The Consequences of Political Rhetoric in the 2020 US Presidential Election

The next paper in this AoIR 2022 session is by my predecessor as AoIR president, the excellent Jennifer Stromer-Galley. Her focus is on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Such leadership communication matters, and actively shapes the public understanding of politics – as the 6 January 2021 coup attempt at the US Capitol clearly shows.

Such language constructs social imaginaries – and in the case of Democrat and Republican politicians, perhaps now multiple mutually exclusive social imaginaries – that are constitutive of the socio-communicative realities their voters believe they live in. Jenny’s work studies this through the long-standing Illuminating project.

The 2020 US election was further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, resulting in a greater use of mail-in voting and ballot drop-off boxes; this is uncharacteristic for US elections, and thus opened up the potential for arguments attacking the validity of the electoral process. On social media, Trump attacked mail-in ballots as early as April 2020, trying to delegitimise the voting process; while his TV ads at the same time mainly focussed on Joe Biden’s fitness for the presidency.

In this, his early ad expenditure was relatively low – only $28,000 in May 2022, for example. And there was a strange disconnect: while railing against mail-in ballots; the Trump campaign promoted the use of absentee ballots, especially in Florida. Ad targetting was also complicated; while the Facebook Ad Library provides some micro-targetting information, most campaigns use other targetting approaches that this does not cover in the same way.

Biden’s advertising, on the other hand, advocated for people to vote in whatever way they saw fit; they did not challenge the electoral process, and indeed countered Trump’s attacks on the process. He underscored the right of people to vote in whatever way possible, and in this way followed the normative way in which candidates are expected to act in an election. The difference is stark, and 6 January shows the ultimate consequences of such differences.