Mobilizing Minority Groups: The Impact of Campaign Appeals.

Political scientists are currently paying significant attention to the impact of voter mobilization. They have mostly concentrated on the mode of mobilization and have paid less attention to the content of these campaign appeals. We investigate whether campaign appeals can mobilize and persuade ethnic minorities, in particular Latinos and African-Americans. The effects of mobilization may be more prevalent among these groups because they are less participatory than the voting population as a whole. We measure different aspects of campaign advertising, such as the language of the ad, whether minorities are depicted, and whether the ad speaks to issues salient to the group. These advertising data are then linked to survey data on voter turnout and vote choice. We find that Spanish-language ads do affect the vote choice and turnout of Latinos, but that issue content (e.g., civil rights or immigration) matters less. The paper also lays out a useful empirical strategy for investigating how subsets of the American electorate respond to specific campaign themes, a question that will become even more important if campaigns continue to engage in segmentation and microtargeting. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]