To moderate, or not to moderate: Strategic domain sharing by congressional campaigns

Maggie Macdonald; Megan A. Brown; Joshua A. Tucker; Jonathan Nagler

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2025.102907

To moderate, or not to moderate: Strategic domain sharing by congressional campaigns

Maggie Macdonald, Megan A. Brown, Joshua A. Tucker, Jonathan Nagler

Political Science

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

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.

Original language	English
Article number	102907
Journal	Electoral Studies
Volume	95
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2025.102907
State	Published - Jun 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2025

Funding

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editor for their constructive, helpful comments. We thank Rachel Connolly for data assistance. We thank Michael Crespin and Scott Basinger for comments at MPSA 2021 and APSA 2021, respectively, as well as engaged audience members; we also thank members of the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University for many rounds of feedback. We gratefully acknowledge that the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University is supported by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Siegel Family Endowment. This work was supported in part through the NYU IT High Performance Computing resources, services, and staff expertise.

Funders	Funder number
Charles Koch Foundation
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Siegel Family Endowment
Craig Newmark Philanthropies
Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University

Keywords

Congressional campaigns
Elite behavior
Ideology
Partisanship
Social media

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Political Science and International Relations

Access to Document

10.1016/j.electstud.2025.102907

Cite this

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To moderate, or not to moderate: Strategic domain sharing by congressional campaigns

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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