Document Type

Student Journal Publication

Semester of Graduation

Spring 2026

Abstract

This research analyzes the methods and terminology employed by men and women candidates when they talk about their political endorsements in strategic campaign communication. While existing literature addresses topics such as educating uninformed voters, the influence of endorsements in political campaigns, messaging ethics, celebrity endorsements, and the correlation between money and endorsements, analyses of gender differences in the use and types of endorsements remain underdeveloped. We argue that women candidates, due to the unique vulnerabilities they face in campaigns (Bauer 2015; Lazarus and Steigerwaltz 2018), will be more likely than men to highlight their endorsements in campaign ads. We record the types of endorsements candidates emphasize in a unique dataset of 68,000 campaign ad transcripts from 2010 through 2020 based on data from the Wesleyan Media Project. We identified whether candidates emphasized endorsements in their ads, cataloging where the endorsement came from, such as newspapers, political leaders, or organizations. For endorsements from organizations, this study codes endorsing organizations as masculine, feminine, or gender-neutral. Organizations such as Planned Parenthood, pro-life/Right to Life groups, and teachers’ associations are coded as feminine, while law enforcement, firefighters, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) are coded as masculine. Party organizations are coded as gender-neutral.


With our exhaustive dataset, we compared how women and men use endorsements in their strategic messages. We analyzed both the frequency and strategic pairing of masculine and feminine endorsements within a candidate’s set of campaign ads. Our results suggest that women candidates may balance endorsements across gender-coded organizations to appeal to broader voter coalitions. These results are consequential because they show the strategic choices women candidates make when crafting their campaign messages. Future research will extend this analysis to the 2024 election cycle, focusing on political variation between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a particularly notable race given Vice President Harris’s late entry into the campaign.

Awardee Name

Eva Carter

Academic Major

Political Science

Project Mentor

Nichole Bauer

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