Under Pressure: U.S. Elections, Advertising, and the Media

Lindsay: Hi, this is Lindsay Shingler, the host of Talking Policy. This fall, we’re glad to bring you a new, three-episode miniseries on American elections. Our guest host for the series is Georgia Kernell, a political scientist at UC Los Angeles, who’s joined by experts from across the UC system to consider the forces that shape what we know and how we participate in elections here in the United States, with an eye on the rapidly approaching 2026 midterms and beyond.

Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the series.

Georgia: Hi, I’m Georgia Kernell, and I’ll be your guest host for this special Talking Policy miniseries focused on U.S. elections. On this first episode in our series, Talking Policy travels to UCLA where I’ll speak with two of my colleagues in the political science and communication departments: Stuart Soroka and Lynn Vavreck. Together, we’ll talk about the information environment surrounding U.S. elections, examining how the news and campaign advertising shape voter attitudes and behaviors.

Stuart and Lynn, thanks for joining me.

Lynn: Thanks for having me.

Stuart: Yeah, thank you.

Georgia: Okay. So to start us out, what are you both the most interested in as we look toward the 2026 elections? Is there something you’re paying particularly close attention to? Stuart?

Stuart: I mean, so since I’m here as a guy who thinks about media, I am really interested in what coverage of the upcoming election looks like. We’ve had changes in management at CBS that may change the nature of content there [Following the Skydance-Paramount merger, Bari Weiss was brought in as editor-in-chief to overhaul CBS News by Paramount CEO David Ellison]. Pressures on ABC and NBC from the administration that may change the way in which coverage happens there. And then changes in what appears to be the willingness of social media owners to adapt algorithms and platforms to, let’s say, produce content that is closer to what the current administration would like.

There’s just a lot of tension between the current administration and media outlets right now. That’s going to make for a different kind of coverage.

Georgia: Lynn, what are you paying particular attention to?

Lynn: Well, I’m almost always interested in campaign advertising and candidate messaging. So for me, I like to see how the candidates are going to think about the nature of the times, and then what is the argument that they will make to voters for why they should choose them instead of their opponent. I will be very interested to see how the economy plays into those decisions.

And then separately, I’m also going to be paying a lot of attention to when and how people vote, and how the Trump administration is responding to those developments. Will there be an effort to send in federal agents of one type or another to certain polling locations? And then what will the response in those locations be to that federal presence? And then what will the administration’s response be to the response of voters in the state?

Georgia: Okay, let’s continue talking about campaigns. Can you actually just back up and give us an overview of how electoral campaigns work in the United States, especially in midterm years? Given our focus on 2026, what’s really at stake in that midterm election, and what’s the life cycle of a typical congressional campaign like?

Lynn: Sure. So I’d say the first thing to keep in mind about U.S. elections is that elections are the purview of states, not the federal government. So even though these are elections for Congress, for our national legislative body, they are run by states, and within states, elections are most often run at the county level.

There are 3,500 and, I don’t know, some number of counties in America, and each one of them has a voting system. Maybe it’s a machine. Maybe you’re coloring in a little dot with a pencil. They don’t all have to do it the same way. Every county can do it differently.

Now, the second thing to know is that there are two major political parties in the U.S., and those political parties also play a huge role in all of our elections. So the nomination of candidates, who gets to run for office, that’s a party function, and parties can choose those candidates however they see fit.

We, since the 1960s, have pretty much had a system in the U.S. where the parties hold primaries and candidates get chosen essentially by voters in these primary elections. Those primary elections can happen anywhere from the spring and into the summer, sometimes even a little bit later. So it isn’t like in the presidential years where we have a very long wind-up. For these congressional elections, sometimes the distance between the primary and the general election can be short.

What’s at stake? You know, nothing but everything. Control of the House of Representatives and the Senate are both on the table for both political parties at this moment in time. And why that feels so urgent to people is that the president is a Republican, and right now both chambers in Congress are controlled by Republicans, and that unified government should be enabling for the administration in terms of enacting the policy preferences that they want into law. If they do not have a unified government, it gets much more complicated for them, and so they would like to hold onto that. Democrats would very much like to undo that unified government. And that’s what everyone is fighting over.

Georgia: So anyone who lives in a swing state has surely seen their fair share of ads. I remember when I lived in Philadelphia during a presidential election, I couldn’t turn on the TV or the radio or even really walk outside without learning more about the candidates. And today, maybe that’s the case for people living in any state with social media. We see ads all the time.

