DOI: 10.7910/dvn/nvmnmp
title: State-Level Candidate Framing (2020 Democratic Primary)

description: Method Section from Relevant Paper:

I focus on rally speeches and town halls specifically because of their ties to locality via a physical, in-person event and focus on audiences of voters and constituents tied to that place. Again, the democratic mechanisms in play mean states decide both which candidates are supposedly viable primary contenders for the general election and which candidate wins that national contest via the Electoral College. In contrast, the primary debates are nationally televised, making the audience both physically and symbolically distant. Moreover, questions from town halls are asked by residents of a given locale; Debate questions are most often written and asked by journalists. Both the assumed audience of the network (Jarvis & Connaughton, 2005) and debate format and question structure (Carlin et al., 2001) alter candidate strategies. Press conferences are likewise addressed to a more national audience and driven by journalistic inquiry. Televised speeches also lack localized attention and place-specific audiences. I excluded invited forums and speeches, including only those events planned by and for the candidate’s campaign, to mitigate the potential candidates are framing for an issue-based audience or group (e.g. Mom’s Demand Action or the Better Business Bureau) instead of a geographic one (e.g. Iowans).
Instead of including events from all states, or at least all those visited, I narrowed the sample to the first four democratic primary and caucus states—Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina. The states represent four different regions of the United States—the Midwest, Northeast, West, and Southeast—and garner sustained attention from most candidates in the lead up to primary voting and caucus-going. Because these states are seen as vital to the success of a presidential primary campaign, candidates may pay more attention to them, potentially altering their framing of pocketbook issues to cater to supporters. Furthermore, presidential primaries start earlier with every election cycle. To manage this variable, I only examined those rallies and town halls happening in 2020.
To find texts of interest, I examined the Rev collection of 2020 election transcripts, opening all those transcripts meeting the above criteria. I then searched the C-SPAN video archives using the terms “candidate, president” to return the maximum number of recordings featuring presidential candidates. I again opened all those meeting the detailed criteria. Rather than running text transcripts like those found on Rev’s website, C-SPAN provides closed captioning for many of their archived videos in a subsection of the page below the clip. For both sites, I copied and pasted the transcript/captions into individual word documents, saved according to candidate, date, and state. The result is forty-two rally, speech, or town hall transcripts (twelve from Iowa, eighteen from New Hampshire, seven from Nevada, and five from South Carolina) from nine candidates (Bennet, Biden, Buttigieg, Gabbard, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer, Warren, and Yang). I narrowed to the top five candidates across those four states (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Warren) for a total of thirty-six (ten from Iowa, fifteen from New Hampshire, seven from Nevada, and four from South Carolina).
I compiled a search list of terms tied to economics. I searched each transcript for each term, assessing whether the use was tied to a discussion of the U.S. economy or economic policy—past, present, or proposed. I moved any segment of text—no less than a full sentence—using economic language in such a context into a separate document. I compiled all relevant segments from a given state into a single document, tagging each with the candidate’s name and date of the event. I also compiled the segments from each candidate in their own document to make it easier to assess which candidates did or did not adapt their frames geographically.