Can Yelling Win Elections?
On November 4, 2016 the citizens of the United States of America elected Donald J. Trump to be the 45th President, a decision that left many in shock. Left searching for answers there have been studies and polls taken ever since the election in an effort to understand how so many organizations had failed to accurately predict the outcome of the election.
What I wanted to know was if the news media, by virtue of who they focus their reporting on most heavily, has an effect on the outcome of an election? To investigate this I compiled data from LexisNexis Academic from the two months prior to the 2012 and 2016 presidential primary elections. I looked at two major publications, The New York Times and The Washington Post, and counted how many articles they were publishing with each candidate’s name in the headline. I chose not to accommodate for positive or negative press.
Beginning with the 2012 primary was fairly simple. Barack Obama ran uncontested in the primary as the incumbent Democratic president, but the Republican party was more convoluted. Since I was looking at the two months before the Iowa Caucuses there were still quite a few candidates in the race, but I narrowed down the field by only looking into the four Republican candidates who claimed a primary win. That brought it down to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul.
Below is a graph of the number of articles written about each candidate between November 3 and January 3.
Obama led all candidates with 160 articles being written in the given time-frame, followed by Gingrich with 126 and then Romney with 116. It would make sense for Obama to have the most articles written about him, as he was the sitting president at the time. What I found to be the most interesting about this early stage in the 2012 primaries, however, was that Santorum won the Iowa caucus on January 3, edging out Romney following a recount. Santorum went on to gather about 20% of the popular vote in the primary before dropping out April 10.
So why weren’t these publications writing about Santorum in the weeks and months leading up to the caucus? Out of the four Republican candidates in 2012 Santorum had the fewest articles written about him, only 4% of all the articles written about Republican’s featured Santorum in the headline. He had campaigned in Iowa for months leading up to the primary, but his stops in small towns in Iowa were not deemed newsworthy enough by these two national publications, so he slipped through the cracks.
Eventually the Romney campaign prevailed, picking up steam as the primary season rolled on. The Gingrich campaign finished third, even though they had the most media attention in the two months before the Iowa Caucuses.
The General Election was won by Obama with a margin of 332 electoral votes to 206. Now this is interesting because when you isolate the articles written about Romney and Obama you have a total of 276, of which 42% went to Romney and 58% went to Obama. That is eerily similar to the percentage of the electoral vote that broke for each candidate, Romney with 38% and Obama with 62%.
That brings us to the 2016 Primary elections. On the Democratic side Bernie Sanders was widely considered the outside challenger to Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate. There were 160 articles written about Clinton compared to 98 about Sanders. That comes to be 60% of articles written about Democratic candidates being about Clinton, and 37% being about Sanders. This is again not too far from the results of the popular vote in the primary. Clinton gathered 55% of the popular vote, Sanders reigned in 43%, and Martin O’Malley finished with around 2%.
On the other side of the aisle there was an intense, fiery race going on for who would be the presidential nominee of the Republican party. But as far as newspapers were concerned, there was really only one story. Donald Trump dominated media. In the two months before the Iowa caucus, from December 1 to February 1, there were 371 articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post mentioning Trump in the headline. There were days when just one of those news sources would run seven articles about Trump throughout the paper, as The Washington Post did on January 29.
I looked at the percentage of the primary vote won compared to the percentage of articles written about each candidate to see just how lopsided this coverage was. Of the six major Republican candidates that I compiled research on there was a total of 676 articles. Trump was responsible for 55% of them. His closest competitor, Ted Cruz, managed 135 articles which was good for only 20% of the media share. Bumping down the list another spot brought me to Marco Rubio with just 74 articles, amounting in 11% of the media share. The bottom three candidates, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, and John Kasich, accounted for less than 14% of the total. When I compared this to the percentage of votes each candidate received I found Trump finished with 45%, Cruz with 25%, and Kasich finished third with 13% followed by Rubio with 11%.
If we examine the 2016 primaries together we find that there were 941 articles written about the 9 candidates I examined in the two month period before Iowa. Trump still dominated the media share with 39% of all articles, more than double the amount of articles about Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. In fact, if you add Clinton and Cruz media shares together you come up 76 articles short of Trump, so I threw in Rubio’s 74 articles as well and still come up 2 articles shy.
This is an astounding dominance of major media, and it brings me back to my original question: Does the amount of press given to presidential candidates have an effect on the results of an election? What I have found is that in some cases there may be correlation, but I have no proof of causality. Simply there are too many potential third variables and my sample size was far too small to prove or disprove anything.
In my examination of media coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the two months prior to the 2012 and 2016 presidential primaries I found examples of a candidate’s media share reflecting closely to the percentage of the vote they won such as the 2016 Democratic primary election between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. But there were also times that the media did not represent what was happening in the voting booth, such as the 2012 Republican caucuses in Iowa when Rick Santorum won with a measly 4% media share.
To come to any definitive conclusion on the effects of media coverage on an election would require far more time and resources than I have at my disposal, but is incredibly intriguing nonetheless. What I did take away from this, however, is that Donald Trump had a massive share of the media’s attention in the 2016 election. Whether or not that had any effect on who people voted for, I can not tell you. But it does raise questions surrounding the ethical coverage of politics and what does and does not deserve to be news. I’m afraid that research will have to wait until my next capstone.
Works Cited
LexisNexis Academic. “The New York Times,” November 3, 2011 to January 3, 2012.“The Washington Post,” November 3, 2011 to January 3, 2012. Accessed October 28, 2017.
LexisNexis Academic. “The New York Times,” December 1, 2015 to February 1, 2016. “The Washington Post,” December 1 2015 to February 1, 2016. Accessed October 28, 2017.
