Social Media Framing of Minority Candidates in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary Election
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Date
2024-05
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
As the number of minorities increased in the United States due to immigration, there have been attempts for both the Democratic and the Republican party to diversify the platform by nominating minority candidates to political offices. However, for candidates to win elections, they need to appeal to the attitudes and sentiments of the electorate, which can be challenging for minority candidates as the base may hold racialized attitudes toward these candidates that can be detrimental to them in winning electoral support. In this study, I strive to determine whether Republicans hold less racialized sentiments toward minority Republican candidates than minority Democrats through conducting a sentiment, racialized content, and sexist content analysis using data from X (formerly Twitter). I collected 1305 tweets describing presidential candidates in the 2024 election, such as President Joe Biden, former president Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and Vivek Ramaswamy by hand over the course of the primary season. I hypothesize that 1) Republicans are more negative toward minority candidates of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party, 2) White Republicans are more likely to use racialized language to describe minority candidates than Non White Republicans, 3) Republicans are not more negative toward minority candidates compared to majority candidates of the Republican Party, 4) Republicans are not more negative toward minority female candidates compared to the minority male candidate, and 5) Republicans are more likely to associate minority candidates of their own party with other past or present prominent Democratic minority candidates when describing them in a negative light compared to when describing them in a positive light. Per my results, there are mixed findings with regard to whether Republicans are more negative toward minority candidates of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and whether they are more negative toward minority candidates compared to majority candidates of the Republican Party. This is because of the divergence between Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley in terms of overall sentiments as Ramaswamy is viewed almost as positive as Trump while Haley is viewed almost as negative as Kamala Harris. I speculate these findings may be a representation of the candidates’ character and rhetoric rather than race and ethnicity. However, it appears that White Republicans are as likely to use racialized language to describe minority candidates as Non White Republicans due to similarities in sentiments and racialized content ratios. While the race of the tweeter may never be confirmed due to possibility of falsification of profile picture, this may represent minority tweeters’ likelihood of echoing White tweeters’ sentiments and their comfortability in talking about race in discussions regarding minority candidates. These results as a whole provide insight into ways minority candidates can campaign to win support from the electorate, thereby increasing descriptive representation in American politics.
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Keywords
implicit racism, 2024 Republican primary, Tweets analysis, sentiment analysis, race, minority candidates