Appealing to the Base or to the Moveable Middle? Incumbents’ Partisan Messaging Before the 2016 U.S. Congressional Elections

Abstract

Political polarization has been widely discussed in political communication research and the popular press for over half a century. Polarized politicians are sorted into clear camps or teams, and they have little overlap with the other camps, making it hard for them to find any common ground from which to govern. The general sense is that partisanship is increasing (see, e.g., Andris et al., 2015; Baldassarri and Gelman, 2008; Brady and Han, 2006; Poole and Ros enthal, 1984), meaning that politicians are more effectively sorting themselves into non-overlapping groups. The gap between parties may be large or small, and either way, the gap is problematic for multi-party governance. As parties become more extreme, that gap both widens and worsens. In this paper, we examine the partisan messaging of incumbent members of Congress during the 2016 U.S. elections in order to understand how partisan messaging changes around elections so that we can evaluate theories about what factors influence campaign messaging and examine patterns of polarization over time. We test hypotheses driven by campaign theories such as the median voter theorem that predict various strategies for partisan or non-partisan messaging. We found that Democrats and Republicans exhibit different rhetorical patterns in the lead up to the 2016 elections: Democrats decreased their partisanship as the election neared, and Republicans stayed consistent in their messaging.