Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney, Choices in a Chaotic Campaign: Understanding Citizens’ Decisions in the 2020 Election, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 278 pp., $105.00 (hardcover).

 

Reviewed by

Enrique Núñez-Mussa

Michigan State University, USA

 

An enduring question in political communication concerns the extent to which campaign news coverage and strategist-crafted messages help explain why a candidate wins or loses. In a polarized media environment marked by fragmented and partisan news consumption, as in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the challenge is not only to understand how political communication reaches audiences but also how audiences’ political identities shape their relationship to that information.

 

In their fifth book, Choices in a Chaotic Campaign, Kim L. Fridkin and Patrick J. Kenney contribute to this problem by proposing what they call a citizen-centered theory of campaigns, which the authors apply empirically to the 2020 election. Their central argument is that political and psychological predispositions structure how individuals encounter, interpret, and evaluate campaign information.

 

The book complements classic approaches such as agenda-setting and priming by incorporating individual-level characteristics into the analysis of campaign effects. The project aims to provide a comprehensive framework applicable beyond the 2020 election. However, the more detailed its explanation of how campaign events and media coverage affected voting behavior through voters’ psychological predispositions, the more closely the framework becomes tied to the specific conditions of the case under study.

 

A central component of the book’s proposal is the distinction between political (partisanship) and psychological predispositions. While political predispositions directly influence vote choice, psychological predispositions, including authoritarianism, conflict avoidance, conspiratorial thinking, racial resentment, and hostile sexism, shape how individuals process political information from campaigns and the media. As a result, the book assigns a significant role to citizens’ information diets. The findings suggest that variations in news consumption, particularly along ideological lines, affect candidate evaluations, echoing long-standing debates about selective exposure and partisan media.

 

The book’s contribution can be read on two levels. The first concerns its broader theoretical argument: the attempt to offer a perspective centered on citizens’ characteristics and their relationship to the campaign’s unfolding. This perspective assumes that different electoral events and their media coverage may generate dynamic effects on voters, depending on how they are interpreted through different psychological predispositions. Explaining an election at this level enables the incorporation of multiple variables and their interrelationships.

 

At the first level, Fridkin and Kenney’s results advance a position about the continuing relevance of traditional news media in contemporary elections. In a campaign shaped by unpredictable events, the book suggests that mainstream news coverage can still operate as an agent of change by influencing candidate evaluations and shaping voters’ responses to how candidates handle crises. For communication scholars, the book argues the importance of studying campaigns as dynamic communication processes in which messages, media coverage, and audience characteristics are mutually constitutive.

 

At a second level, the book offers a detailed and multicausal explanation of why Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020. Empirically, the analysis is organized around the key milestones and media events that gave the 2020 campaign its “chaotic” character, including the presidential debates, Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis, the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests, and controversies surrounding electoral integrity. Drawing on a three-wave panel survey with a nonprobability sample of 4,311 participants, 1,040 of whom took part in all three waves associated with those milestones, the authors examine how citizens’ evaluations of candidates shift in response to these moments through the interplay between media consumption and individual predispositions.

 

Each empirical chapter can stand on its own as an independent study. The chapters open with a narrative reconstruction of the events and issues under consideration, describing how the candidates performed in those moments. These introductions rely on press coverage and literature of campaign effects. In this way, the interpretation of the results is informed through dialogue with those events.

 

Overall, the results show that differences in news consumption shape candidate evaluations, especially when the ideological orientation of the media consumed is taken into account. At times, however, the relative weight assigned to media exposure and voter predispositions varies across chapters. For example, the chapter on Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis relies on priming theory to explain the effects of journalistic coverage, whereas the chapter devoted to the presidential debates foregrounds those media events and their coverage as key factors in evaluating candidate performance and vote choice. One of the clearest findings in this chapter is that individuals who followed the news closely tended to rate Biden’s debate performance more favorably.

 

Taken together, the findings describe the unique nature of the 2020 campaign. One example is campaign engagement: while negativity initially drew voters’ attention and encouraged them to follow the campaign, prolonged exposure to excessive negativity in the news ultimately led to disengagement from the electoral process. Findings such as this are among the book’s most valuable contributions, especially when they challenge conventional assumptions, embrace causal complexity, and demonstrate the importance of specific campaign moments in shaping citizens’ attitudes toward the candidates. For instance, the press coverage of Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis increased concern about the virus among individuals with stronger authoritarian tendencies, who were generally closer to Trump, and among those inclined to avoid conflict, who tended to be closer to Biden.

The book’s framework reflects an active model of information seeking that does not fully capture contemporary patterns of media use. Recent research on incidental exposure (Boczkowski et al., 2018), news avoidance (Robertson, 2025), and news produced by influencers and content creators (Newman et al., 2025) suggests that citizens often encounter political information in less intentional and more algorithmically mediated ways. Therefore, future applications of this citizen-centered theory would benefit from a more explicit engagement with the changing infrastructures through which citizens encounter political information, including the role of digital platforms, algorithmic curation, and influencers in shaping information environments. Likewise, subsequent research should distinguish between campaign communications from candidates and the press’s selection and framing of that information. This distinction will offer deeper insights into citizens’ news diets and their ultimate impact on voting.

 

The book will be useful for scholars and students in political communication, campaign studies, and media effects research, as well as for those interested in the relationship between media environments and democratic processes. It provides an empirical framework that advances the argument that media effects can be thoroughly understood by placing citizens’ predispositions, media environments, and campaign events in sustained analytical relation. While different contexts can be studied using the citizen-centered theory of campaigns, its application requires careful attention to local media systems, salient issues, and the political and social circumstances that shape audience predispositions. Therefore, the explanatory value of variables such as racial resentment or hostile sexism may differ across countries, campaigns, and political moments, depending on their prominence in public debate.

 

 

References

 

Boczkowski, P. J., Mitchelstein, E., & Matassi, M. (2018). “News comes across when I’m in a moment of leisure”: Understanding the practices of incidental news consumption on social media. New Media & Society, 20(10), 3523–3539. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817750396

 

Newman, N., Ross Arguedas, A., Mukherjee, M., & Fletcher, R. (2025). Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news-creators-influencers/2025/mapping-news-creators-and-influencers-social-and-video-networks

 

Robertson, C. T. (2025). People are turning away from the news. Here’s why it may be happening. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/news/people-are-turning-away-news-heres-why-it-may-be-happening

 

 

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https://doi.org/10.65476/jrvfpe43