The 360: Election info, ads, the media – and what’s at stake

As we hurtle toward midterms, how do voters get information - and how successful is that information in persuading them? How important are campaign ads? Are "horse race" coverage and negative stories valuable? What role does truth play in campaigning and election media coverage?

These are just some questions addressed in "Under Pressure: U.S. Elections, Advertising, and the Media," the first of the "Talking Policy" podcast miniseries on U.S. elections. UCLA professor Georgia Kernell is an expert on political parties, political communication, behavior and comparative democratic politics. She speaks with fellow UCLA professors Stuart Soroka, whose areas of expertise include political communication, negativity bias, misinformation and political behavior, and Lynn Vavreck, an expert on campaigns, elections and public opinion. They examine the information and media environment surrounding campaigns and the midterms, as well as how small changes can impact voters and the political landscape.

Below is an excerpt from the recorded discussion:

Georgia Kernell: The public is demanding information, right? And you're saying that journalists in some ways are responding to what they think that the public needs to hear, but also what the public wants to hear. So, does the public want to hear a certain type of coverage about elections?

Stuart Soroka: I think the consensus in the field is that there's a fair bit of audience interest in the horse race coverage because it's simple and can be a little exciting or sensationalistic. And so even as horse race coverage may not be the most productive in terms of learning about the substance of politics, it's always going to be a salient feature of media coverage of an election because it's something the audience is interested in.

The other example is negative coverage, that on balance there are negativity biases in the content that media produce because humans have negativity biases. We tend to be more attentive to and consume more negative information than positive information, so news will, on balance, be negative.

Lynn Vavreck: Georgia, I just was going to jump in to say one of the things that has surprised me the most in the last three decades of working on these questions is when Stuart and I both started working as professionals, there was a huge movement in political science and in communication that horse race coverage was bad. It was bad news because all of the things that Stuart just said: It didn't have any content, it wasn't about the issues, it didn't help people make informed choices.

And then fast-forward to 2008, 2012, technology really enabled researchers to bring a bunch of data streams together, and we started getting poll aggregators. And that's sort of where FiveThirtyEight.com became famous, and then every news outlet had its competitor to FiveThirtyEight.com. News organizations gave awards to the best poll aggregators at the end of every election cycle. And it became this thing that people celebrated. Who could actually get the best horse race number?

I just think it's such a turn from where we all were in the late '90s and the start of the 21st century, thinking we have to get rid of horse race coverage. And now newsrooms spend money on getting the best one. It's an interesting development, and I think it's fueled by technology, but I would be curious, Stuart, to hear how you see it.

Soroka: Well, I think it's pretty common, certainly in the academy, to look down our noses at horse race coverage or at negative coverage, but I'm not sure that either of those things are necessarily bad. I mean, part of the reason why there are poll aggregators and they get a lot of attention is because actually those are pretty useful. Useful for academics, useful for parties, but also useful for people looking for cues about where the election is headed. It's reasonable to base your vote, in part, on which party seems likely to win or lose nationally or locally.

Vavreck: Like to figure out if you're gonna be pivotal or if it's going to be a blowout.

Soroka: Those are all good reasons to take horse race coverage seriously. It's not bad that it exists. In the same way I would argue that it's not bad that news coverage is, on balance, negative.

That's not problematic either. Negative information can be highly diagnostic. That's why we have evolved to have negativity biases. We don't all have hours and hours and hours to spend on news content every day. Sometimes you just need to know the most important things, the things that are most likely to require a change in behavior.

Often that's negative stuff. The content of news media is not created in a vacuum. It's partly a function of what audiences want. And sometimes, often what audiences want, for instance, horse race coverage or negativity, might be actually pretty useful.

Kernell: So with all these advances in technology and now a 24-hour news cycle, so many different ways that people can access the news, are people more informed about elections today than they were 50 years ago?

Soroka: Uh, no.

Vavreck: I was going to say maybe ever so slightly, like more people can tell you the name of the vice president or the chief justice … Basic information. This is a complicated question to answer because, of course, if we're thinking relative to 30 or 40 years ago, the parties are much different now than they were in the '80s and '90s. And so just by virtue of knowing, oh, this candidate's a Democrat, or this candidate's a Republican, or my neighbor's a Democrat, you know the whole suite of issues and how they stand. In the '80s and '90s, and, you know, we could go back to the '50s and '60s, you had a really hard time doing that.

So just by virtue of the parties being more separated, voters probably do know more. But they're not doing it in the traditional learning way that I think you were thinking, Georgia, when you asked the question.

Soroka: I agree. I think party cues are more informative than they used to be, and that can't really be separated from the nature of media technology, because probably the evolution of the parties and the evolution of media technology, these things are intertwined. It's partly the nature of media technology that creates an incentive for parties to distinguish themselves, or makes it easier for people to sort into different parties.

Vavreck: Yeah, I think there's a really interesting story to be told about Donald Trump's rise and the role of radio, talk radio. One thing he does well is sort of read the room and sell. And so that talk radio audience was helpful for him in understanding preferences that already existed in the electorate.

You know, Donald Trump didn't make people believe this or that. People already held those beliefs. Prior to him, the candidates weren't taking different positions on things like whether Mexico was sending its best, for example. And he understood from this kind of market research through radio, and with the help of some elite actors like Steve Bannon and other people in politics, that if he went there, there would be people there.

And then he uses the new media technologies to disseminate those messages, and those people use new media, social media, to find one another and say like, "Hey, we're all onboarding with this guy." And then there's momentum and bandwagoning. And so this is just going back to the point you started with, Stuart, that it is impossible to think about American politics and American elections without thinking about media

Soroka: And Trump's ability to use Truth Social effectively as a way of reaching people is just fascinating because nobody's on Truth Social.

It's a teeny, tiny audience, and yet we know what he says on Truth Social, just like we knew what he said on Twitter before that. So he has found this kind of magical space in which he can say whatever he wants without a press conference; he can just throw it out there, and then it gets repeated and echoed through the media environment.

Kernell: And now the media's role is also in fact-checking everything that Trump and everybody else says, right? So anything he posts often has a lot of analysis around it, much of that focused on what is true or isn't true in what he said.

I imagine that's something new.

Soroka: Yeah, I mean, once we entered the era of "alternative facts," I think just it all broke. And I mean, clearly it would be pretty hard to make the case now, I think certainly senior members of the Republican Party are worried about saying something false because they might be fact-checked. That just doesn't seem to hold water at all.

Kernell is an affiliated researcher and hosts this podcast miniseries for the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.