The Battle for the Soul of the Nation: Nationalist Polarization in the 2020 American Presidential Election and the Threat to Democracy

ABSTRACT

This article examines the nationalist rhetoric of Biden and Trump in the 2020 presidential election, focusing on how the candidates represented, and contested, the meaning of American national identity. To do so, we construct a novel analytical framework to undertake a contextual content analysis of Biden and Trump’s campaign tweets (n = 4,321). We demonstrate that the meaning of national identity was a key source of contestation in the election, and that the parameters of this contestation closely tracked a longstanding cleavage in American political culture between civic and ethnic nationalist traditions. Biden largely drew upon the civic nationalist tradition to defend a conception of American national identity that is grounded in liberal myths and symbols. By contrast, Trump largely drew upon the ethnic nationalist tradition to defend a conception of American national identity that is grounded in white American myths and symbols. Critically, both candidates used these opposing nationalist traditions to frame each other as a grave threat to the nation’s “true” identity and, ultimately, as un-American. This “nationalist polarization” of presidential politics is a troubling development for the future of American democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• American politics
• political communication
• nationalism
• polarization
• Twitter

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the thoughtful comments and suggestions to earlier an version of the paper from the participants of the American Political Science Association’s panel on ‘Fragmentation, Polarization and National Identity.’ We are similarly grateful to the participants of seminars on the paper held at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, and the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. On June 6^th Biden officially received enough delegate votes to become the Democratic nominee for the 2020 presidential election. We waited for two weeks after this date to begin capturing tweets to ensure we were focusing only on the period where Biden was positioning himself as challenger to Donald Trump, rather than his democratic competitors. This approach ensures we are focusing on the general election in our analysis, while leaving ample time to capture sufficient tweets that reflect Biden and Trump’s campaign strategy (136 days of campaigning).

2. Because we are interested in the direct messaging of the candidates, and to avoid issues with bots, we excluded re-tweets. The majority of the tweets for both candidates were collected directly from the Twitter API through an rtweet package; however, after Donald Trump was removed from the platform following January 6^th, 2020, we also used www.thetrumparchive.com to ensure we captured all of his tweets. The full list and text of all tweets collected is available in our supplementary material on the Harvard Dataverse, accessible here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AZWHQG.

3. The full codebook is available on the Harvard Dataverse, accessible here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AZWHQG.

4. Our approach facilitates intercoder consensus through collaboration and discussion rather than reaching intercoder reliability scores by comparing coding conducted by multiple people independently (on these different approaches see Braun & Clarke, 2013; O’Connor & Joffe, 2020). At the same time, we follow many of the best practices that can facilitate intercoder reliability, notably the bifurcation between the developers of the codebook and the initial coding, the use of a data immersion phase to refine the codebook, a clear process for resolving coder disagreement and measures to mitigate power dynamics among the coders (see Lacy et al., 2015; MacPhail et al., 2015).

5. Supplementary materials – which provide more detail on this process, all Twitter data and the codebooks – is available on the Harvard Dataverse, accessible here: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AZWHQG.

6. References to tweets indicate the date that they were sent from users’ accounts. We indicate.

the time when we cited more than one tweet in a single day.

7. Earlier in America’s history (notably in the 18^th and 19^th centuries) Biden’s Catholic faith would have put him at odds with the WASP majority; however, as discussed earlier in the article and elsewhere, throughout the 20^th century the religious boundaries of the majority group in America shifted from a basis in Protestantism (in contrast with Catholicism) to a broader Christian basis (Schertzer & Woods, 2022: Chapter 4). A related process has taken place, whereby Anglo-Saxon identity – as the central referent for the heritage of members of the majority group – has shifted to a more nebulose notion of whiteness rooted in European heritage. Thus, today, whiteness, European heritage and Christianity are among the key ethnic referents for membership to the American nation.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this work was supported by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant number 430-2019-00062), and a Small Research Grant from the British Academy and The Leverhulme Trust (grant number SRG1920\101691).

Notes on contributors

Eric Taylor Woods

Dr. Eric Taylor Woods is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Plymouth. His current research examines the intersections of politics, culture, and media-with a particular focus on how these phenomena relate to nationalism and identity.

Alexandre Fortier-Chouinard

Alexandre Fortier-Chouinard is a PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. He specializes in political engagement, campaign promise fulfillment, and research methods.

Marcus Closen

Marcus Closen is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto. His research examines group representation in national legislatures, with an emphasis on advanced industrialized democracies.

Catherine Ouellet

Catherine Ouellet is an incoming Assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université de Montréal. She specializes in Quebec/Canadian politics and public opinion, with an emphasis on lifestyle and the construction of social identities.

Robert Schertzer

Dr. Robert Schertzer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His current research focuses on the ideas, institutions and political communication related to rising nationalism in liberal democracies.