Offline and Online Rallies in the 2024 Presidential Campaign in Mexico

And the final speaker in this full session at IAMCR 2024 is Dorismilda Flores-Márquez, who shifts our focus to the presidential campaign in Mexico. This was the first time the election was a contest between two women candidates – a major step in the country.

The interest here is in the structuring of political rallies in a hybride media context. These are predominantly face-to-face activities, but also produced for mainstream and social media coverage, and the logics of these hybrid media contexts now shape their structure and designs.

The project explored this through ethnography and grounded theory; it performed participant observation on-site and online, in the cities of Guadalajara, Puebla, and Léon, and focussed on the two major candidates Claudia Sheinbaum (who won the election) and Xóchitl Gálvez. Such observational work – conducted by three different scholars – was not without its problems; it needed to respond quickly to unexpected announcements of such rallies, work within the oppressive security conditions at each location, and conduct a unified analysis of observations across the researchers.

Overall, 11 rallies were observed, but only three of these were by Gálvez; this represents the differing resourcing of these campaigns, as well as their different regional campaigning emphases. Key insights to date include an articulation between on-site rallies and digital media coverage; they are live-streamed both professionally and by ordinary participants. Both on-site and online activities help to amplify the rallies’ message and galvanise supporters; the central focus is not one convincing undecided voters.

Mainstream media coverage is generally homogeneous; it reproduces rally information and candidate statements, but provides no information about ordinary participants other than photos from the rallies. This reflects the construction of these rallies as media events, which attempt to portray high social expectation and resonance for the candidates.