Harnessing the Power of Emotions: How Women of Color Use Emotional Appeals in Their Campaign Messages

Women of color are running for political office at higher rates in recent U.S. elections, and existing scholarship is only starting to investigate the communication strategies of women of color and how voters respond to their campaign messages. We shed light on how women of color use emotions in campaign messages and how voters respond to these emotional appeals. We employ an analysis of campaign advertising data across multiple election years from the Wesleyan Media Project to show that both white women and women of color rely heavily on enthusiasm in their campaign messages, even though white women use anger appeals at higher rates than women of color. We complement these results with an original survey-based experiment to examine how emotional appeals affect voting preferences for women of color candidates. Our results suggest that when women of color employ positive emotions, the effects of these messages do not differ when compared to positive emotions from white women. We also find that positive emotions in messages are especially beneficial for Black women candidates compared to negative emotions in messages. These results offer insights into how women of color can build effective communication strategies to broaden their representation in U.S. decision-making bodies.