So Lynn, can you tell us about your research examining the effects of these ads? How do they actually work?

Lynn: I think we start by saying something everybody should come to grips with, persuasion is hard. It’s just hard. So the effects of political advertisements are small in size.

That doesn’t mean they’re small in consequence. They’re just small in size. You’re not swinging an election ten points with your political ads. You’re not swinging it five points at the level of president or senate. Sometimes in these house elections, if you have a bunch of people who no one’s ever heard of, you can get effects that are three to five points.

But for the most part, effects are in the low single digits, and the second thing, they go away really fast. So decay is rapid. Everybody in marketing knows this. This is why Coca-Cola and Pepsi, those brands are so familiar to everybody in the world, and yet they advertise all the time everywhere. Why? Because you don’t cede ground to your opponent or your competitor, and decay is rapid. People forget, so you have to stay top of mind.

So are they persuading people? Yes, a very, very small amount. Are they turning people off? We have not really been able to show any evidence that they are sort of spurning people from the process. Is there a plateau? Maybe. The evidence on that, again, is mixed. These are very hard questions to answer, but the best evidence that we have across all kinds of methods, small effects go away really fast, not demobilizing.

Georgia: And so do you think this will be any different in 2026? Do you have any reason to think ads will operate in a different way than they have in the past?

Lynn: People ask this all the time. “Well, surely now with social media and TikTok, it must all be different.”

Georgia: And AI.

Lynn: And AI, and whatever else. This is like the canonical problem of the social scientist. “But this time it’s different.” And every time I want to say, “But it’s not.” The fundamental thing that makes persuasion hard isn’t anything about the source of the information or the messenger. It’s just hard to get people off of their preexisting beliefs.

And so I guess if you said like, “Take $1,000 and bet if the advertising effects in 2026 and 2028 will look similar to how they’ve looked in the entirety of the 21st century,” I would probably bet all my $1,000 on them looking similar: small effects that decay rapidly.

Georgia: So how much money is spent on advertising in a typical presidential year or in a midterm cycle?

Lynn: A lot. A lot. The easiest way to think about this is whatever that campaign’s budget is, and I know you’re going to look at me and you’re going to say, “Come on, it’s 2026. Nobody is doing this.” But most of the money they raise, they will spend on broadcast television advertising.

Now, not for the lower level races. They’re not advertising on television, especially in a place like California. But at the presidential level, at a gubernatorial and Senate level, a lot of money is being spent on advertising. It costs money to make these ads. It costs money to do the research leading up to making the ads, money to produce them, and then it just costs a lot of money to run ’em.

Georgia: And when you say that the effects are really small, and yet they’re spending a ton of money on it, is it still worth it?

Lynn: Well, in my opinion it is. And again, I’ll say it’s like asking Coke and Pepsi, “Is it still worth it to you to spend money on advertising?” They could stop advertising, but they know they will lose market share to their competitors.

Politics is different. It’s a one-day sale, and you have political parties. Those guys are competing every day, every minute for people’s dollars. So maybe the ubiquity of their advertising has to be more. But we have a one-day sale. And so yeah, I would never tell a candidate to cede that ground to their opponent.

That seems to me a surefire way to not protect against your maximum losses.

That doesn’t mean advertising is the end-all and be-all. It’s not going to solve all your problems. There’s tons of examples of candidates raising boatloads of money, making, by all accounts, very professional ads, running them a lot, and losing spectacularly. It is not sufficient. But especially in a razor-thin margin election, when we think about the effects of ads, it’s not like you run one ad and you get that effect. You have to out-advertise your opponent. It’s the balance of advertising.

So in a razor-thin election, if you can tip the balance of advertising to you, you’re doing yourself a service.

Georgia: So many campaigns rely, of course, on this paid advertising, but a lot also, especially in smaller elections, rely on free media through the news. And so clearly the media play a major role in campaigns, whether as a platform for paid advertising or a space in which candidates compete for free media coverage to disseminate their message.

Stuart, can you tell us about the role that news and other media outlets play in elections and how voters engage with this coverage during elections?

Stuart: I mean, I think the simple, big media effects claim is that most people have limited direct interaction with politicians. Most people have limited direct interaction with any campaign events, limited direct interaction with most policies.

