The Spectacle of U.S. Senate Campaigns by Kim Fridkin Kahn & Patrick J Kenney

Author:Kim Fridkin Kahn & Patrick J Kenney [Kahn, Kim Fridkin & Kenney, Patrick J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Process, General
ISBN: 9780691227924
Google: GugSEAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 56702859
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1999-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

1 We should note that differences in coverage patterns in the 1988 and 1990 campaigns are not due to differences in endorsement decisions. The Casper Star-Tribune did not endorse Wallop in his 1988 campaign nor Simpson in his 1990 campaign.

2 Patterson (1980) and Aldrich (1980) both document an impressive relationship between the amount of news coverage a candidate receives and voters’ recognition of the candidate during presidential nomination campaigns.

3 Of course, Vinich was probably better known than Helling at the start of the campaign.

4 While eighty-eight paragraphs discussed the horse race during the Wallop-Vinich campaign in the Casper Star-Tribune, only eleven paragraphs focused on this topic during the Simpson-Helling contest.

5 It is possible, of course, that voters viewed the economy as a crucial issue long before the onset of the campaign.

6 The feeling thermometer is used to assess how warm or cold respondents’ feelings are toward the candidate, on a scale ranging from 0 to 100, 0 representing cold and 100 measuring warm.

7 As discussed in chapter 2, we concentrate on campaign coverage in newspapers.

8 Weaver and Wilhoit (1986) examine a more representative sample of journalists than Lichter et al., (1986) and find journalists to be more centrist than liberal in their ideology.

9 The mean news hole for our sample is 3,881 column inches with a standard deviation of 1,138 column inches.

10 By including the population of the state in the analysis, we are also providing a necessary control for spending differences that are purely a function of the size of the state. We could simply divide spending by population, but we would lose the control for competing news stories. By including population in our analysis, we control for any forces that may covary with the size of the state (i.e., spending, rival stories).

11 In the case of poll standings, we look at polls published between September 16 and September 30. With regard to candidate spending, we look at expenditures between late August and late September.

12 We examine two categories of candidates: (1) incumbents and open winners, and (2) challengers and open losers. In the remainder of the chapter we will refer to the incumbent/open winner category as the incumbent category, and the challenger/loser category as the challenger category. In each analysis in this chapter, we initially included an open-race variable to see whether coverage patterns differed for candidates running in open races compared to candidates running in incumbent races. However, the variable tapping open races never reached statistical significance and was dropped from the analysis.

13 The tenfold interpretation is necessary because we logged spending to base 10. For both challenger and incumbent spending, outliers are created because of heavy spending in some small states (e.g., Wyoming, Maine, Vermont, Idaho), even controlling for the size of the state. This is typical in Senate elections, and logging is the solution used by previous scholars (e.g., Abramowitz, 1988; Green and Krasno, 1990). This allows us to keep all of the cases for analysis instead of discarding the outliers (Tufte, 1975).

14 In addition

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