Prof. Erik P. Bucy
Marshall and Sharleen Formby Regents Professor of Strategic Communication, College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University, where he teaches and conducts research on misinformation, news literacy, visual politics, and public opinion about the press. Bucy is also Visiting Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at Loughborough University where he was a US-UK Fulbright Scholar.
Email: erik.bucy@ttu.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)
Debating populists is not an easy task for mainstream politicians. Populists tend to harp on a few pet issues at the expense of other pressing policy concerns and engage in a ‘post-truth’ mode of discourse that opens fissures and strikes at emotional tone setting. Reasoned retorts can rarely undo the initial impression that a wild accusation can make. But nonverbal displays can sometimes offer helpful cues.
Thus, it was that towards the end of the 2024 general election debate, after Kamala Harris accused Donald Trump of killing an immigration bill that was being considered in Congress last February and taunted him about the length and vacuousness of his rallies, that he defended his rally attendance and asserted with full throated confidence that:
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in [Haitian immigrants], they’re eating the cats. They’re eating… they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”
In the split screen format of the debate, Harris’s expression shifted from a critical but engaged stare in Trump’s direction to a dismissive laugh of disbelief and head shaking at what she had just heard. According to The Guardian, the false accusation had apparently originated from a viral video of a Springfield resident complaining at a city council meeting, without proof, that immigrants had killed ducks from a local park to eat for food.
Because of its virality and racial undertones, this fabricated trope—exaggerated beyond even the original claim to household pets—was now being asserted as a dog whistle to anti-immigrant voters in an American presidential debate.
Harris’s reaction captured the shock and absurdity of the moment but it was Trump’s voice, channeling the faux outrage of a professional wrestler, that then went viral in the biggest meme of the campaign season. In the creative culture of the internet, pugs were suddenly shown in frying pans while cats peered out from deep skillets, all to a synchronized beat and Trump’s absurdist claims. Harris’s point about his efforts to kill the immigration bill was all but lost.
With rational discussion over legitimate policy differences evacuated from political debate, visual and nonverbal communication take on outsized importance. Indeed, over the past decade our research into social media response to presidential debates has consistently shown that viewers respond more to visual and tonal channels of candidate performance than to the substance of what’s said.
Similar to his 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton, Trump was much less bound to the norms of rational discourse than his more erudite and articulate opponent. Whether due to gender dynamics, a sense of propriety, or even their legal background as lawyers, both Clinton and Harris followed the rules whereas Trump felt free to blather anything that came to mind. A recent analysis by Ezra Klein of the New York Times has described this propensity as an extreme lack of inhibition, the inverse of conscientiousness.
Along with signs of cognitive decline widely noted in mainstream news coverage, one wonders how this lack of inhibition will play out in a second Trump presidency.
Trump’s performative spontaneity, hyperbolic phrasing, use of comedic gestures, and put downs of opponents and disliked groups are weaponized elements of his communication repertoire. In populist delivery, the conviction with which assertions are made stands in for verifiable facts because it feels emotionally compelling. Coupled with the visible display of anger, ever present in populist speeches and appearances, targets of blame are clearly identified. And therein lies a danger.
In the days following the election, the Associated Press reported racist text messages invoking slavery, some referencing the incoming presidential administration, were sent across the country to Black men, women and students, including middle schoolers, prompting an investigation by the FBI and FCC. Dog whistles, even when comedically performed and circulated as memes, find their intended audience.
Many factors go into an individual’s vote for president but arguments by the Harris campaign about democratic stability, dangers posed by Trump, and the enthusiasm voters should have for status quo politics fell short. While progressive Democrats were wildly enthusiastic about Harris’s emergence onto the presidential stage with an initial message of hope over fear, not every element of the traditional Democratic coalition was equally enthused, younger Black and Hispanic male voters in particular.
Harris arguably did most things right, but the truncated campaign only really started with the Democratic National Convention in mid-August and allowed little time to adjust. Like Hillary Clinton before her, Harris was caught in the bind of campaigning as a highly accomplished woman (of color) against a transgressive opponent who reveled in racialized, misogynistic attack and flaunted the rules of civilized debate. Nullifying the noise while communicating a message of hope was always going to be a tough assignment.