So any national level election, any regional election beyond like your school, these are media elections. So the role that media play is facilitating elections full stop. Most of us would not know anything about an election if we weren’t getting some of it from media, or we weren’t talking to our friend who got some of it from media. That’s how the information is getting around. Elections are essentially media phenomena, and media are the most important component of an election.

But it’s also true that we often overstate the magnitude of media effects in elections. Media content is endogenous, or circular. It’s not journalists in a vacuum creating the content that they’re interested in. It’s journalists working with the content that they’re provided by politicians and parties, and it’s journalists working with what their audiences are interested in too, because of course, journalists need to generate audiences, either for commercial reasons or because as a journalist, your goal is not to write content that nobody will read.

So that means that media content isn’t just taking something the journalist thinks and saying it to someone and then maybe having a brief effect on their attitudes. It’s mostly this complex circular combination of audience interests and journalists’ interests and the nature of media platforms and what parties and politicians provide.

Georgia: So if 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: I mean, 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 like 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: 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.

Stuart: 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.

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

Stuart: 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.

Georgia: 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?

Stuart: Uh, no.

Lynn: 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.

Stuart: 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.

Lynn: 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

Stuart: 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.

Georgia: 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.

Stuart: 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.

Lynn: Or, or I would say politicians maybe in either party. You know, I think the idea now is argument. Everybody wants to make the argument, which is, that sounds like, why is that bad? But it is bad if the idea is that the elements supporting your argument are convenient facts that may or may not actually be based in evidence.

Georgia: So has the American public changed? Like, do we no longer care about the facts? Why would we want arguments? Wouldn’t we want to know the facts?

Lynn: Do people want facts, Stuart?

Stuart: Yeah, I was just going to say—did we ever care about facts? I mean, even when we thought fact-checking mattered, was it the case that the electorate really cared about facts?

Lynn: No, it was about the character of the candidate running the ad. If you ran an ad that really was not based in evidence, that was saying something about your character, your trustworthiness. Voters cared about that. I don’t want to say voters don’t care about that stuff anymore, but I’m going to go back to: the parties are farther apart than they’ve been. They want to build really different worlds on issues that voters care a lot about. Will they trade away trustworthiness and honesty to get a world that they want on abortion, on immigration, on trans policy? Yes, they will, all day long.

Georgia: Yeah, this is actually one way the U.S. really differs from other countries because of the two-party system. Here in the U.S., we really only have two choices, so “if you’re not with me, you’re against me,”—it’s a very “us vs. them” mentality, because there’s only those two options.

In most democracies, there’s actually multiple parties, and so those parties have to overlap, whether it’s on immigration policy or economic policy. There’s usually multiple parties that a person could potentially identify with, at least on some of the issues. And as a result, people aren’t as polarized. The parties aren’t just “us vs. them”, and neither are people. My neighbor might vote for a different party, and I may not hate them because I see some commonality.

Lynn: Well, and there are often coalitions of parties in government, and that makes a difference.

Georgia: Yeah. Okay, so I want to follow up with what you were saying earlier about negativity, Stuart.

So people are more attentive to negative information. Do journalists then also more accurately present information that’s negative? Do they focus more of their attention on the negative?

Stuart: That’s absolutely the case, and there’s a good deal of research showing exactly that. That if we follow the unemployment rate or we follow inflation over time, when things are going worse, they get more coverage than when things are going better.

In some of my own work, my estimate was that a downturn in either of those produces roughly three times as much content as an upturn.

Georgia: And so what’s the relationship then between negativity, misinformation, and accuracy in the media?

Stuart: I think that while there’s a reasonable argument that negativity is an especially useful diagnostic and can be a really effective way for us to learn about what’s going on in the world in a limited amount of time, too much negativity bias, certainly on the media production side, about crime or about inflation or about unemployment or about immigration, can produce a media signal that is inaccurate because it pays no attention to positive outcomes and lots of attention to negative outcomes.

So negativity can, on the one hand, be a way of getting people interested in news content about elections or about anything else, and can be an effective way of conveying information or teaching people about those things because they’re being attentive to that negative content. But too much negativity in a signal over time can produce a systematic bias that actually starts giving people the wrong impression of the world.

And the best example of that is in people’s estimates of how much crime or violence there is in the world. Because crime coverage is always negative, there’s a steady flow of it, and we tend to have a skewed view, then, of how much crime there is, which is partly why even when crime is not a problem, it is a regular feature of election campaigns.

