Revisiting the influence of campaign tone on turnout in Senate elections

Examining the influence of campaign tone on individual turnout in the 1990 U.S. Senate elections, this note revisits Kahn and Kenney's conclusion that the political profile of citizens (as based on partisanship, level of political interest, and level of political expertise) conditions their responsiveness. Implementing an appropriate modeling strategy for making group comparisons, our analyses do not provide statistical support for the conditional effects that they highlight. More generally, our results do reinforce Kahn and Kenney's finding that negativity in tone of news coverage mobilizes citizens, but they do not reveal significant turnout influence for television advertising tone.