Media Coverage of Female Candidates’ Traits in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary

ABSTRACT

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary featured more female candidates than any prior race of its kind, presenting a unique opportunity to analyze media coverage of women running for this distinctively masculine office. In this article, we explore themes in trait coverage for female candidates in 2020. Using a natural language processing (NLP) approach, we analyze a sample of print and online media coverage of the Democratic primary field just prior to the Iowa Caucus. We find that trait coverage largely emphasized warmth and competence, with a tendency to criticize female candidates for displaying insufficient warmth. Comparing white women to women of color, we find coverage of Harris, but not Gabbard, emphasizes racial and gender identifiers. The themes emerging from our trait analysis suggest women candidates continue to face obstacles in the form of gendered and sometimes racialized media coverage on their paths to the presidency.

KEYWORDS:

• female candidates
• gender stereotypes
• media
• content analysis
• traits

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Al Johri, Sean Long, Dominik Stecula, Linda Beail, Ciera Hammond, Jiwon Nam, and Cameron Espinoza.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Harris and Gabbard were not the first women of color to run for the presidency. Notably, they were preceded by Charlene Mitchell, Shirley Chisholm, Margaret Wright, Isabell Masters, Isabell Masters, Lenora Fulani, Monica Moorehead, Joy Chavis Rocker, Carol Moseley Braun, Cynthia McKinney, and Peta Lindsay.

2. Warmth and competence map onto other perspectives on gender-based trait attributions, for example scholarship on biosocial role theory, which focuses on communal traits and agentic traits (Wood and Eagly 2002).

3. The double bind is distinctive from the concept of gender-based double standards, in which women candidates face a higher bar in demonstrating competence relative to men (see, for example, Bauer 2020; Ditonto 2018; Teele, Kalla, and Rosenbluth 2018).

4. We converted each document into a set of 10-character shingles, and then converted those sets of shingles into a MinHash (Broder 2000). We then applied locality sensitive hashing (Rajaraman and Ullman 2011) on those hashes to identify groups of documents that may be similar to one another with a threshold of 0.5. Finally, we calculated the jaccard similarity scores of documents in those groups and removed one document from any pair that had a jaccard score of >0.75 (i.e. had more than 75% identical shingles).

5. To further refine our analysis, we created a block list to screen out common but non-substantive adjectives and adjectives related to horserace coverage. The blocklist included the following terms: ‘such,’ ‘more’, ‘much’, ‘many’, ‘most’, ‘former’, ‘other’, ‘hopeful’, ‘presidential’, ‘likely’, ‘democratic’, ‘least’, ‘close’, ‘less’, ‘political’, ‘national’, ‘own’, ‘public’, ‘primary’, ‘early’, ‘big’, ‘recent’, ‘private’, ‘federal’, ‘american’, ‘ukrainian’, ‘several’, ‘personal’, ‘major’, ‘likely’, ‘foreign’, ‘economic’, ‘military’, ‘republican’, ‘general’, ‘willing’, ‘non-disclosure’, ‘past’, ‘third’, ‘fourth’, ‘fifth’, ‘about’, ‘senior’, ‘so-called’, ‘last’, ‘post-debate’, ‘significant’, ‘three-way’, ‘closer’, ‘local’, ‘undecided’, ‘deputy’, ‘sustained’, ‘overwhelming’, ‘reproductive’, ‘low-income’, ‘expensive’, ‘minimum’, ‘total’, ‘free’, ‘universal’, ‘basic’, ‘extra’, ‘monthly’, ‘weekly’, ‘daily’, ‘daylong’, ‘decades-long’, ‘health-care’, ‘green’, ‘enough’, ‘key’, ‘environmental’, ‘public-housing’, ‘agricultural’, ‘initial’, ‘final’, ‘immediate’, ‘important’, ‘outright’, ‘heightened’, ‘nearby’, ‘few’, ‘statewide’, ‘congressional’, ‘legislative’, ‘upcoming’, ‘next’, ‘previous’, ‘inexpensive’, ‘affordable’, ‘fellow’, ‘pharmaceutical’, ‘opioid’, ‘preliminary’, ‘happy.’

6. See the conclusion section for a discussion of the caveats associated with our approach including additional information about trait validation efforts.

