Stuff You Should Consume - May 18, 2022

Welcome to this week’s edition of “Stuff You Should Consume,”— a weekly compilation of interesting political content for Message Box readers.

“The Default Debate: A Guide for Advocates” by Navigator Research

“Bad Politics, Bad Policies: Election Denial in 2023” by States United Action

Our research also shows that Election Deniers did not have a direct effect on voter turnout in these races, suggesting that the Election Denier penalty was largely driven by vote-switching. Voters who otherwise would have voted for the Republican candidate instead voted for the Democrat when the Republican was an Election Denier. (Note: In 2022, Election Denier statewide candidates were all running on the Republican ticket; not all Republicans running were Election Deniers.)   

These findings square with polling that States United conducted just before the election in key states. A plurality of voters (43 percent) across Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin reported that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who believed the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump

“Former GOP Strategist Tim Miller, Dan Pfeiffer Analyze GOP Primary Ads” Crooked Media

“Democrats may only have themselves to blame for Biden’s grim approval ratings” by Holly Otterbein, Politico (Read the whole Way to Win report HERE)

An analysis put together by the organization, which was first shared with POLITICO, looked at advertising in the 2022 midterms. It found that Republicans spent $135 million on broadcast ads in House and Senate races — nearly one-third of their total costs on commercials — attacking Biden.

At the same time, few Democrats aired ads promoting Biden’s legislative accomplishments, according to the Way to Win report. Democrats also only forked over about $20 million for ads that mentioned former President Donald Trump, less than 4 percent of their total spending on spots. And some of those commercials actually talked about Trump in a positive or neutral light.

“Watching partisan media doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a strong partisan” by Jessica Grose, New York Times

A new study available in preprint from Joshua Kalla, an assistant professor of political science at Yale, and David Broockman, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, complicates those assumptions. It shows that cable news viewers aren’t as old, as partisan or as set in their beliefs as the stereotypes may depict.

Kalla and Broockman found that “approximately 15 percent of Americans watch an average of eight hours or more of MSNBC, CNN or Fox News per month,” which, for starters, is a fair amount of cable news. They also found that “roughly half of these networks’ audiences are either not primary voters or not registered with the party aligned with that news source” and that “young adults make up a meaningful portion” of partisan media outlets’ audience, indicating that, despite cord cutting, cable news viewing “will likely remain substantial in the years to come.”