Stump Speeches Research Articles

Se Habla Español: Spanish-Language Appeals and Candidate Evaluations in the United States

Political candidates use Spanish-language appeals in efforts to increase their support among Hispanic voters. We argue that candidates, Hispanic or not, can use Spanish to signal closeness to Hispanics and posit that the effectiveness of these appeals is conditional on proficiency. To test this, we run two experiments where participants listen to an audio clip of a hypothetical candidate’s stump speech. We vary the ethnicity of the candidate (Anglo or Hispanic) and the language of the speech (English, non-native Spanish, and native-like Spanish). We find that Hispanic support for the Anglo and Hispanic candidates is higher in the native-like Spanish condition compared with the English-only condition. Relative to the English condition, non-native Spanish does not increase support for the Anglo candidate, but it decreases support for the Hispanic candidate. We find mixed effects for Anglo participants. Our results suggest that candidates can effectively appeal to Hispanic voters using Spanish-language messages.

The War of Words: The Electoral Language of British Elections, 1880–1914, by Luke Blaxill

Preceded by a series of innovative articles, Luke Blaxill’s debut monograph is a remarkable achievement. Blaxill invites readers both to reassess the electoral politics of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and—through a corpus linguistics-based approach to the stump speeches delivered at nine general elections—to consider the utility of digital techniques to historical analysis and explanation. The book will be a must-read for those interested in modern British politics, but, beyond representing a dynamic intervention in its immediate field, it will also stimulate welcome debate about historical methods and inspire future research. Blaxill positions his work as a ‘methodological experiment’ (p. 12), posing questions about the capacity of quantification to provide and articulate evidence and seeking to answer them by reference to a field where the historiography is mature (but which also, in several cases, needs reinvigorating). Given the nature of this testing ground, the book is interested in questions which have long preoccupied political historians, yet it occupies a distinctive position within the scholarship. Blaxill contends that the emphasis on deep readings prompted by the turn to the political-cultural has led to a privileging of the recovery of narrative over the provision of causal explanations or generalisations (pp. 6–8). He suggests that these strands of historical analysis and outcome might be reintegrated and strengthened by a ‘hybrid methodology’ that blends both the qualitative and the quantitative and which, simultaneously, builds a bridge between the social sciences and the humanities (pp. 9, 238–40). Quantification, Blaxill convincingly demonstrates, can enhance our capacity to analyse vast discourses systematically, precisely and verifiably—in this case, the enormous volume of words spoken by politicians in the era of the mass electorate (p. 229). As Blaxill notes, electoral culture was, from the later nineteenth century, increasingly ‘platform-centric’, its language being deliberately partisan and delivered with the intention to persuade (pp. 2, 27–9). For Blaxill, close and distant readings could and should be carried out in tandem, the result being the empowering and augmenting, rather than the replacement, of traditional approaches. From local and national newspaper reports of election speeches, he constructed (and checked for quality and accuracy) three main corpora (collections of texts), containing over four million words. They are: the principal corpus, covering East Anglia, a region where he identified an opportunity to expand historiographical coverage of political life in the countryside, and from which he builds a period-wide case-study; a ‘constituencies’ corpus, encompassing seats outside the region and representing a variety of constituency types; and a ‘national’ corpus for front-ranking politicians. From these datasets, Blaxill generated statistics showing, for instance, the frequency with which issues were discussed, the linguistic context in which they were mentioned, and the connections between the words which made up the rhetoric by which politicians appealed to electors (see Chapter One).

Andrzej Bobkowski and Józef Czapski

Andrzej Bobkowski and Józef Czapski

Southern Accents and Partisan Stereotypes: Evaluating Political Candidates

ObjectiveRecent research suggests that many American voters use candidate accents as an evaluative heuristic. We build on this research by examining whether this effect is conditional on the partisan positions of the candidate and across participant party identification.MethodsWe designed an experiment using actors to record candidate stump speeches, manipulating the accent of the candidate and the partisan issue position of the candidate.ResultsDemocrats and Republicans in our sample were more likely to believe candidates with southern accents were Republican as opposed Democrat, and were also more likely to negatively evaluate candidates with a southern accent. This was true in both instances regardless of whether the candidate espoused a typical Democratic or Republican issue position. Democrats’ judgments of candidates with southern accents, though, were harsher than those of Republicans and, again, this was the case across the partisan positioning of the candidate. Finally, both Democrats and Republicans in our pool were less likely to say they would vote for the candidate with a southern accent regardless of the partisan position of the candidate.ConclusionOur results confirm that accent is a heuristic and add nuance to our understanding of how partisanship shapes this effect.

