In the inaugural episode, Dean Banet-Weiser speaks to Sarah J Jackson, and Yphtach Lelkes, associate professors at Anneneberg School for Communication about how affective polarization, uncommitted movement, and race and gender are shaping the 2024 presidential elections in the United States.

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Hi everyone, and welcome to our new podcast series, Annenberg Conversations. I am Sarah Banet-Weiser. I'm the Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication here at the University of Pennsylvania, and I'm going to be hosting this occasional podcast to talk about the kinds of cutting-edge research on media and communication that shape our world and that we are actively participating in here at Annenberg.

In this inaugural podcast episode, I'd like to invite all of you who are listening to think through media and polarization as one key aspect of democratic politics, especially as it relates to the upcoming presidential election in the United States.

And I have today with me my incredible and brilliant colleagues, Sarah Jackson and Yph Lelkish to help us grapple with

this complex topic. They both have expertise in different parts of democratic politics, and we're so lucky to have you both in conversation with us today. So welcome, Sarah and Yph.

Thanks so much.

Thank you.

So,

My first question is to you, Yph, as someone who studies political polarization and public opinion formation, when looking at the election season, when looking at what's been happening for the past several months in the U. S.,

What are some of your findings in your research that speak to the kind of current political divide that we not only see and signs, but we hear in classes. We hear on the train. We hear everywhere. How does your research speak to these kinds of political divides?

When we talk about divides, there's a lot of different dimensions we could talk about divides on. Um, we could think about divides in terms of, of partisanship, identities,

race, racial groups, gender, whatnot.

Um, I think one big issue that's been happening in recent decades is that the divides are overlapping, meaning that when I tell you what my party is, I have a pretty good idea of other aspects of you. I probably know your race, where you live, more or less. A good chance I can guess your gender identity.

Um, And all this means that our partisanship has become this super cue that people rely on to infer all sorts of things about one another. And those things may or may not be true.

Do you see that this division is something that is stronger and more rigid in the contemporary moment than it has been in the past? Or has this always, I mean, you know, we can always talk about, we live in a system that is a two-party political system.

and so there's always been this division.

But it does seem sharper and more violent in the current moment, than it has seemed in the past. Or maybe that's just me being presentist.

No, that's

totally true. Um, it's been happening for the past, I don't know, 50 years or so, um, that the parties have sorted, which means that there used to be a good amount of liberal Republicans and there used to be a good amount of conservative Democrats, the parties were more or less more heterogeneous in terms of, uh, what they believed, um, often who they represented, and this has certainly changed over the past 40 years where the parties are now very distinct.

This means that partisanship just becomes so ingrained and so indicative of everything else, because once I know whether or not you're a Democrat, I know all these things about us. I know your

values, I know your policy positions, and it just leads us to just rely on these cues to make all our other decisions, whether in politics or elsewhere or who we want to associate with or who we want to date.

Thanks for that. And, and I'm thinking more also that, you know, what you said there, you know, in the past there were kind of liberal, Republicans and conservative Democrats, and it felt like there was, um, I know this is not quite the right term to use, but sort of, less divisive, I guess, or a grayer area, within the parties, with extremes at either end.

And so one of the things, and Sarah, maybe I'll turn over to you to ask you about, you know, this sort of gray area. Do you see that as a change from historical elections, or how is this uncommitted movement shaping the political discourse and political election in ways that actually can speak to, you know, what Yph is talking about, about these sharp divides?

Yeah thanks, Sarah, I think, from the perspective of

thinking about social movements and activism, one of the most important things that folks should understand is that activist organizations and protest against politicians and policies is a healthy part of the democratic process and has always existed for all of time.

It's not actually new to be seeing folks who are unhappy with the options within the system and expressing that. Social movements are necessary to a healthy nation, and of course in the United States we can name so many social movements that have been sort of a force for progressive, um, movement.

