The Selling of Experience in the 2022 Congressional Elections

Abstract

Past experience in elective office has always been the best predictor of congressional candidate success in elections. These “quality” candidates come into elections with experience fundraising, name recognition, and general knowledge about how to run a successful campaign. Yet, recent congressional elections have seen an increase in the electoral success of inexperienced candidates. As past experience in office may no longer be valued as it once was, how are these experienced candidates marketing themselves to voters? Are they still leaning into their past experience in elected office or are they more likely to emphasize other occupations and experiences? We expect candidates brand themselves, emphasizing different experiences, based on the type of election they are in and who they are running against. In order to test these expectations, this paper examines all available biography pages of experienced candidates who ran in congressional primaries in 2022. We find clear partisan differences in what candidates past occupational backgrounds they highlight. We find mixed evidence that decisions about what occupations to emphasize vary based on electoral dynamics.

Keywords:

• Congressional elections
• candidate experience
• occupation presentation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Sarah Zhang for excellent research assistance. We are also grateful for helpful comments and feedback from the editor and three anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For comparison, McDonald, Porter, and Treul (2020) found websites for 83% of candidates in the 2018 primary election.

2 For reference, in our dataset there are 313 Democrats and 299 Republicans.

3 Not all candidates have four individual occupations in our dataset. These candidates are placed into the bucket for their first occupation listed and excluded otherwise, which is denoted by the grey bar at the top of the chart.

4 These include activist, doctor/healthcare professional, farmer/rancher, journalist, judge (non-elected), minister, and teacher/educator.

5 We exclude categories that have fewer than 20 candidates from either party who have held that occupation.

6 Predicted probabilities are calculated using an observed values approach.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colin R. Case

Colin R. Case is a PhD candidate at the at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sarah A. Treul

Sarah A. Treul is a Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.