Little is known about why elected officials choose to get involved in presidential nomination struggles. Recent research argues that elected officials have a collective incentive to nominate an electorally viable and ideologically unifying candidate. Yet, elected officials must balance these collective incentives with their own personal considerations (e.g., reelection motives, policy interests, ambition, ideology) that may either foster or inhibit their ability to act on their collective desire to nominate viable, ideologically unifying candidates. Further, this research then determines the extent to which elected officials are rewarded-or punished- for getting involved during the presidential nomination process. In particular, interparty differences between the Republican and Democratic coalitions predict that Republicans, but not Democrats, will be rewarded for attempting to lead intraparty nomination struggles. Finally, this research links the aggregate-level findings that endorsements from elected officials are important determinants of nomination outcomes to the individual level by arguing that elected officials' endorsements mobilize their constituents to get involved in politics. In particular, as the mobilization process targets those who are already likely to participate in the first place, endorsements during presidential primaries leads to differential participation in politics. In sum, this research provides individual level foundations for the causes and consequences of congressional endorsements in presidential nomination contests.

In this paper, I discuss the area of issue-ownership as it applies to the 2016 presidential primaries. The central discussion of the paper features a tradeoff between viability and issues in primary contests. Viability, which is presented through The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform by Marty Cohen et al. as party elites deciding who should be the nominee, and issues that are salient to primary voters, and thus candidates, which I present as the more likely reason for how nominees are selected. Using a combination of national polls and analysis of candidates’ Twitter feeds, I hope to compare data on who primary and caucus voters support and which issues are important to them. The hypothesis is simple: if candidates stake claims on issues that voters care about and frequently remind voters of that via Twitter, they will receive a bump in the polls.

The study of political communication is an old and diverse field, and the media has been proven to have an effect on their readers. The narratives that they create in their reporting can be as damning as they can be auspicious. Therefore, the study of media and how they frame certain events is as important as it has ever been. The democratic primaries in 2016 were certainly an interesting event. Hillary Clinton, the apparent nominee of the party, faced off against Bernie Sanders, who, in America, is something as unusual as a democratic socialist. How were these two polar opposites framed? To find out, a framing analysis was made on New York Times and Washington Post, two of the largest newspapers in the US. The analysis was built around four “events” that were deemed important in the election. 195 articles were analyzed. The methods that were used were both quantitative and qualitative, and the theories of framing (how the media depicts the election) and agenda-setting (what the media deems to be important) were applied. The results showed that the two newspapers did not differentiate all that much from each other, except for a few percent in certain aspects. All in all, the narrative was obvious. Clinton was the candidate that would go on to win the nomination. She was also the most suitable candidate. Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, was framed as the loser and as unsuitable. Though he was consistently framed as having more integrity than his opponent. Clinton was also the candidate that had the biggest focus on her. This was true for all of the events, and in both newspapers. The implications of the study are twofold. First, Sanders was consistently painted in a negative light, which created an undesirable narrative and gave him negative momentum. Secondly, the virtual duplication of the narratives in New York Times and Washington Post suggests that there was some kind of consensus. Either Clinton really was the obvious nominee for the party, or the media hampered Sanders chances to clinch the nomination by depicting him in a negative manner.