Prof. Ken Cosgrove
Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies. Suffolk University Department of Political Science and Legal Studies.
Email: kcosgrove@suffolk.edu
U.S. Election 2024
36. The tilted playing field, and a bygone conclusion (Dr David Karpf)
37. Looking forwards and looking back: Competing visions of America in the 2024 presidential campaign (Prof John Rennie Short)
38. Brat went splat: Or the emotional sticky brand won again (Prof Ken Cosgrove)
39. Election 2024: Does money matter anymore? (Prof Cayce Myers)
40. Advertising trends in the 2024 presidential race (Prof Travis N. Ridout, Prof Michael M. Franz, Prof Erika Franklin Fowler)
41. Who won the ground wars? Trump and Harris field office strategies in 2024 (Sean Whyard, Dr Joshua P. Darr)
42. Kamala Harris: Idealisation and persecution (Dr Amy Tatum)
43. Kamala Harris campaign failed to keep Democratic social coalition together (Prof Anup Kumar)
44. Revisiting Indian-American identity in the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Dr Madhavi Reddi)
45. Harris missed an opportunity to sway swing voters by not morally reframing her message (Prof John H. Parmelee)
46. In pursuit of the true populist at the dawn of America’s golden age (Dr Carl Senior)
47. Language and the floor in the 2024 Harris vs Trump televised presidential debate (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
48. Nullifying the noise of a racialized claim: Nonverbal communication and the 2024 Harris-Trump debate (Prof Erik P. Bucy)
49. A pseudo-scientific revolution? The puzzling relationship between science deference and denial (Dr Matt Motta)
50. Amidst recent lows for women congressional candidates, women at the state level thrive (Dr Jordan Butcher)
By election day, it was no shock that Donald Trump could win or that the Republicans could win the Senate, the surprise was in the scale of these victories and the Republican’s competitiveness in the House races. The 2024 election represents a class and ethnic realignment of the electorate that, as Patrick Ruffini suggested, had been underway for several years. The Democrats failed because of the results of the Biden Administration’s governance that differed from their 2020 brand promises. Donald Trump ran largely the same emotive campaign that he had run twice before only this time he asked if voters were better off now than they were under his administration. This election showed the superiority of branding as a political marketing tool to an untethered set of emotions or vibes that Harris attempted to use to win the election.
Democrats
Democrats were elected in 2020 to deal with the pandemic and restore a sense of normality to the country. Instead, they implemented policies that appealed to progressive audiences and interest groups. As Teixiera and Judis note, college educated and progressive voters don’t constitute a majority of the electorate meaning that the Biden Administration opted to target the smaller, not the bigger, available audience.
Biden personally did not keep his promise of being a transitional figure because he sought a second term, and his team deprived the Democrats of several months of earned media for their brand by making sure Biden had no serious primary challengers. By the middle of 2024, the Administration had been caught lying about the health of its principal as Biden imploded during a live televised debate with Trump. By the time Kamala Harris replaced Biden she was saddled with a string of promises not kept by the administration and little time to build her own brand. Harris cemented her public image as a leftist by picking a leftist for Vice-President. Harris only had around one hundred days to change public perceptions about her, differentiate herself from Biden and negatively brand Trump. She didn’t have the extant brand to do it and instead relied on celebrity endorsements and free-floating emotions or attitudes: the so-called vibes.
She failed to differentiate from Biden, most notably during her appearance on “The View” and tried to build a positive vibe by using language like “freedom” and “joy” as George Lakoff suggested politicians should do, but Harris never defined these terms. Her campaign was light on specifics but heavy on attacks on Trump. negative messaging about her opponent. Her campaign theme of “we’re not going back” went undefined and this was problematic given that she was the sitting Vice-President. Her campaign had vibes, but vibes don’t make brand. She lacked a unique story, emotions and policy offerings able to convince people she could solve their problems or wasn’t just a continuation of an unpopular status quo. When she spoke about policy, she always did so in terms of Donald Trump being unacceptable and not so much about herself or what she would do in office
Trump
Donald Trump used a similar sticky brand to what he had used previously and focused on that not vibes. His brand story was a tale in which he’d done well as President, taken on the Washington Establishment and been repaid with impeachment, a rigged election, indictment and assassination attempts. Trump, as he always had, told his supporters that they prove that the establishment feared him and was only after him because they wanted to make sure he couldn’t protect the voters from them anymore. Trump deftly turned the Democrats’ name calling against him into attacks on his supporters. He ran on mainstream issues using working-class sensibilities. He turned the election into a referendum on his and Biden’s Administrations by asking people if they were better off than they had been four years earlier and used the Biden Administration’s controversial record to build a contrast with his. He recruited new customers, appeared with celebrities and influencers these audiences respected and in media that they consumed. At the same time, he successfully did to Biden in 2024 what Biden had done to him in 2020 by making the election into a referendum on the current Administration.
Conclusion
The lesson of the 2024 campaign is that branding remains the key tool for winning elections. Vibes alone aren’t enough and woe unto the politicians who don’t keep their brand promises as the Democrats did not from 2020 forward. The second lesson is that it takes time to build an effective brand. Trump had been building his for decades, Kamala Harris only had a few months to do so. Trump used sticky branding well. Harris had to rely on vibes because of the difficult situation into which she’d been thrown. Once again, the better built, more effectively distributed brand won.