"Red Tom" Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham

Reviewed by: "Red Tom" Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham Thomas Alter II "Red Tom" Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism. By Peter Buckingham. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020. Pp. 416. Photographs, appendices, notes, bibliography, index.) Irish-American Socialist Thomas Hickey has long been an enigmatic figure. Just about every study of Progressive Era Texas labor history includes at least a brief mention of him. He gained the admiration of thousands of downtrodden tenant farmers and the wrath of economic and political elites. However, there was no full account of Hickey's life until this one, [End Page 234] Peter Buckingham's impressive biography. Buckingham's enjoyable storytelling befits Hickey's life of rebellion, heartbreak, drink, and unfulfilled dreams. The book also includes appendices containing two of Hickey's stump speeches, allowing readers the rare chance to absorb Hickey's own words. The little that was previously known about Hickey came from his time as a leader of the Texas Socialist Party and as an editor of its newspaper, The Rebel, which grew to the third largest socialist paper in the country. Buckingham has pieced together Hickey's history from archives in Ireland and across the United States, including an extensive use of the Hickey Papers at Texas Tech University. Hickey was born in 1868 in Ire-land and immigrated to the United States in 1892. When he was an infant his family moved to Dublin where his father was a Fenian, who opposed British rule of Ireland. This influence would stick with Hickey his entire life; in Texas Hickey viewed the struggle of tenant farmers for landownership through an Irish lens. The conflict between labor and capital that defined much of life in the United States at this time radicalized Hickey further, and he joined the Socialist Labor Party. Based in Brooklyn, Hickey toured the country as a stump speaker and close ally of party leader Daniel DeLeon before he ran afoul of DeLeon's sectarian control and was expelled from the party in 1901. It has been decades since historians have looked closely at this period of internal party conflict, but Buckingham provides fresh insights on this topic that should draw the attention of those interested in the history of socialism. After being expelled, Hickey headed west and found work as a lumberjack in Washington and a miner in Montana before settling in Texas around 1907. He became one of the U.S. government's main targets during the post-World War I Red Scare, which effectively crushed the Texas Socialist Party. Hickey then attempted to start a few radical newspapers and even gave the oil business a try, all unsuccessfully, before dying of throat cancer in 1925. According to Buckingham, "Hickey's life was shaped by being both the son of a proud Fenian in one century and the father, in his own right, of a powerful political movement in faraway Texas in another" (2). Referring to Hickey as the father of the vibrant socialist movement of Texas in the early twentieth century is a bit of an exaggeration. Throughout the book, Buckingham suggests that the Texas Socialist Party would not have succeeded as it did without Hickey's speaking, writing, and organizing skills. But, because Buckingham does not take into account the decades-long history of radicalism in Texas, "Red Tom" Hickey should not be taken as a history of that radicalism, but as a biography. One can argue the Texas Socialist Party would have achieved the same level of success even without Hickey because it already had the required people, organizing experience, and skills before his arrival. [End Page 235] That being said, Hickey did make valuable contributions to the socialist movement in Texas and became a key figure in the state's rich history of agrarian radicalism. This is what Buckingham reveals with his book, making a valuable contribution that joins the list of required readings on Texas working-class history. Thomas Alter II Texas State University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

The Historical Presidency: Fear and Loathing in Presidential Candidate Rhetoric, 1952–2016

In this article, we build on research on affective (emotion‐based) polarization in American politics by investigating whether and how it has manifested in campaigns for the presidency. Drawing on a new data set of more than 11,000 statements about opponents from presidential stump speeches over the 1952–2016 period, we use quantitative content analysis to examine trends in negativity, fearful content, and anger content in these statements. We also conduct case studies of the 1968, 1992, and 2016 elections to examine qualitative patterns in these statements. We find compelling evidence that negative, fearful, and angry content in candidate statements about their opponents has been increasing over time among presidential candidates. We also find indications that fearful and angry rhetoric toward opponents is becoming more directed toward opponents’ character flaws rather than their issue stances. Our research suggests that affective polarization in presidential campaigns is a long‐term, and likely durable, development.

