A Cri de Coeur for Political Marketing Research in U.S. Midterm and Off-Year Elections

A Democratic candidate for governor of Pennsylvania trounces an opponent who played a central role in attempts to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results. All the election deniers running for secretary of state in key battleground states are sent packing. The Republicans wrest control of the House, but, reversing the near-universal tendency for the president’s party to lose more than 25 House Seats and 4 Senate seats, the Democrats lose just a handful of seats in the House and pick up a seat in the Senate. Abortion plays an outsized role in the election, contributing to the unexpected victory of many Congressional candidates. All these events occurred in the 2022 U.S. midterm election and their effects were important, in some cases politically seismic. As scholars of political marketing, we want to understand the role marketing processes played in the trajectory of these elections. How did candidates brand themselves? What were the psychological processes by which this occurred? What role did media play in persuading voters and how does this comport with theory? What broader implications can we draw about normative democratic theory? Well, if past scholarship in our field is any guide, the answers to these questions will come in a trickle, if they come at all. Campaigns for U.S. midterm Congressional elections, as well as off-year state races and the plethora of local and issue referenda elections, get short shrift in our field, veritable specks of scholarly dust in comparison to the cyclonic sweep of research on the presidential election (Patterson 1993; Perloff 2022). It is a glaring omission. In 2022, approximately $3 billion was spent on more than 4 million broadcast television ads for national and gubernatorial races (Wesleyan Media Project 2022). More broadly, midterm elections, as Busch and Pitney (2021) observed, “are the political equivalent of Festivus: an occasion for the airing of grievances” (p. 153). They have historically flipped control of the legislative chambers to the party out of power and communicated, sometimes quite bluntly, voters’ dissatisfaction with the powers-that-be. Midterm elections can have cataclysmic effects. The 1994 election gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in more than 40 years, flipped the Clinton agenda on its head with a resounding rejection of health care reform, and was organized around the philosophically conservative, heavily promoted “Contract with America” branded message. Political marketing was obviously a centerpiece in 1994, and the electoral outcome pushed Clinton to triangulate his marketing, moving more to the center in the 1996 presidential contest. Similarly, the 2010 election gave the out-of-power Republicans a major increase in Congressional seats, with marketing and message development focusing around economic problems, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and the rise of the conservative and controversially populist Tea Party movement. More generally, midterm elections can shape the political agenda, influencing the policy direction leaders take and the focus of the presidential election. They can upend the demographic and political makeup of Congress, as 2018 did with a record 36 women representatives winning House seats. They offer marketing lessons politicians apply to other elections, such as the quadrennial presidential contest, suggesting ways to rebrand issues, as well as elevating personalities (as with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2018).