The Submerged Campaign

• In Event: US Interest Group Tactics, Framing, and Influence

Abstract

The twin rulings in Citizens United v. FEC and SpeechNow v. FEC had a seismic effect on American elections. These rulings created an entirely new vehicle for outside spending in elections – the “super PAC” – empowering these groups to raise and spend money at levels far beyond what candidates and parties are legally permitted to. This bifurcation in campaign finance regulation between candidates and parties on the one hand, and outside spending groups on the other, has prompted a concurrent bifurcation in campaign strategy. To maintain message and image control in the face of vast, legally unrestricted campaign spending by outside interests, candidates and parties have developed a suite of strategies, alongside traditional campaign methods, that allow these actors to compensate for their legal disadvantages while remaining largely obscured from public view. This paper explores these strategies, examining the growth and usage of "redboxing" and B-Roll or image provision by candidates and parties in congressional elections from 2018-2022. Though currently unappreciated by political scientists, these strategies have become a ubiquitous feature of American elections, with hundreds of candidates in each cycle attempting to bypass campaign finance laws and solicit huge sums of outside spending on their behalf. I further show that both strategies are broadly effective in prompting super PAC-produced advertising that closely mirrors the candidate or party’s specific instructions, or that employs the visual resources provided by these actors. This work thereby represents the first quantitative scholarly evidence of political parties directly orchestrating the activities of non-party actors.

Author

• Gabriel Foy-Sutherland, University of Chicago