This week took advantage of another opportunity: the Senate Judiciary Committee’s review of President Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to sit on the Supreme Court. As members of that committee, both Hawley and Cruz have since taken the opportunity to turn the light on themselves.
To be clear, this is a fundamental component of being a national politician; You will not be elected to the Senate without having a healthy heart bound to wear eyeballs. Of course, it is also the case that the senators nominated and asked the Supreme Court. But if you’ve paid any attention to the Jackson nomination, you’ve probably heard something about Hawley and Cruz’s lines of argument, and less about sense. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) Or John Cornyn (R-) Tex.).
Hawley and Cruz took care of it. In the last two weeks, they have been featured in 124 15-second segments on Fox News or Fox Business, about three times as often as Cornyn and Sasse. That needs some trying.
It made me wonder how effective this is. We know senators like Cruz, Hawley, and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) Are capable of generating sound bites that are played on Fox or covered in conservative media, but what good is that? Does it lead, for example, to more people contributing to their campaigns?
To answer this question, I drew data on television recordings (using GDLT analysis of Internet archive closed-captioning data) and on campaign contributions in 2021 for 12 senators. These senators were chosen to contrast a media-hungry senator with a more sensitive one, with the two coming from the same party to better evaluate the relative campaign contributions.
What emerged was not what I expected. Senators who like cable news have been mentioned on the television almost three times as often over the last year as those who are not constantly on the television – but the latter group has raised more money. That pattern holds even if you only look at Fox News and Fox Business mentions and if you only look at individual donors – the kind of donors who are expected to see one on Fox and then make a contribution.
Of course, there is one important difference between these senators: not all of them are re-elected for this year. It is to be expected that those on the ballot paper in November will collect more enthusiastic money than those who are not open until 2026, for instance.
If we overlap when senators oppose re-election, the picture changes – but not as much as you might expect. Senators running for re-election this year have actually pulled in a lot more money. But in the pool of those who are not on the ballot in November, the difference between the cable messages and those who are not is not as great as you might expect.
The senators who are constantly mentioned on TV will be mentioned on average about 700 times more in 2021 than those who are not often mentioned on TV. They have also raised, on average, about $ 1.5 million more – meaning their cable news listings will each be about $ 2,000 each. If it was a Fox News nomination, the benefit was about $ 3,000 in individual contributions on average.
These are small numbers and subjective decisions, for sure. There is also correlation without proven cause; Did Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) draw less money because he is not as much on Ted Cruz as Ted Cruz or because he has heard of Bill Hagerty? (No insult to the good senator, of course.) Nor is that necessarily the metric that Cruz and Hawley measure. Everyone wants Fox News attention, not just because of money, but because they have designs at higher offices, and the path to the Republican presidential nomination runs through Fox’s Studios.
And, of course, because they like to position themselves at the center of attention. If you’re curious, Cruz and Hawley were mentioned on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and Fox Business in about 12,000 15-second segments last year, more than three times as often as the six less attention-hungry senators combined above .
They raised a quarter as much money.
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