And so it's very interesting because, you know, I think I would ask you if a question about whether polarization, because we hear a lot about this word polarization, whether or not polarization is always a bad thing. Because I think there's sort of a mainstream conceit that it's talked about as if polarization is always bad, not being able to find a middle ground is always bad, but of

course, In social movements, we think about polarizing people

towards the goals that are trying to be by particular actors.

I agree that the discourse is polarization is bad and we should avoid it. Um, and I'm more concerned about kind of the descriptive aspect and the, the causal effects of polarization on various things.

So I'm interested in, has it increased? You know, and does it matter? Um, and maybe it leads to good things, maybe it leads to bad things. But the first thing that I'm interested in is defining the different types of polarization that might exist. Um, and we've, you know, I study mostly what we call affective polarization.

This notion that Democrats and Republicans dislike each other more over time. and then the next thing I'm interested in is

Does this affect democratic outcomes? and I think the answer is actually pretty

mixed. I think with regards to affective polarization, there's clearly good reasons why Democrats and Republicans dislike one another and there's not great evidence that this leads to kind of one side or the other, supporting anti-democratic behavior.

So that's one aspect of it. The more, I guess, causal story I've been interested in is, how does this kind of shape how we're thinking about things, how we're perceiving the other side, does it kind of skew our perceptions of what one side or the other side believes? So, I totally agree that,

the

media, and I think a lot of academics, do push this narrative that polarization is normatively bad, and I think that's problematic on its face because the golden era of low polarization was, you know, in the nineteen fifties, when many, many

people in the United States didn't have rights, and polarization didn't exist because those things weren't on the agenda.

Once civil rights was put on the agenda, we started to polarize. and so, I, you know, you can see how polarization

leads to good outcomes. What I'm more concerned about, or at least what I'm concerned about with regards to polarization, is when people hate the other side, do they have, clear vision?

Can they update? And process information in a way that's rational? Do they hold their elected leaders accountable? Or do they just hold their noses and say, I know Donald Trump is bad, but he's better than Democrats, so I will let him get away with anything, because in my mind, I have this perception of how bad Democrats are.

Thanks for

that. I mean, I love what you just said about both the way the civil rights movement created polarization and also about whether or not have the ability to, people have the ability to, hold folks accountable if they're super

polarized. And I think, going back to the question that Sarah asked me, you know, that's something that I'm thinking about, in terms of the role of activists and social movements in this election. You know, that we often, when we're thinking about

elections, are really hyper focused on polling, and voting behavior, and the messaging coming from the candidates. But that these pressure campaigns and communication and activism

that comes from organized grassroots groups can be part of really helping people to think or challenging people to think critically about both options that are available to them,

and even when the values of those groups fall outside of

the major party

candidates. And so, I think the uncommitted movement is one of these groups, right? The leaders have been clear that.

they're

willing to meet with Vice President Harris if they will be heard on their demands uh, around Gaza. And they understand that moving the sort of mainstream

candidates, um, is how political pressure works, even as they really are polarizing people who share their particular set of demands and ideas, in a particular direction.

And so, you know, another group that I have been following is this group called Seed the Vote, which is a group that partners with grassroots social justice organizations nationwide who have come together with the idea that, look, Harris might not be as progressive on many issues as activists who care about those particular issues would like, but they feel that they're more likely to be able to move her on those issues if she's elected.

And so, even though they object to some of the Democratic Party's policies, I think they're trying to address this idea that if folks are too polarized, they'll opt out of the election altogether, right? And so, for example, Seed the Vote was door knocking here in Pennsylvania this weekend, and they were door knocking for the Harris Walz campaign, because they think that

Sarah Jackson

And so they're really taking this pragmatic approach to, I think, addressing some of what Yph is nodding to about the idea that people, don't become so disenchanted or don't become so stuck in their, in their lanes and their opinions that they're sort of like, not able to engage in a sort of pragmatic way that will move politics, you know, forward.

How have activists kind of balanced this, um, in, in the context of this campaign, idea of pulling the agenda in one direction and trying to bring politicians with them,

while not going too far where politicians just say, I can't go this end?

