Prof. Michael L. Butterworth
Director of the Center for Sports Communication & Media and Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. His research explores connections between rhetoric, democracy, and sport, with particular interests in national identity, militarism, and public memory.
Twitter: @BurntO_Butterwo
Email: michael.butterworth@austin.utexas.edu
U.S. Election 2024
51. The powers that aren’t: News organizations and the 2024 election (Dr Nik Usher)
52. Newspaper presidential endorsements: Silence during consequential moment in history (Dr Kenneth Campbell)
53. Trump after news: a moral voice in an empty room? (Prof Matt Carlson, Prof Sue Robinson, Prof Seth C. Lewis)
54. Under media oligarchy: profit and power trumped democracy once again (Prof Victor Pickard)
55. The challenge of pro-democracy journalism (Prof Stephen D. Reese)
56. Grievance and animosity: Fracturing the digital news ecosystem (Dr Scott A. Eldridge II)
57. Considering the risk of attacks on journalists during the U.S. election (Dr Valerie Belair-Gagnon)
58. What can sentiment in cable news coverage tell us about the 2024 campaign? (Dr Gavin Ploger, Dr Stuart Soroka)
59. The case for happy election news: Why it matters and what stands in the way (Dr Ruth Palmer, Prof Stephanie Edgerly, Prof Emily K. Vraga)
60. Broadcast television use and the 2024 U.S. presidential election (Jessica Maki, Prof Michael W. Wagner)
61. Kamala Harris' representation in mainstream and Black media (Dr Miya Williams Fayne, Prof Danielle K. Brown)
62. Team Trump and the altercation at the Arlington military cemetery (Dr Natalie Jester)
63. Pulling their punches: On the limits of sports metaphor in political media (Prof Michael L. Butterworth)
Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, political observers have focused considerable energy trying to explain the outcome: Joe Biden waited too long to drop out of the race; Kamala Harris expended too much energy courting centrists and neo-cons; Trump exerts a charismatic hold on many voters in spite of his obvious flaws; global trends point to voters rejecting incumbents; political media normalized an abnormal candidate. A recurring theme in these explanations is that political practices—and media coverage of those practices—have fundamentally changed.
Typical campaign coverage frames elections in purely strategic terms, a perspective that parallels the language of sports. Campaigns are most often characterized through the metaphor of the “horse race” and other sports, especially boxing. Verbal exchanges become “jabs” and “punches,” and a particularly effective statement might be a “knockout blow.” The vocabulary is so familiar now that audiences may not even recognize the connections to the sport. Such language risks positioning audiences as passive spectators and reducing substantive policy discussions to gameplans and playbooks. It is also frequently the case that sports metaphors fail to capture campaign developments in accurate terms. As political scientists Peter Schrott and David Lanoue conclude, “despite the promiscuous use of the word, no presidential debate has ever resulted in a knockout. Even the worst performers go the distance.”
The September 10th debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was an emphatic victory for the Vice President, and the clarity of her superior performance lent itself especially well to the familiar boxing metaphor. MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” suggested “the vice president knocked the GOP candidate off balance the moment they touched gloves.” NPR declared, “if he was a boxer, Trump was cut and bleeding in the middle of the fight, and by the end, was TKO’d.” A Republican operative told NBC News, “that Harris was able to ‘bait’ Trump with her comments about his rallies and that ‘he hasn’t been off the ropes since.”
One example of the boxing metaphor stood out: the “rope-a-dope,” a strategy made famous by Muhammad Ali in his “Rumble in the Jungle” bout with George Foreman in 1975. Although it requires the boxer to take repeated blows, the payoff results from a worn-out opponent who is increasingly vulnerable to a flurry of counterpunches and a potential knockout. The presumed parallel in 2024 was found in Harris’ strategy of baiting Trump into rambling, at times incoherent, diatribes about the sizes of his rallies or (discredited) allegations of immigrants stealing and eating pets. Headlines invoked the famous boxing strategy, including The Atlantic (“How Harris Roped a Dope”) and The Nation (“With Her Rope-a-Dope Strategy, Kamala Harris Baited Trump into Scaring Swing Voters”). Elsewhere, columnists claimed Harris “rope-a-doped Trump,” “had the dope on the ropes,” or “used a carefully constructed rope-a-dope strategy to derail Donald Trump during their debate.” Meanwhile, a range of observers on social media echoed the theme as well, including journalists, academics, and celebrities.
Part of the problem here is that the specific metaphor is ill-suited to the occasion. Ali’s gambit against Foreman required not that he distracted his opponent, but that he withstood an onslaught of legitimate punches. In the debate, Trump flailed wildly but he rarely made any impact on Harris. Ali exhausted Foreman; Harris let Trump self-destruct. Yet, therein lies the larger problem with the metaphor: in 1975, a rapidly tiring Foreman faltered in the eighth round, leading the fight to be stopped; in 2024, a comprehensively defeated Trump simply ignored his own performance, avoided additional debates, and focused on his own peculiar campaign tactics.
There is no causal link between political media’s misuse of boxing metaphors and its confusion over the election’s outcome, but they are similarly symptomatic of an inability to interpret a political landscape permanently altered by Trump and a changing electorate. Voters no longer rely on either the conventional architecture or wisdom of legacy media; and boxing, once among the most popular sports in the United States, is now the subject of marginal interest. There was a time when being “heavyweight champion of the world” was a revered status; today, there is more enthusiasm for mixed martial arts (MMA) and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).
At the risk of oversimplifying the politics of UFC and its fan base, it is clear that the emergent sport appeals to younger white men, a key constituent for Donald Trump. To that point, Slate describes a UFC event from the summer of 2024 in which the various ingredients of white masculine political identity—MAGA, podcaster Joe Rogan, MMA, and Black Rifle Coffee Company—constituted a recipe for Trump’s eventual triumph. In short, the contexts in which electoral politics are staged and the rules by which they are judged have shifted. Boxing is an artifact of the past. Increasingly, so too is legacy political media.
I do not mean to suggest these shifts explain all of the factors that affected the 2024 presidential election. Nevertheless, political media cannot continue to rely on the historical practices that have guided our understanding of elections in the 20th century. Trading punches and knockout blows may provide color to campaign analysis, but they reflect a frame that rarely characterizes modern campaigns. It isn’t merely that the “rope-a-dope” doesn’t apply to Harris’ debate performance in a way that could forecast the election’s outcome; it’s that her opponent was engaged in an altogether different contest.