Multicultural American Exceptionalism in the Speeches of Frederick Douglass and Barack Obama

In his Reconstruction-era speeches, Frederick Douglass faced a more complex rhetorical situation than prior to Emancipation: for the first time an African American man worked from within a major political party and to do this effectively Douglass pioneered a new kind of American exceptionalism rooted in America's “composite nationality” and founding social compact as well as his claim to a representative American identity. His rhetoric of Reconstruction contrasted with his ironic posture toward American principles in the era of slavery and the bitter period after “Southern Redemption,” but his constitution of self and nationhood formed an important model later adopted by Barack Obama. This article specifically examines Frederick Douglass's 1872 stump speeches, Barack Obama's 2008 stump speeches, “Recollections of the Antislavery Conflict” (1873), and “A More Perfect Union” (2008).

The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War TwoRoger L.Geiger. Princeton University Press, 2015.

The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War Two Roger L. Geiger. Princeton University Press, 2015.Since the 1990s, there has been a belief in the United States that all citizens should go to college; indeed, this trope has been part and parcel of most politicians' stump speeches since the Clinton presidency. While most citizens of the United States view the idea of going to favorably, they do not understand the true purpose of what a university means or the differences among institutions. A reading of Roger Geiger's excellent The History of American Higher Education will help fill in some of these blanks: readers will understand that the purpose of higher education is not, nor has it ever been, learn more earn more; instead, as Geiger argues, higher education in the United States has achieved four results that rank the system among the best in the world:It [has] preserved and entrenched a tradition of liberal education as a fundamental attribute of a college education for all students, not just an elite. It [has] augmented that tradition by incorporating applied and practical studies on the same collegiate and postgraduate levels. It thus produced the first system of mass higher education, largely through individual public and private institutions responding independently to student demand. It also developed the capacity to teach and advance academic subjects on the highest level, achieving world-leading status for American science. (x)Geiger is arguably the most prolific scholar of higher education in historic context in the United States. In previous works, he has focused on particular eras (To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940, 1986) or trends (Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace, 2004) within higher education. Exceeding the limits of any of the excellent institutional case studies published in the last few decades, Geiger's latest volume is the most comprehensive he has produced to date, expanding chronologically and thematically from other texts such as Frederick Rudolph's The American College and University: A History (1990) or the Michael Bastedo, Philip Altbach, and Patricia Gumport edited collection, American Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century: Social, Political and Economic Challenges (2016).Broken out into fifty sections organized into twelve chapters, the overall purpose of the work is to emphasize change over time, the essence of historical analysis (xi) regarding US higher education. The first two chapters explore higher education through the colonial era. Chapter One looks at the first three universities in the United States: Harvard, Yale, and William and Mary. …

Religious rhetoric meets the target audience: Narrowcasting faith in presidential elections

ABSTRACTResearch documents politicians’ use of religious rhetoric and its effects on the public, but little work has investigated the considerations influencing the decision to use religious rhetoric in the first place. We theorize that politicians’ use of religious rhetoric is determined by four considerations: the alignment between the speaker’s and audience’s religiosity, the acceptability of the speaker’s denomination to the audience, the speaker’s religious history, and the speaker’s party. Using the 2012 presidential election as a test case, we pair county-level religion data with a content analysis of 264 stump speeches to examine how the religious aspects of candidate rhetoric changed depending on the religious contours of a community. The evidence provides insight into how and why candidates “narrowcast” faith.

Language for Winning Hearts and Minds: Verb Aspect in U.S. Presidential Campaign Speeches for Engaging Emotion.

How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment of mental states in message recipients. Consequently, we predicted that emotion-inducing language should be found in speeches specifically designed to create audience alignment – stump speeches of United States presidential candidates. We focused on phrases in the past imperfective verb aspect (“a bad economy was burdening us”) that leave a mental simulation of the language content open-ended, and thus unconstrained, relative to past perfective sentences (“we were burdened by a bad economy”). As predicted, imperfective phrases appeared more frequently in stump versus comparison speeches, relative to perfective phrases. In a subsequent experiment, participants rated phrases from presidential speeches as more emotionally intense when written in the imperfective aspect compared to the same phrases written in the perfective aspect, particularly for sentences perceived as negative in valence. These findings are consistent with the notion that emotions have a role in constraining the comprehension of language, a role that may be used in communication with large audiences.

