Thou Shalt Not Speak ill of Any Fellow Republicans? Politeness Theory in the 2012 Republican Primary Debates

The campaign for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination involved 27 "debate events" from May 2011 until March 2012. These debates drew large audiences--more than 3 times the size of the audience for the primary debates during the 2008 presidential campaign--and according to the Washington Times, viewership was more than 8 times the average primary debate audience for the nationally televised debates broadcast by CNN. Michael Shear (2011) of the New York Times Politics and Government blog wrote that each debate "seems to have more influence over the course of the campaign than the last one" (p. 1). To understand how the debates preceding various state primaries may have affected the political fortunes of the candidates in the primary campaign, we examined the content of nine debates held before the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, and Arizona state primaries. Examining the debates in these pivotal state campaigns gives us a glimpse into the dynamics of the race to win the 2012 GOP presidential nomination. The candidates featured in these events were Michelle Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, John Huntsman, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum. Of this group, Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum held the greatest hope of gaining support for their nomination. Santorum won the Iowa primary, leaving Romney a very close second; Romney regained momentum after his Iowa setback, but Gingrich surged later after a strong performance in the South Carolina debates. Clearly, the debates played a major role in shaping the outcome of the nomination in the 2012 campaign. A substantial number of studies have found that primary debates make a difference in campaigns. Pfau (1988) found that intra-party political debates produced significant learning about the general campaign issues including issue learning that was specific for each of the three major candidates in the debate studied. Research has also found that primary debates affect voting intentions in several ways. Benoit, McKinney, and Stephenson (2002) found that viewers of primary debates "learn about the candidates' policy positions, form or change their evaluations of the candidates' character, change vote choice, and increase confidence in their vote choice" (p. 329). Benoit and Stephenson (2004) found that two thirds of their sample of viewers of a primary debate changed voting intentions and expressed greater confidence in their voting intentions. Primary debates differ from general election presidential debates in important ways. Benoit and Stephenson (2004) have argued that primary debates feature messages directed to the base rather than a national community, exchanged between members of the same party rather than an opposing party, and focused on regional audiences and concerns rather than national issues. Depending on the campaign, primary debates can function as turning points for different camps as potential candidates assess the field and sometimes decide to toss their hat in the ring, changing the dynamics of the campaign. McKinney, Kaid, and Robertson (2001) have found that front-runners often become the target of attacks in primary debates as lesser contenders try to assert their candidacy at the expense of the current leader in the polls. The nature of the arguments in primary debates merits consideration. Some political debate scholars believe that the content of primary debates often focuses less on differences in policy positions because the candidates are drawn from the same party. Yawn, Ellsworth, Beatty, and Kahn (1998), for example, have argued that "ideological and issue differences among candidates are of a lower magnitude in primaries than in general election campaigns" (p. 156). Drawing on the research of Gopoian (1982); Often (1985); and Hellweg, Pfau, and Brydon (1992), Yawn et al. (1998) have argued that "the absence of party labels leads voters to abandon the standard criterion and forces them to rely on short-term influences--often candidate image--when making vote decisions" (p. …