Candidate Party, Gender, and the Face Mask as a Political Symbol in Campaign Advertisements

During the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask became politicized in the United States, with politicians and reporters employing competing public safety and civil liberties frames in discussions of masking. In this research, we argue that political candidates’ decisions to speak about and depict mask-wearing in their political advertising were strategic, depending on both the candidate’s party and gender. We examine political ads run on Facebook and on television by federal candidates during the 2020 U.S. campaigns. We use Amazon’s deep learning algorithms for PPE (personal protective equipment) detection. We extract the text and audio of each ad to identify mentions of masks and use an à la Carte embedding regression model to understand how the usage of the term mask differs across covariates. We find that images of masks are much more common than mentions of masks, that there are significant partisan, but not gender, differences in the use of masks, and that there are both partisan and gender differences in the way that candidates speak about masking. This research demonstrates the utility of a novel approach to collecting data. It also suggests that public health measures can become partisan in a campaign environment, with the potential to polarize both the views and behaviors of Democrats and Republicans.