In the run-up to the 2024 election, Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada aired an ad emphasizing her willingness to stand apart from her Democratic colleagues. “I won't walk the party line and I never have ... I stood up to my own party to support police officers,” Rosen says in the ad, highlighting a position more commonly associated with Republicans.
Rosen was far from alone in her strategy. As political campaigns spend more than ever to reach voters, candidates experiment with new ways to break through. One increasingly common tactic involves candidates explicitly criticizing their own party or embracing a position associated with the opposition.
In a new paper, Professor Mohamed Hussein of Columbia Business School — along with co-authors Courtney Lee and S. Christian Wheeler of Stanford University — call these messages “party-defiance ads.” Analyzing more than 2,400 Senate campaign ads, they found that the share of candidates using the tactic rose from 17% in 2014 to 28% in 2024. In competitive races, 45% of candidates used them.
Party-defiance ads might seem risky in an era of intense partisanship and deep party loyalties. But Hussein and his colleagues found that they can make candidates seem more electable — and that many voters are willing to accept some political disagreement if they believe it improves their party’s chances of winning.
“The media often paints voters as irrational actors without a lot of nuances in how they respond to elections,” Hussein says. “We found the opposite to be true. Some voters are willing to trade off some level of political disagreement for electability.”
Testing a counterintuitive campaign strategy
Hussein and his co-authors became interested in party-defiance ads after noticing more candidates explicitly advertising their disagreements with their own parties. In a political environment in which party loyalty is powerful, they wondered why candidates would voluntarily call attention to their departures from party orthodoxy, and whether voters would reward or punish them.
To find out, the team began by examining results from 2024 Senate races. Candidates who used party-defiance ads tended to outperform their party’s presidential nominee in the same state, even after the researchers accounted for factors including incumbency, campaign resources, and pre-election popularity.
Digging deeper into this insight, the researchers conducted 16 studies involving more than 11,000 participants. In these studies, participants evaluated candidates who did or did not use party-defiance ads and answered questions about their policy agreement, willingness to support the candidate, and perceptions of the candidate’s electability.
The experiments revealed different dynamics in general elections and primaries. In general elections, voters from the opposing party became more willing to support a candidate who used a party-defiance ad, in part because the candidate’s position more closely matched their own. Meanwhile, voters from the candidate’s own party generally continued to support their nominee despite the disagreement.
Primaries presented a more complicated trade-off. Voters generally preferred candidates whose positions matched their own. But they also cared about whether, in their view, a candidate had a legitimate shot to win the general election, thus helping their party secure more power. A candidate willing to depart from the party line could appear better positioned to attract independents or voters from the other party, offsetting some of the cost of policy disagreement.
The balance shifted with the circumstances. When an election was highly competitive or the stakes of losing were high, voters placed greater emphasis on electability and were more willing to tolerate defiance. In safer, lower-stakes races, agreement mattered more, and defiance could hurt the candidate.
Beyond polarization
For campaigns, the findings suggest that party-defiance ads work best when voters have a clear reason to reward them. A close or high-stakes contest can make broader appeal more valuable, giving voters a reason to accept a candidate they agree with less. In a safe race, that rationale largely disappears.
The opposing candidate matters, too. In general elections, defiance was most likely to attract voters from the other party when they were dissatisfied with their own nominee. “If you’re deciding whether or not to use this strategy, it would be a good idea to take your opponent’s profile into account,” Hussein says, “it matters a great deal.”
Campaigns already appear attuned to some of this calculus: The researchers found party-defiance ads were far more common in competitive races. But some candidates also used the strategy in safer contests, where Hussein says it may have hurt them. Ultimately, he says, the opportunity for campaigns lies in recognizing when voters see breaking with the party as a liability, and when they see it as the price of winning.