Migration and Development in the Twenty-First Century

Displacements from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, sustained flows from Central America, and dislocations in North Africa and Southeast Asia—migration continues to grab headlines as the third decade of the twenty-first century approaches. Media in host countries cover the day-to-day realities in the form of interviews with migrants in camps along the Greece-Macedonia border, politicians’ stump speeches warning of flood tides of humans, and reactionary right-wing militia movements. The work is worthy, of course. Much can be learned from only a short conversation with a person stranded on a border in …

The American election 2012: contexts and consequences

Introduction - The American Election 2012: Contexts and Consequences R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson PART I: THE STATE OF THE PARTIES IN 2012 1. The Consequences of Party Reform in the 21st Century Terri Susan Fine 2. Closed for Repairs So It Can Reengage with the World: Prospects for Reforming the Republican Party Douglas M. Brattebo 3. The 2012 Elections and the Southern Roots of Polarized Politics: The Continuing Power of Southern Conservatives After Obama's Reelection Allen Neal 4. The Ever-Widening Gap: Gender and the 2012 Presidential Election Derya Rix 5. Data, America's Shifting Landscape, and the Meaning of 2012 Dante Chinni PART II: EMERGING STRATEGIES IN THE 2012 CAMPAIGN 6. Are Super PACs Really Arms of Political Parties? A Study of Coordination Dante Scala 7. Economic Appeals in Unequal Communities: Stump Speeches in the 2012 Presidential Election Christopher B. Chapp 8. Casualties of the Ground War: Personal Contacting in 2012 and Its Discontents Robert Boatright 9. Unfriendly to Women? Female Politicians, Rape Comments and the GOP in 2012 Jennifer Lucas and Tauna Sisco 10. Weighing In or Waiting: When, Whether, and Whom Republican Officeholders Endorsed in 2012 Kevin J. Parsneau and Christopher Galdieri PART III: IMPLICATIONS OF THE 2012 ELECTION: DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN POLICIES 11. The Past as Prologue: Obama, Health Care and the Election of 2012 Anne Marie Cammisa 12. Healthcare Spending and Prevention within the Affordable Care Act: Contrasting the Public Health and Medical Models of Prevention T. Lucas Hollar 13. Natural Uncertainty: Reconciling the Contrasting Environmental Goals of America's First Natural Security President - Barack Obama Mark O'Gorman 14. Federal Judicial Vacancies: Obama's Record and Prospects Susan Siggelakis 15. The Politics of Presidential Foreign Policy: Unilateral Authority and the Role of Congress Brandon Prins and Bryan Marshall 16. Decline or Not: America's Continued Primacy in the Persian Gulf? Wesley Renfro and Marc O'Reilly PART IV: FAITH AND POLITICS: 2012 AND BEYOND 17. Courting the Catholic Vote: Obama, Romney, and the U.S. Catholic Bishops in the 2012 Presidential Election Richard J. Powell and Mark D. Brewer 18. Catholic Vice Presidential Candidates and the Politics of Abortion: The 2012 Debate in Context Angela Senander 19. What Romney's Nomination Means for Mormons and the Presidency Luke Perry 20. The Liberal State and the Gay Marriage Debate: Lessons from American Catholic Thought Aaron Taylor 21. Obama and the Common Good Daniel Daly 22. The Rise of the Liberal Protestant? Faith and Politics in the Obama Administration R. Ward Holder and Peter B. Josephson

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

PIMPING FICTIONS: AFRICAN AMERICAN CRIME LITERATURE AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK PULP PUBLISHING

