Invoking Identity? Partisan Polarization in Discussions of Race, Racism, and Gender in 2022 Midterm Advertising in the U.S.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Report Publish Date: June 2024
This article examines American’s political polarization, including on issues related to health care policy and the social determinants of health, through the lens of campaign advertising for federal offices during the 2022 midterm elections.
Primary Takeaways
The authors say many ads, particularly from Republican sources, focused on issues that are implicitly about race, such as criminal justice and immigration. Few ads focused on the broad topics of racism and racial injustice.
The researchers also found that Democrats focused many ads on messages about gender, particularly abortion. The advertising clearly connected abortion restrictions to potential impacts on public health. In other words, the creators of Democratic ads focused more on gender as it relates to policy than on race, even just a few years after the racial reckoning of 2020.
Overview and Objectives
The ways that political candidates and their proponents address issues related to race in campaign ads can have long-term effects on how the public views those issues and on policies that impact population health. Political ads can also deepen polarization between Democrats and Republicans. Earlier research has found that ads “do not even need to be explicitly about race or gender appeals, or health, to have an influence on support for health-relevant policies,” the authors of this study point out.
The researchers wanted to see how race and gender were discussed in political ads during the 2022 midterms.
Hypothesis or Approach
The researchers used election advertising data from the Wesleyan Media Project. Trained undergraduate research assistants classified ad content using “race and gender textual keywords.”
Then the researchers calculated what proportion of political ads were related to race or gender and how much each party discussed each issue, compared to the other party.
How This Influences Change
The researchers say that their findings on discussions of gender in the ads show that political ads can clearly show how policy impacts population health.
“Given the clear and dire consequences of racial disparities in health outcomes for the lived experiences of people of color,” they write, “it is imperative to better understand how to reinforce an understanding of this reality to the mass public.”
Research: Go Deeper
Context: Media messaging matters for public opinion and policy, and analyzing patterns of campaign strategy can provide important windows into policy priorities.
Methods: The authors used content analysis supplemented with keyword-based text analysis to assess the volume, proportion, and distribution of media attention to race-related issues in comparison to gender-related issues during the general election period of the 2022 midterm campaigns for federal office in the United States.
Findings: Race-related mentions in campaign advertising were overwhelmingly focused on crime and law and order, with very little attention to racism, racial injustice, and the structural barriers that lead to widespread inequities. In stark contrast to mentions of gender, racial appeals were less identity focused and were competitively contested between the parties in their messaging, but they were much more likely to be led by Republicans.
Conclusions: The results suggest that discussions of race and gender were highly polarized, with consequences for public understanding of and belief in disparities and policies important to population health.
Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, Vol. 49, No. 3, June 2024. DOI 10.1215/03616878-11066296
Research Team
This study and report were conducted and created by the following people.
- Erika Franklin Fowler
- Steven T. Moore
- Breeze Floyd
- Jielu Yao
- Markus Neumann
- Neil A. Lewis Jr.
- Jeff Niederdeppe
- Sarah E. Gollust
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