When Two Become One? Examining Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's Campaign Themes from Primary to General Election

Abstract

Moving from primary opponents to presidential ticket partners requires negotiation and strategy. Yet no work has systematically tracked the evolution of how two separate campaigns rhetorically become one. Rooted in partisan appeals, descriptive and policy representation, and ticket balancing research, this study employs two computer-assisted content analytic methods to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's tweets during the 2020 U.S. presidential primary and general election. Shifting between campaign phases, Harris did not rhetorically engage in ticket balancing or emphasize her qualifications, favoring other techniques instead to support Biden. Biden's messaging remained largely consistent yet showed some accommodations to emerging contexts.

The popularity of Biden and Trump in the United States and Latin America during the 2020 campaign

“…While at the end of 2019, polls predicted the re-election of Donald Trump, this voting trend changed in mid-2020. According to several authors (Shi, 2021;Meeks, 2021), the mismanagement of the pandemic, the fact that vaccines did not arrive during the electoral campaign and the social and racial conflicts were decisive for Trump's electoral defeat.…”

COVID‐19 and 2020 presidential election speeches: A content analysis of pandemic campaign rhetoric

“…However, conventional wisdom suggests that Trump may avoid talking about COVID‐19 since many viewed his administration's handling of the pandemic as a failure. This reality suggests it would then be advantageous for Biden to discuss COVID‐19 often, however, in a study of Biden's tweets, Meeks (2022) finds that healthcare represented only 10.4% of Biden's tweets in the primary and 5% during the general election cycle, whereas COVID‐19 represented 3.1% in primary and 11.8% in general. Meeks speculates that healthcare mentions decreased in general because Biden shifted to focus on COVID‐19.…”