That's a really interesting question. And I, I mean, you know, I think one thing we've seen in the contemporary era is actually that right wing activists have been very

successful in pulling many of the mainstream

and primary, um, Republican candidates towards their issues.

Um, and so in that sense, there doesn't seem to be, like, we've hit a, wall where the politicians are turned off by some of the more, um, right wing demands. This seems to be being incorporated. But I think on the left that question is interesting because

People always worry that if you target a candidate and you call them names or you make accusations that they'll stop, being conciliatory, they'll, they'll stop being willing to work with you.

And I think the sort of social movement theory around that is that it's public pressure that eventually moves the politicians and that

garnering

as much solidarity from the public around their issues is what matters as opposed to whether or not the politicians

like them. And so there is a risk that if you completely turn the public off, people

won't support your issue.

And I do think that that's just sort of a balance that social movement actors and activists are always playing, is being able to clearly articulate their demands which often make people uncomfortable, and also doing that in such a way that even if they turn some people off, they're shifting the narrative.

It's sort of called like cultural politics, right? They're shifting the discourse in such a way that more people are being exposed to their, those ideas and coming to care about those ideas.

So yeah, I mean you're right that it's sort of a careful, careful balance there.

Why is it asymmetric? Like why do Republicans not have to bring their public along?

My sense would be that part of the story is that the right is just much more hierarchical and in sync, you know, that it's very top down,

You can't just rely on one group all marching in.

That's Right. I agree with that.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

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Maybe, Sarah, you can start with, reflecting on how Harris's kind of racial and gender identity is being worked out in ways, that are different from Obama and the first black president and all the discourse that surrounded that?

Yeah, it's funny. I think something sort of started as a joke but now

folks who study identity and politics are really seriously using these phrases which is that, um, we are now post, post racial and post, post gender. And what I mean by that is that in two-thousand eight the democrats leaned into this idea that if we elected our first black president It was a sign that the country had overcome racism.

But at the same

time, they were initially very hesitant, to make too explicit racial appeals or to to explicitly call out racial animus that Obama faced, because they were very worried that that would turn off white voters. And in twenty-sixteen, you saw the Clinton campaign depend on a lot of the logics which were very reminiscent of second wave feminism.

Really

downplaying Clinton's femininity,

Um--

Pantsuit nation.

Yeah, talking very little about her role as a wife and mother, right, the whole pantsuit thing. The idea that she was fit to be a president because she could be a president just like a man would be the president. And I think on both these fronts we're now in very, very different terrain.

And I think part of that is that the Trump era and the Trump presidency brought with it a lot of open um, expressions of racism and misogyny that had been maybe obscured or that at least in sort of like mainstream elite media and politics people had come to

Um, and that also in the last decade we've seen an upsurge of social movements around race and gender. So the Black Lives Matter movement, the Stop Asian Hate movement, the Me Too movement. And so I think the sort of combination of those things means that nobody really seriously thinks we're post racial or like post, gender anymore.

And so, you know, I think the Harris campaign has done something really smart, um, which is saying, look, you know, this stuff, for example, when, um, Trump made the comments to the National Association of Black Journalists about how Harris had always been Indian and had just recently turned

black,

right?

Um, or, when the Trump campaign has made sort of like sexist innuendos, uh, you know, about her political career, it doesn't seem that the Harris campaign, or the Democrats, I would say, in general, are as hesitant to call these

things racist and sexist explicitly. But they're also doing something which I think is unique, and I would actually be really interested to hear Yph's take on this in terms of polarization, which instead of just saying, "that's a racist comment, Of course, you can be Indian,

and black, that's a sexist

comment", and, being very serious about it.

they started saying like, that's so weird. Like, why are the Republicans saying that? That's so weird. And almost sort of laughing it off and making it like uncool in a fun way to say these racist and sexist things almost, you know, in a way that I think, um, allows Harris to lean into all of her identities.