PIMPING FICTIONS: AFRICAN AMERICAN CRIME LITERATURE AND THE UNTOLD STORY OF BLACK PULP PUBLISHING. By Justin Gifford. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2013. 216 pp. $74.50, cloth; $24.95, paperback; $24.95, e-book.In his wildly popular single-cum-political-anthem, Dirt Off Your Shoulder (2003), rapper-mogul Jay Z spits, If you feelin' like a nigga, go and brush your shoulders off / Ladies is pimps too, go and brush your shoulders off. His inclusion of women in the pimp is a brilliant, if wickedly deceptive, move. What Jay Z no doubt recognizes is the political baggage that is bound up in the ideas of and pimping, particularly as they concern black women, sexual violence/exploitation, and black-thug masculinity. He seems simultaneously aware of the cultural and gendered capital of these ideas as they concern black men and revolutionary politics. Indeed, the and player were elevated in blaxploitation films of the 1970s as heroic figures; their hypermasculinity and sexual prowess were inextricably linked to their bravery in the face of white male power. Even the iconic blaxploitation film Foxy Brown (1974), starring Pam Grier, reproduces these hypermasculine and playa versions of black masculinity to a large extent.Though the unwritten, if not also unspeakable, code of black respectability has long resisted at least the pimp-criminality version of these notions of black masculinity (because, as the thinking goes, the celebration of criminality to any extent reinforces white supremacist notions of black pathology), the tropes have remained viable in black spaces over several generations due in part to working-class blacks' extant mistrust of the (white) police and legal system, as well as to a comparable mistrust of an assimilation-minded segment of the black middle class. To be clear, the hypermasculine and playa aspects of black masculinity are not necessarily objectionable or even totally out of sync with the class, sexuality, and gender codes of black respectability (consider the love that middle- and upperclass blacks in particular continue to shower on the likes of Bill Cosby, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, Mike Tyson, and Charles Barkley, to name but a few); rather, what may be seen as objectionable are the aspects of these tropes that link black masculinity to criminality, anti-intellectualism, and pathological behavior in general. Jay Z's Dirt Off Your Shoulder is a stroke of genius from a cultural marketing standpoint, then, because it anticipates and attends to the exploitative gendered baggage of pimping even as it recuperates the revolutionary fervor of these age-old, hypermasculine/playa tropes. Culturally speaking, Jay Z is able to have his hypermasculinity/black respectability cake and eat it too.The success, if you will, of Jay Z's song is perhaps most evidenced by the way in which President Barack Obama famously invoked and performed Jay Z's patented gesture of brushing off his shoulders during a stump speech in which he was referencing the hate that was coming his way from the GOP. Without uttering a word, Obama communicated that he was a pimp-subversive of the American political system. That is to say, he indicated that he had managed to bend to his political will the very system of power that was ostensibly designed to keep black folks from ascending to the highest office of the land. Being an outsider black man with a scary, Muslim-sounding name ultimately emerged as more benefit than liability in Obama's political game.But, of course, as we have witnessed with both Obama's ascendance to the presidency and Jay Z's ascendance to international celebrity and economic power, the game is, at bottom, another iteration or expression of status quo power. For all of his hope rhetoric and brush-off-his-shoulders bravado and black cool, Obama is every bit a status quo president. Perhaps a consequence of his blackness and the attendant (unspoken) promise to his white constituency that he would govern as a postracial president is that Obama pays at best only cursory attention to long-standing issues of racial and structural inequalities. …

The Art of Intervention: The Humor of Sojourner Truth and the Antebellum Political Cartoon

Over the past fifteen years, scholars Saidiya Hartman to Catherine Toal have addressed the hegemonic tendencies of sentimental identification in white abolitionist politics and literature in the US. They have argued that such identification elides, revises, and appropriates the subjectivities and experiences of African Americans to serve white and often female agendas (Hartman 20; Toal 40). Since Nell Irvin Painter's biography Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (1996), she and other scholars have examined at length appropriations of Sojourner work, in particular by her sentimental amanuenses and by later white feminists. Painter, Carleton Mabee, and Margaret Washington discuss Harriet Beecher Stowe's self-interested portrayal of Truth and the extent of Frances Gage's reworking of speech at the 1851 Akron Women's Rights Convention. (1) Roseann M. Mandziuk and Suzanne Pullon Fitch demonstrate that white women's movements and white feminist scholars have deployed Truth as an icon that reduces her to nothing more than a symbol of their own causes (133). According to Xiomara Santamarina, however, Truth's simultaneously vexed popularity and iconic incongruity do not simply emerge her amanuenses' and auditors' appropriations of the reformer's words and actions (37). Santamarina finds that iconicity arises at least as much out of the difference between working-class persona and middle-class models for ex-slaves in a growing abolitionist movement that favored literacy (39). I invoke Santamarina's intervention in order to inflect it toward the consideration of a different problem entwined with appropriation: how at once to tease out, to contextualize, and to explore practice of humor. iconicity does not emerge simply from her amanuenses' and auditors' appropriations. Because Truth has no choice but to grapple with the discourse that casts her as an incongruous iconic figure, some of the most striking features of her artistic and political practice (re)deploy features of the icon, particularly its pictorial quality and its solicitation of identifications. In certain ways, rhetorical practice of humor must be seen as the inverse side of its appropriation, as it intervenes in the discourse within which it must work. Hence, it is important also to recognize that practice cannot emerge simply its appropriation. (2) In this essay, I sort the subordinations of Truth by those who recount her humor in print her valued and coveted rhetorical practice. This essay probes the tension between the qualities of humor that overlap with the icon--its almost visual imagery, its indexical relation to an abstract value, and its memorability (Tomaselli and Scott 18-21)and the fluid relationships of the audience to Truth herself that her humor is meant to intercept. The much-discussed problem of the appropriation of work arises when hegemonic interests shift qualities of iconicity away oratorical devices honed by Truth to self-serving and decontextualized variations of them and often to Truth herself. In the latter case, those who appropriate words treat her as a site of memory for their cause (Grever 370). I situate pictorial metaphors within a cultural context that differentiates them icons and invites a critical approach that illuminates their density, complexity, and contingency, and hence the ways they exceed both iconicity and appropriation. That context is the burgeoning popularity of political cartoons and racial caricatures in New York City, where Truth lived for sixteen years before her speaking career. The medium of the political cartoon and its conventions of visual metaphor can be employed to illuminate practice of humor. As Bernard Reilly notes, common tropes circulated in stump speeches and cartoons during the antebellum period (148). It is useful to consider briefly the fluctuating social and political field in which rhetoric and the rhetoric of cartoons perform. …

