Constructing the Electorate during Presidential Campaigns

A presidential election is more than a search for votes. It is also a search for the American people. Every four years, Republicans and Democrats traverse the nation's landscape searching for that odd concoction of attitude, party, race, region, and gender--that 51 percent--that will bring them victory in November. In doing so, they cannot depend exclusively on loyal Republicans or loyal Democrats, for there are not enough of either to make them president. Rather, candidates must search among the restless middle, that 30 to 40 percent of the American people that pledges allegiance to nothing for very long. To make matters worse, this restless middle changes its identity from day to day and from issue to issue: they can be progressive on civil rights, angry about taxes, populist about education, troglodytes on gun control. In these ways and more, "the American people" are an emergent thing. In light of these realities, presidential candidates invest large sums of money in polling operations to discover who the American people are and why they are that way. But the candidates are not just reactive about such matters. They also take active steps to define the people for the people. That is, the American people are more a stipulation than an instantiation, a people that comes into being via definition rather than through experience. Perhaps that is how it must be in a land of 270 million persons sharing a scant national history. Perhaps such a nation must always be in a state of becoming. Sensing that, the candidates offer new-yet-old definitions of the American people every four years. In doing politics, that is, they also do sociology. In this article, we trace the rhetorical construction of the American people during the past fifty years. Using a sizable database of some five hundred speeches authored by the major-party candidates between 1948 and 1996, a database assembled in connection with the Campaign Mapping Project (an endeavor overseen by the first author and Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania), we found roughly nine hundred uses of the phrase "the American people."(1) We puzzled over these uses in a variety of ways, asking who the described people were, how they spent their rime, what gave their lives meaning, and what forces challenged them. To be sure, these descriptions of the American people, coming as they did from self-interested politicians, cannot be trusted as empirical descriptions of the nation's condition. They are, in Kenneth Burke's terms, secular prayers--factual-sounding commentaries uttered projectively, hopefully. Nevertheless, these rhetorical constructions can be powerful: as Marc Hetherington (1996) has shown, Bill Clinton's worrisome descriptions of the nation's economic situation in 1992 resonated with people whose own, empirical circumstances were, in fact, quite good. Clinton's became a taken-for-granted rhetoric, an unargued rhetoric, and that made it seem truer than truth. That same sort of truth can often be found when the American people are introduced into the modern political campaign. Background From almost any perspective, the American people are a complex thing: television news portrays blacks and whites living in separate communities, attending separate schools. The poorest of the poor live on the outer fringes of society, homeless and unnoticed. Southern Baptists dash with gay-rights activists. Native Americans struggle to maintain their island of language in a sea of MTV images and Anglo-hegemony. Watching just a few hours of CNN shows a fractured society, a people without coherence. And then there are the commercials: happy, multiracial children saluting a flag that dwarfs them, veterans marching in a parade of yellow ribbons down Main Street, families holding their reunions in cozy city parks, Air Force jets streaking across the summer sky to thunderous applause. During these latter moments, America seems whole. …