Elite & Mass Political Behavior

We test whether candidates move to the extremes before a primary but then return to the center for the general election to appeal to the different preferences of each electorate. Incumbents are now more vulnerable to primary challenges than ever as social media offers a viable pathway for fundraising and messaging for challengers, while homogeneity of districts has reduced general election competitiveness. To assess candidates’ ideological trajectories, we estimate the messaging ideology of 2020 congressional campaigns before and after their primaries using a homophily-based measure of domains shared on Twitter. This method provides temporally granular data to observe changes in communication within a single election campaign cycle. We find suggestive evidence that incumbents in safe seats moved towards the extreme before their primaries and back towards the center for the general election, but only when threatened by a well-funded primary challenge.

Social media is used by millions of Americans to access news and politics. Yet there are no studies, to date, examining whether these behaviors systematically vary for those whose political incorporation process is distinct from those in the majority. We fill this void by examining how Latino online political activity compares to that of white Americans and the role of language in Latinos’ online political engagement. We hypothesize that Latino online political activity is comparable to whites. Moreover, given media reports suggesting that greater quantities of political misinformation are circulating on Spanish versus English-language social media, we expect reliance on Spanish-language social media for news predicts beliefs in inaccurate political narratives. Our survey findings, which we believe to be the largest original survey of the online political activity of Latinos and whites, reveal support for these expectations. Latino social media political activity, as measured by sharing/viewing news, talking about politics, and following politicians, is comparable to whites, both in self-reported and digital trace data. Latinos also turned to social media for news about COVID-19 more often than did whites. Finally, Latinos relying on Spanish-language social media usage for news predicts beliefs in election fraud in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election.