7. In a separate paper, we compare coverage of male and female candidates. Please see Conroy et al. 2020.

8. See for example: Miller, Hayley 2020. “Meadows Says Kamala Harris Eligible For Vice Presidency After Trump Promotes Racist Claim.” Newstex Blogs The Huffington Post, August 16. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mark-meadows-kamala-harris_n_5f393b70c5b6959911e5cac7

9. Russ, Valerie 2019. “It’s not whether Kamala Harris is ‘Black enough,’ critics say, but whether her policies will support native Black Americans.” Philly.com, February 11. https://www.inquirer.com/news/kamala-harris-ados-african-americans-black-immigrants-president-20190211.html

10. Weigel, David. 2019. “The Trailer: What the busing fight shows us about the Democratic Party.” The Washington Post, June 30. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/paloma/the-trailer/2019/06/30/the-trailer-what-the-busing-fight-shows-us-about-the-democratic-party/5d18c22aa7a0a47d87c56f59/

11. Rogers, Katie, and Maggie Haberman. 2019. “Donald Trump Jr. Shares, Then Deletes, a Tweet Questioning Kamala Harris’s Race.” The New York Times, June 28. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/28/us/politics/donald-trump-jr-kamala-harris.html

12. Our algorithm did not identify racial mentions when included in sentences as nouns (e.g., “Gabbard, a Samoan-American,” …) or as adjectives modifying nouns other than candidates’ names or pronouns (e.g., “Gabbard, a Samoan-American woman.”) Stories indicating she “grew up in American Samoa” were also not flagged as a racial trait by the dependency parsing mechanism. Thus, our estimates of racial mentions are conservative and may systematically undercount certain kinds of racialized messages. Even so, race emerged as a central theme for Harris. At the same time, it’s not accurate to say that Gabbard’s coverage lacked allusions to her Samoan heritage; but these references were not identified as adjectives by the part of speech tagging package.

13. Bowles, Nellie. 2019. “Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We’re Doomed.” The New York Times, August 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-2020-presidential-race.html

14. Herndon, Astead W. and Jonathan Martin. 2019. “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Reset Her Campaign by Taking on Trump.” The New York Times, May 8. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/08/us/politics/kamala-harris-2020-trump.html

15. Schneider, Elena. 2019. “Klobuchar’s opening pitch sidetracked by staff horror stories.” Politico, February 10. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/10/amy-klobuchar-2020-staff-horror-stories-1160780

16. Terkel, Amanda. 2019. “Exposing Amy Klobuchar’s Mistreatment of Staff Is Not Sexist.” The Huffington Post, February 22. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/amy-klobuchar-sexism_n_5c705bd3e4b00eed08341067

17. Thomas, Ken, Sabrina Siddiqui and John McCormick. 2019. “Warren pressed on health care plan at the Democratic debate.” Wall Street Journal, October 16. https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-meet-for-first-debate-since-impeachment-push-began-11571181523

18. Linskey, Annie. 2019. “In a shift, Warren responds to Biden’s ‘angry’ comment.” The Washington Post, November 9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-a-shift-warren-responds-to-bidens-angry-comment/2019/11/09/053a430c-0332-11ea-9518-1e76abc088b6_story.html

19. Viser, Matt, and Annie Linskey. 2019. “Is Elizabeth Warren ‘angry’ and antagonistic? Or are rivals dabbling in gendered criticism?” The Washington Post, November 6. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/elizabeth-warren-faces-a-new-line-of-attack-shes-angry-and-antagonistic/2019/11/06/dd27b4fa-00af-11ea-8bab-0fc209e065a8_story.html

20. Merica, Dan. 2019. “Kirsten Gillibrand embraces Fox News host calling her not ‘very polite.’” CNN.com, June 3. https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/03/politics/kirsten-gillibrand-fox-news-town-hall-2020-election/index.html

21. However, men’s coverage can focus on their lack of masculinity (e.g., Conroy 2015; Smith 2017).

22. Siders, David, and Christopher Cadelago. 2019. “Harris stops playing it safe, and 5 other takeaways from a raucous debate.” Politico, June 28.https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/28/democratic-debate-results-1386169

23. Martin, Lawrence. 2019. “Elizabeth Warren, the ‘Big Mo’ Democrat, is not another Hillary.” The Globe and Mail, June 25. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-elizabeth-warren-the-big-mo-democrat-is-not-another-hillary/

24. The reference to “dumb” refers to coverage of an exchange with Pete Buttigieg, in which she accused him of calling her “dumb” because she forgot the name of Mexico’s President during a live interview and doesn’t reflect broader discussion of her intelligence.