Mama Grizzlies and the Midterms: Women and the Tea Party

This paper offers a first look at women who support the Tea Party and considers both how they compare with other women politically and with Tea Party men using a national PEW survey. Compared with Republican women more generally, Tea Party women are the most theologically orthodox and religiously observant. In this respect, the Tea Party appears to be capturing support among women for whom mixing their conservative religious values and conservative politics is a good thing — women who may otherwise feel right at home in the Christian Right. Tea Party women are also more religiously devout and theologically conservative than Tea Party men. And while Tea Party women and Tea Party men are more similar than not when it comes to public policy attitudes (and certainly more conservative than the nation at large), the preliminary findings here suggest that Tea Party women hold less conservative views on social welfare concerns than do Tea Party men, which echoes other studies that consistently show that men are less supportive of government assistance to the poor. That women nationally are more likely to be more supportive of government assistance to the poor than men indicates that women are also more supportive of a larger role for government to play in society, which is exactly what the Tea Party is rallying against. So attempts to rally more women to be supportive of the Tea Party may need to be gendered in tone and may need to speak to women’s place as caregivers and mothers, aka the “mama grizzlies” that Sarah Palin talks about in her stump speeches. More empirical research needs to be conducted that determines whether Tea Party activists and conservative Tea Party candidates — especially Tea Party women — routinely employ such rhetoric in their appeals, and if so, whether such appeals are effective in terms of gaining electoral support from women.

The Media Game: New Moves, Old Strategies

Campaigns are strategic contests between candidates and reporters. While candidates have proven to be adept at gaming news coverage of their campaign advertisements, journalists have maintained their autonomy by curtailing coverage of the candidates’ stump speeches. The advent of online media, however, advantages the candidates by permitting direct communication between candidates and voters.

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Stump Speeches and Road Trips: The Impact of State Campaign Appearances in Presidential Elections

AbstractTravel, stump speeches, and pressing-the-flesh make up a large part of any presidential electoral campaign. Obviously, candidates feel that their appearances are important, as they make hundreds of appearances between Labor Day and Election Day. But are they right? Well over 100 million people cast ballots in November, but only the tiniest fraction of voters meets or catches a glimpse of either of the candidates. Do candidate appearances and contact sway voters in some way? In this article, we use changes in weekly state tracking polls to determine the impact of candidate appearances in battleground and non-battleground states. Using polling data from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 elections, we find that campaign appearances can change a candidate's polling percentages, and that the impact varies by candidate and location (battleground state, safe Democratic state, or safe Republican state). We also find that the selection of a vice-presidential candidate is important, because of this candidate's ability to campaign effectively.

Saving the Lowercase "g"

Hello, America. I am the lowercase “g.” After the holidays, I am usually a happy sort. Congress returns from vacation, and my humble, seventh-place self is thrust back into the spotlight by the reintroduction into the national debate of words such as “gun” and “gay.” I bask. Or, I used to. Now I wonder if my somewhat self-centered attitude about the substance of congressional conversation blinded me to what was to come. Something that could destroy me. And you. It began in the 2008 presidential race, when, in debates and stump speeches, candidates began to assert they were “thinkin’,” “talkin‘,” and “hopin.‘” At first I could not believe they were dropping me. Me, of “gun” and “gay”! I explained it away as fatigue due to a contentious battle for votes, but after the ballots were counted, it continued.