Georgia: So our focus today has really been about the role of the media and advertising in campaigns and elections. But I just want to take a step back and ask you both: how are you feeling about the upcoming elections? Are you concerned about the midterms? Are you concerned about democracy more generally here in the U.S.?

Lynn: Stuart and I have talked about this before, but on the democracy freak-out scale, where 1 is I’m not losing any sleep over it, it’s going to be healthy forever, and 10 is, “Oh my God, I’m moving to Canada.” You know, I’m usually on the lower end.

Among my colleagues, I’m the sort of person saying, like, you know, “Institutions matter, and they’re holding up.” And so I will just say that if that usually means I’m at a 1.5 or a two, I’m up there at a 3.5, which is a huge move for me. I am worried about all of those things surrounding polling places and the accusations that may be made about, quote-unquote, “election fraud,” after these midterm elections.

I am very worried about that. And that’s moved me to almost a four. And then of course, the global implications of who the president of the United States is, you almost just don’t have to spell them out. I do worry about the world order as a U.S. president becomes less and less a leader of that free world.

In some ways, these 2026 congressional elections are the warm-up or the practice round for the 2028 presidential election. And so that is also part of what is moving me on my scale of worry.

If you really just take a tiny step back and look at the things that have been happening, requesting the files of registered voters with complete information, the attempt to build a national voter file. That doesn’t exist, by the way, for people who are listening.

There’s no list of American citizens. And the use of federal agents in capacities that are really not what they’re trained to do. All of these things give me worry that this is all leading up to 2028.

Stuart: I will just note that I’m a five on Lynn’s freakout scale. And it’s because a lot of things that I think I, and maybe most of us, a lot of things that I think we thought were rules or laws turn out to just be norms, or at least they turn out to be rules and laws that we don’t have to follow if we choose to not follow them.

So the rules of politics that I thought we were all operating under seem to be in a state of flux, and that makes the whole situation riskier in my view.

Lynn: What’s an example of one norm that surprised you?

Stuart: Well, an easy media one, and this applies to both political parties, is the total breakdown of White House press conferences.

And that’s not unique to Trump. It occurred during Biden as well. You see this decay in something which I thought was just a regular feature of how we learned what administrations were doing and what they were thinking, and that system is broken.

So now I don’t know… I mean, I think we know that information gets conveyed less effectively now. We know less about what governments are doing.But that goes through the whole political system.

Lynn: When you say decay, you mean that, like, back in the day, every morning, there was a White House press conference, rain or shine, no matter what, and in the last 12 years, sometimes days and days go by. Like, there are fewer of them.

Stuart: Sometimes weeks go by between hearing from the president, certainly, and days and days can go by without there being a White House press conference.

Lynn: And, and do you think that some of this is because they know they can speak directly to voters through social media?

Stuart: It almost certainly is partly about that, that media technology has changed in a way that allows for an administration to get their message out without any of the pushback that they would get from journalists. But that is then a fundamental problem for citizens who need journalists to act as a fourth estate.

It means we all know less about what’s going on in government. And so that’s one example, but there are many other examples, of course, of rules or laws that, well, are just more flexible than I thought they were, and as a consequence, we’re living in a system that just seems much riskier than I thought it was a decade ago.

Georgia: Thank you so much, Lynn Vavreck and Stuart Soroka, for joining us today on Talking Policy.

Lynn: Thanks, Georgia.

Stuart: Thanks for having us.

Georgia: My conversation with Lynn and Stuart highlighted the crucial role that media play in elections. Whether it’s from horse race coverage or negative news, voters learn about candidates and their campaign narratives through the media. Knowing this, candidates, parties, and interest groups spend millions, and they try to persuade voters. But even while persuasion is hard, and most voters’ have their minds made up, polarized parties and close margins in the House and Senate mean that small changes can have monumental effects on the political landscape. As Lynn put it, nothing but everything is at stake in these elections.

On our next episode, we’ll hone in on voters themselves, asking how individuals’ identities shape the ways they form political attitudes and beliefs, and how those preferences translate into behavior at the polls. Please join us right here on Talking Policy as we hit the road and travel to the Inland Empire to talk with Professors Ben Bishin and Jennifer Merolla at the University of California, Riverside.

I’ve been your guest host, Georgia Kernell. Thanks for listening.