25. Crispin, Jessa, Art Cullen, Malaika Jabali, and Jill Filipovic. 2020. “ Who won the last Democratic debate? Our panelists’ verdict.” The Guardian, February 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/08/who-won-the-last-democratic-debate-our-panelists-verdict

26. Hook, Janet. 2020. “Tight polls, impeachment, billionaire wild cards: Uncertainty reigns in the 2020 Democratic race.” Los Angeles Times, January 13. https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-01-13/2020-uncertainty-reigns-on-the-eve-of-the-iowa-debate

27. Siders, David. 2019. “‘The surge is real’: Klobuchar makes late push in Iowa.” Politico, December 24. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/24/amy-klobuchar-iowa-089646

28. Cupp, SE, Ian Sams, Errol Louis, Jen Psaki, Scott Jennings, David Gergen, Alice Stewart, Paul Begala, Sery Kim, Van Jones, Sarah Isgur, Daniel Guild, and Joe Lockhart. 2020. “Bernie Sanders’ victory scrambles the race.” CNN.com, February 12. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/11/opinions/new-hampshire-primary-results-commentary/index.html

29. Jones, Athena. 2019. “2020 Democrats embrace populist message against corporations and the wealthy.” CNN.com, February 18. https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/18/politics/2020-democrats-populist-message/index.html

30. Merica, Dan. 2019. “Klobuchar to make presidential pitch in CNN town hall.” CNN.com, February 18. https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/18/politics/amy-kobuchar-cnn-town-hall/index.html

31. Stack, Liam. 2019. “Tulsi Gabbard, Democratic Presidential Candidate, Apologizes for Anti-Gay Past.” The New York Times, January 17. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-gay-lgbtq.html

32. Rubin, Jennifer. 2019. “The first debate: Who won, who lost and what matters.” The Washington Post, June 26. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/06/27/first-debate-who-won-who-lost-what-matters/

33. Astor, Maggie. 2019. “Tulsi Gabbard, Last 2020 Holdout, Supports Impeachment Inquiry.” The New York Times, September 27. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/politics/tulsi-gabbard-impeachment.html

34. Siddiqui, Sabrina. 2019. “Kirsten Gillibrand can’t break through – is sexism to blame?” The Guardian, May 20. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/20/kirsten-gillibrand-cant-break-through-is-gender-bias-to-blame

35. TIME’S UP Now. 2021. “Vice Presidential Announcement Media Analysis.” Edelman Data and Intelligence. https://timesupnow.org/work/we-have-her-back/vice-presidential-announcement-media-analysis/

36. See for example: Cadelago, Christopher, Daniel Lippman, and Eugene Daniels. 2021. “‘Not a healthy environment’: Kamala Harris’ office rife with dissent.” Politico, June 30. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/30/kamala-harris-office-dissent-497290

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Cassese

Erin Cassese is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Delaware. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from Stony Brook University. Cassese’s research has appeared in academic journals such as Politics & Gender, Sex Roles, Political Behavior, and Political Research Quarterly.

Meredith Conroy

Meredith Conroy is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at California State University, San Bernardino. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from University of California, Santa Barbara. Conroy’s research on gender, and media in politics has been published in academic journals like American Politics Research, Political Research Quarterly, The International Journal of Communication, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. She has also authored/co-authored three books: Masculinity, Media, and the American Presidency (2015), Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Race (2018), and Who Runs? The Masculine Advantage in Candidate Emergence (2020).

Dhrumil Mehta

Dhrumil Mehta is an Associate Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the Assistant Director of the Tow Center For Digital Journalism. He is also a visiting professor at the Harvard Kennedy School where he designed and teaches a programming course for policy students. He was previously a data journalist at FiveThirtyEight, where he built databases, maintained an open data repository and wrote about elections, public opinion and media. Dhrumil also has a research interest in natural language processing and text analysis and in finding journalistic applications for quantitative social science methods.

Franchesca Nestor

Franchesca Nestor is an Assistant Professor of Politics and Government at Ohio Wesleyan University. She earned her Ph.D. in political science from West Virginia University. Nestor’s research has been published in the academic journals Politics, Groups, and Identities and Science and Engineering Ethics. She is a co-author on the third edition of Contemporary Regulatory Policy.