Rediscovering how mid-century conservative talk radio influenced American politics

In this article, authors Engist et al. contended that an expanding network of grassroots conservative talk radio broadcasters in the 1950s and 1960s, who promoted a strong anti-communist, anti-Kennedy, socially conservative agenda, swayed their listeners’ voting behavior, laying the groundwork for modern conservative media and its political influencers. But Engist et al. noted the impact of those earlier broadcasters has long been obscured by a lack of data on mid-century radio programming. In this paper, the authors look at whether exposure to three of the most popular conservative talk radio shows between 1953 and 1972–Carl McIntire’s “Reformation Hour,” Clarence Manion’s “Manion Forum,” and Billy James Hargis’ “Christian Crusade”–affected electoral outcomes in the years they were active and beyond. To do so, Engist et al. needed to study voting patterns before and after the three shows entered local media markets. So they created a novel dataset by compiling and digitizing archival records in the form of radio station lists, as well as radio station financial records, enabling them to map where specific right-wing shows reached listeners county-by-county over time. They then matched these lists to US House of Representatives election data from 1950 to 1970 by using data compiled in the ICPSR study, Electoral Data for Counties in the United States: Presidential and Congressional Races, 1840-1972 (ICPSR 8611). They also mapped those radio station lists to historical census data from IPUMS to control for socioeconomic and demographic effects at the county level on Republican party vote share not due to exposure to conservative talk radio. The authors could then analyze the effect of introducing these radio shows on the vote share of the Republican party.

Engist et al. found that in counties where the conservative shows were newly aired, Republican congressional candidates saw a boost of almost two percentage points on average compared to counties without these shows. Conservative talk radio increased turnout to the polls, expanding the Republican voting base at a time in the South when voters were leaving the Democratic party due to its support for the Voting Rights Act. Their results also help show that even before Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, inflammatory media personalities could substantively swing local and national elections. The authors concluded that radical right-wing voices on AM radio helped reshape conservative ideology and expanded the Republican electorate during pivotal post-war realignments, filling in missing history on talk radio’s political influence.