“Let’s Talk About Iowa”: The Role of Geography in Candidates' Economic Frames

• In Event: Election Campaign Strategies

Abstract

Research gives scholars a good idea of what happens in terms of geo-targeted frames on the digital road to the White House and from the Oval Office. Yet, little is known about whether place-based framing occurs as candidates meet voters in-person in towns across the country. Given the increasing number of campaign events—rallies and town halls—and the number of potential voters who attend them, they matter for the democratic health of the United States.
I assume candidates engage in some level of geographic framing—shifts in frames based on place. What is unknown is the degree of variation and whether it crosses the line from voter engagement to voter deception, bolstering to undermining a campaign. It is a normative good for campaigns to recognize geographic differences and to speak to the needs of place-based audiences. It would be less so for campaign events to veer toward either framing extreme by (a) mirroring microtargeted ads that at best may pander and at worst lie to localized audiences or (b) dropping all place-specific appeals from their in-person campaign communication.
Frames are powerful organizing principles shared by cultural groups that have implications for the social world. To date, most comparative framing studies distinguish patterns of political frames in news coverage across different nation-states with divergent political and/or media systems. Instead, this study asks whether 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidates, in their live events, varied their framing of economic issues from one state to another.
I do this by collecting rally and town hall speeches from the top five candidates (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Warren) from the first four states (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina), using the C-SPAN video archives and Rev election transcripts. The study deploys an interpretive framing analysis with a focus on (un)common themes, metaphors, and devices related to economic power across localities to distinguish among frames across the four states. I conclude that candidates engage in unequal use of geographic framing devices, including racialized geographic appeals, comparisons of a state to their own, and essentialization of a state to an industry. These tactics avoid microtargeting extremes but may reflect surface-level appeals and pandering that do not fully embrace the pluralism of each state or the nation.

Author

• Dakota Park-Ozee, University of Texas at Austin