Talk Radio Can Also Be A Political Springboard

By Author: FIRELEAVES
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Recent evidence suggests that talk radio is more helpful to conservatives than to liberals, and to Republicans than to Democrats. The Times Mirror survey of summer 1993 found that Republicans are twice as likely to listen as Democrats, and conservatives are more likely to listen than liberals. Half of all conservatives reported listening regularly or sometimes.

As the 1994 campaign approached, evidence was mounting that talk radio was a medium of and for but not by conservatives. In the Cartier Replica exit polls of the 1994 election, 25 percent of Republicans said they had listened to talk radio. Republican pollster Frank Luntz reports that those who listened to ten or more hours voted Republican in 1994 by a ratio of 3 to 1, 63 yet according to Times Mirror, the hosts are about as likely to identify themselves as liberals as they are to call themselves conservatives. In the wake of the November 1994 elections, the freshman Republican members of Congress named Rush Limbaugh an honorary member. The New York Times called Limbaugh "an electronic ...
... precinct captain for Republicans in Congress."

Talk radio can also be a political springboard. New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman was a part-time radio call-in host before successfully running for governor, while Maryland's governor Donald Schaefer hosted a weekly show.

According to the Times Mirror survey, listeners believe that these shows offer a diversity of points of view. Hosts acknowledge, however, that conservatives and those angry about government are overrepresented.

With what effect? Although a U.S. News & World Report poll in summer 1993 found that more of Limbaugh's listeners say they listen for entertainment (28%) than for information (1%) or for opinion (10%), talk radio's ability to activate partisans on a topic of interest to them has been documented. For example, in February 1994, the executive director of the Home School Legal Defense Association concluded that a provision in a piece of education legislation was a threat to home scholars. He got on the phone to talk radio hosts around the country, reaching Replica Cartier Roadster almost fifty of them. Within hours, Congress was flooded with cards, calls, and faxes. A week and a half later, the offending provision had been stripped from the bill by a vote of 422 to 1.

In 1989, talk radio was also given credit for mobilizing the public against a recommended congressional pay hike. Radio listeners also created pressure against the confirmation of Clinton's attorney general nominee Zoe Baird and fueled opposition to his proposed ban on discrimination against gays in the military.