Issue Attention in Congressional Primary Elections

ABSTRACT

Prominent theories of campaign issue strategy provide three main perspectives candidates can adopt when deciding what issues to discuss: (1) issues voters view their party as “owning”, (2) “trespassing” onto issues that the other party owns, and (3) addressing timely and salient issues (e.g., “wave riding”). This paper examines candidate issue messaging strategies in congressional primary campaigns. By isolating party‐owned issues and issue trespassing from wave riding, a distinction not typically made in previous literature, we explore how candidate characteristics and electoral conditions influence the use of these three strategies in primary elections. Leveraging a dataset of campaign website issue platforms for nearly all congressional candidates running in primary elections from 2018 to 2022, we find that incumbent candidates dedicate relatively more of their campaign platform to party‐owned and opposing party‐owned issues compared to challengers. Further, we find that candidates who must appeal to a partisan primary electorate spend relatively less time engaging in issue trespassing, but discuss salient, wave riding issues more. Overall, our results contribute to the growing body of literature on issue messaging strategies and primary elections.