Conservatives and party labels

This chapter explores how the partisan and ideological cues that Republican congressional candidates employ in their televised political advertising have evolved over the past decade. It tests the hypothesis that the rise of the Tea Party has helped to create an identifiable new breed of Republican candidate for the U.S. Congress. Drawing upon content analysis of candidates’ TV ads from 2006 to 2014 conducted by the Wisconsin Advertising Project and the Wesleyan Media Project, the evidence presented here suggests that, while GOP candidates’ use of partisan rhetoric has increased modestly in recent years, Tea Party-endorsed Republicans actually eschewed the conservative moniker in favor of attacks on the liberal label. This finding, in particular, serves to reinforce the narrative that the Tea Party was less of a conservative movement than it was a movement defined first and foremost by its opposition to liberalism. Finally, this chapter sketches an agenda for future research on partisan labels and calls specifically for additional work to be conducted on how the public gives meaning to these symbols and their effects on the process of politics.