Democrat Maria Cantwell has easily won re-election to the U.S. Senate from Washington state in previous years, but as she seeks her fourth term this November she is facing her most recognizable opponent.
Republican Susan Hutchison, who spent two decades as a Seattle TV news anchor before leading the state Republican party for five years, said people are looking for change.
Cornell Clayton
Cornell Clayton, director of the Thomas S. Foley Institute for Public Policy at Washington State University, said even though Hutchison is a recognized name in the state, she has an uphill battle in not only trying to take on a Democratic incumbent in a state where Democrats hold most statewide offices, but doing so in a year where Democratic voters appear to be turning out in force.
To quote the great political philosopher Cyndi Lauper, “Money changes everything.” And nowhere is that proverb more taken to heart than in a federal election, where billions of dollars are raised and spent on the understanding that money is a crucial determinant of whether or not a candidate will win.
This year, the money has been coming in and out of political campaigns at a particularly furious pace. Collectively, U.S. House candidates raised more money by Aug. 27 than House candidates raised during the entire 2014 midterm election cycle, and Senate candidates weren’t far behind. Ad volumes are up 86 percent compared to that previous midterm. Dark money — flowing to political action committees from undisclosed donors — is up 26 percent.
Travis Ridout
Presumably, all that money is going to buy somebody an election. In reality, though, Lauper isn’t quite right. Political scientists, such as Travis Ridout, professor of government and public policy at Washington State University, say there’s not a simple one-to-one causality between fundraising and electoral success. Turns out, this market is woefully inefficient. If money is buying elections a lot of candidates are still wildly overpaying for races they were going to win anyway. And all of this has implications for what you (and those big dark money donors) should be doing with your political contributions.
Overall, advertising ends up being the major expense for campaigns, said Ridout. In 2012 and 2014, the average Senate campaign spent 43 percent of its budget on ads, he told me, and the average House campaign spent 33 percent. Presidential races spend an even bigger chunk of their budgets on advertising. In 2012, for instance, ads made up more than 70 percent of President Obama’s campaign expenses and 55 percent of Mitt Romney’s.
This is a really tough thing to study, Ridout said, and it’s only getting harder as media becomes more fragmented and it’s less clear who saw what ad how many times and in what context. But it’s also something people have been studying for a long time. Driven by fears that attack ads might undermine democracy by reducing voter turnout, researchers have been looking at the impacts of negative advertising since the 1990s. And, beginning around the mid-2000s, they began making serious progress on understanding how ads actually affect whether people vote and who they vote for. The picture that’s emerged is … well … let’s just say it’s probably rather disappointing to the campaigns that spend a great deal of time and effort raising all that money to begin with.
The role feminism plays in addressing the gaps in established science will be discussed at the next Science Pub talk, hosted by Washington State University’s Entrepreneurial Faculty Ambassadors and the Palouse Discovery Science Center.
The talk titled, “Doing Better Science through the Other ‘F’ Word” will take place 6-7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 11, at Paradise Creek Brewery in downtown Pullman.
NollMazur
Amy Mazur, a Claudius O. and Mary W. Johnson Distinguished Professor in political science at WSU and an associate researcher at the Centre d’Etudes Européennes at Sciences Po, Paris, and Samantha Noll, assistant professor in The School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs, will map out the different feminist approaches that are used in current research. In addition to discussing the gaps in established scientific practices, they will present one specific area of feminist political science that has an integrative, comparative feminist agenda.
“Feminism in today’s ‘me too’ world often conjures up images of war of the sexes and man hating. For us, two feminist scientists whose work is situated in the social sciences and the humanities, the notion of feminism provides a fundamental starting point to make science more scientific,” said Mazur. “Taking a feminist approach to research also has the promise of making science more meaningful and better suited to solve today’s wicked problems.”
Rep. Nancy Pelosi has starred in roughly one in every five Republican-made House campaign ads across the country this year, usually as a device to tar a fellow Democrat running in a conservative area as beholden to her “liberal San Francisco values.”
Some who study such things, however, say there’s no proof anti-Pelosi ads persuade voters who are on the fence.
Travis Ridout
“I have not seen any research like that,” said Travis Ridout, a professor of political science at Washington State University and co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project.
“I suspect that these ads are less designed to appeal to the independent voters than to get their base to turn out,” Ridout said. “A lot of these candidates have decided that they are for Trump and this is their way to win: Get their voters out and the heck with the middle.”
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers has gained ground in every corner of Spokane County as ballots have trickled in since election night and extended a district-wide lead that remains within striking distance for challenger Lisa Brown.
It’s difficult to say what effect those ads had on Brown’s share of the late vote total, said Travis Ridout, professor of political science at Washington State University in Pullman.
“It is complicated, and it’s hard to untangle,” Ridout said. “I think there is some research that suggests that when people are exposed to negativity about a candidate, that they’re less enthusiastic about voting for that candidate.”
The McMorris Rodgers ads, attacking Brown’s record on taxes and public safety, probably didn’t sway those who had their minds made up to cast ballots for the Democrat, Ridout said. But for those who were still undecided and leaning toward Brown, the ads may have dissuaded them not to vote at all, he said, which could account for the difference in late numbers between her and McMorris Rodgers.
“People who are exposed to a lot of negative information about a candidate they already support, they’re more likely to just not vote,” he said.
