television despite having a more local
constituency. First, if the member is hoping to promote
legislation or some other national program, the national
audience offered by cable news provides a forum for such
commentary that did not exist during the O’Neil era. Another
explanation could be the political ambition of the member.
More individuals are running for the presidency, with pres-
idential primary debates now requiring multiple stages to
get all the candidates a few minutes of television time. When
growing a national brand to make a run to be the president,
there is hardly a better venue than a national broadcast to
1
Department of Social Sciences, United States Military Academy, 607 Cullum
Road, West Point, NY 10996-2101, USA.
Corresponding Author:
Scott Limbocker, Social Sciences, United States Military Academy, 607
Cullum Road, West Point, NY 10996-2101, USA.
Email: scott.limbocker@westpoint.edu
drive up national name recognition and the awareness of the
candidate. Some estimates have Donald Trump garnering
nearly $5 billion of this sort of unpaid airtime by appearing on
various television programs (P. L. Francia, 2018). A third
option might be to raise money for the member’s reelection or
their party. Candidates looking to appear on cable news can
make policy appeals that would either make donors inclined
to open their pocketbook or explicitly make an appeal for
campaign contributions.
For this paper, we do not attempt to unpack candidate
motivations (see Ansolabehere et al., 2001 or Jacobson, 1989
for such discussions). Rather, we focus on one politically
relevant offshoot from appearing on cable news: fundraising.
Members of Congress lament the disproportionate amount of
time they spend raising money (60 Minutes, 2014). The
people they need to reach out to, donors, are those most
engaged with politics (Brown et al., 1995;P.Francia et al.,
2003). The composition of the audiences of cable news
programs provides a fertile group to tap the most engaged
partisans (Brown et al., 1995;P.Francia et al., 2003;Martin &
Yurukoglu, 2017;Prior, 2007;Stroud & Jomini, 2011), so
much so that recent works posit channels as information
bubbles (Dempsey et al., 2020) and assert cable news to be
the primary source of political information for many
Americans (Hoewe, Brownell, and Wiemer 2020). During the
period we consider, Americans tuned in at consistent levels
with noticeable spikes in election years. According to Nielsen
and Adweek data, a similar number of Americans are
watching the primetime cable news slots from Q3 2012 to Q3
2021 with the exception of increases during election cycles.
1
If candidates are getting more money following cable
news appearances, it would certainly be understandable why
they seek out the cable news camera. A recent example of this
would be pundits noting that Speaker vote holdout Matt
Gaetz made overt fundraising appeals as he withheld his vote
for Kevin McCarthy (Soellner, 2023). But this is just one
anecdote about the behavior of one member. That this oc-
curring at any scale requires empirical validation, which we
do in this paper. To preview the result –candidates who do
appear on cable news see a bump in fundraising on day the
day of the appearance.
Links Between Television and
Citizen Behavior
A common observation in the field of American political
science is the increasing amount of nationalization occurring
in elections and governing. Observed the 1994 midterms to be
the most nationalized election since 1954. Over time, state
and national parties have grown closer together, all while
voters are voting evermore consistently for the same party at
lower levels of government (Rogers, 2016). Moreover, this
nationalized link is exacerbated by its relationship with the
incumbency advantage (Carson et al., 2020). Congressional
candidates now seem predestined to the fate of their national
political parties at the ballot box and candidates running in
districts that lean towards the other party have difficulty
breaking away from their nationalized fate (Abramowitz
et al., 2006;Are Members of Congress Becoming
Telemarketers?, 2022). This is somewhat less pronounced
in earlier House cycles (Born, 2008), though more in-focus
when considering subnational constituencies rather than in-
dividuals (Caughey et al., 2018).
Across many contexts, there are several reasons for why a
candidate might opt for nationalizing an election (see Hijino
and Ishima (2021) for a discussion their cross-level electoral
appeals theoretical framework. For a US specific discussion
see Born (2008);Rogers (2016)). We focus on one theorized
cause for this nationalized shift: the movement in public focus
and media attention from state and local politics towards
national coverage (Hopkins, 2018). This dynamic gets re-
inforced by trends in campaigns. Money in congressional
elections is increasingly coming from residents outside the
candidate’s district (Gimpel et al., 2006;Gimpel et al., 2008).
Moreover, this money can shape subsequent behaviors of
members once elected (Barber, 2016;Trussler, 2022). So, if
voters are increasingly paying attention to national news,
gaining attention on the national stage by appearing on na-
tional programs may be beneficial for congressional
candidates.
Past work has considered the role of media and money in
the electoral process (Brown et al., 1995;P.Francia et al.,
2003;Herrnson et al., 2019;Jacobson, 1978,1989;Jacobson
& Carson, 2019;Limbocker & You, 2020) with some recent
work showing the electorate (Trussler, 2021) and members
(Trussler, 2022) changing their behavior as they are exposed
to media. While all these works take different angles at at-
tacking the question, the central theme born out of the results
is that candidates view media as a vehicle for messaging and
need monetary resources for purchasing that time from media
outlets.
Candidates believe in their ability to persuade the elec-
torate with good reason. Past work has shown that different
media sources can move opinions of the public. Newspaper
endorsements do persuade readers to vote for the endorsed
candidate (Chiang & Knight, 2011) and the public still learns
from local newspapers about their national representatives
(Peterson, 2021). Moving to television, local news can at-
tenuate the nationalization of elections (Moskowitz, 2021).
Meanwhile, Hopkins and Ladd (2013) support the idea that
media can change public preferences when they studied the
effect of a “ideologically distinctive”cable news source on
voters. Using variation in the introduction of Fox News
across the nation, they were able to see if the network’s
presence altered vote preferences. They found the effect of
access to Fox News had little change on the population writ
large. However, when differentiating effects by partisan
group, they found that those that identify as Republican and
Independent were more likely to support a Republican
candidate when exposed to Fox News, indicating that
634 American Politics Research 51(5)
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