You heard at the DNC her husband talking about how she makes a mean brisket, and she's leaning into people calling her Mamala, which was like sort of a nickname started by her stepchildren. She's like leaning into this, these identities, and at the same time sort of just like making it fun and cool, it seems, to point out

that some of these more racialized and misogynistic lines that are coming out

of the Republican Party are, um, not just wrong but, like, uncool.

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And it kind of does

lead you

into, a question that I think is one of the key questions that

is at the core of the political discourse

in the contemporary moment, which is the role of misinformation and disinformation, because affective politics, if you're looking for that emotion, such as hatred or racism or, you know,

or misogyny,

to bind a group together to allow some kind of coherence.

So how does misinformation and disinformation, um, what role does it play in political polarization from your research?

Yeah. Um, I

think there are kind

kind of different elements. one is, is misinformation exacerbating polarization? I'm not sure. because

as we've kind of talked about, people are very set in their ways. I'm not convinced that new information is going to change people's minds.

I think the people who are consuming misinformation, I think the people who are, spouting terrible things are already extreme. And I'm not sure that misinformation is moving them one way or another.

Another aspect of all this is that our colleague, Duncan Watts, and others have shown, like, the amount of misinformation in the environment is pretty small.

So the actual effect of any piece of misinformation on polarization or other things, I'm less concerned about than kind of misinformation as almost a rhetorical tool where we are using misinformation to again,

bind the

group, to say, immigrants are aliens or Haitians are eating cats and dogs.

I don't know how many people actually believe that, but it's, a way of kind of separating us and them. I think it's a rhetorical tool used by some politicians to say, there's misinformation everywhere. Don't trust anything you read. And now I am the only source of truth. So again, I think it's less about misinformation as you know, what this statement says and the effect on downstream outcomes, than kind of

the project of misinformation and how it's deteriorating everything else.

Yeah, and I think, and, and then, Sarah, because you have studied misinformation and disinformation on different platforms, I'd love to hear what you have to think. But I also, I wanted to ask kind of both of you, I appreciate that misinformation is used as a rhetorical tool, but it also

feels like in acute cultural moments, moments of violence, of disruption, of chaos, that misinformation can actually, be used as more than a rhetorical tool, and I was thinking when you were talking, Yph, about the recent, different sorts of protest in the UK, after three young, white girls were stabbed to death and someone put out misinformation that the person who murdered them was an asylum seeker, and this is a huge issue in the UK right now and so it sparked riots and, mosques being burned and violence and, you know, in the streets and, and because of this one, even after the news kind of came out and said this person was not an asylum seeker, he was actually born in the UK,

It didn't matter because that was a spark, you know, taking advantage of a moment of chaos and grief and anger and sort of

unimaginable, kind of fear at what happened to these little girls at a dance recital. And so, it does seem like it's a rhetorical tool that has different sorts of force in different kind of moments.

And I don't know, Sarah, if you, in the work that you've been doing on this, if this is something that you've also noticed.

Yeah I mean, I think that’s interesting, and I would love to hear Yph

respond, because

I also think about the way that disinformation drove some of the understandings of the people, the January 6th, folks.

but you know,

the work that

from, from the perspective of of the work that I do, I'm much more interested in how kind of ordinary people are engaging with the discourse that comes out of the campaigns, and comes out

of these spaces. And so I actually am working on a project right now about how Gen Zers on TikToks are undermining

the propaganda and the disinformation that is particularly, like, racist or sexist disinformation.

I tend to call it propaganda, and I think this is very, this is probably, you know, like a rich conversation we could have later between the people who study myths and disinformation and people who think of it as propaganda. But, a lot of the history of how people have come to understand and think about race, has been disinformation, right?

and so the particular example that Yph just gave about what started as misinformation and then I would say became the intentional spreading of disinformation or propaganda, by the Trump Vance campaign about the Haitians, uh, you know, kidnapping people's dogs and cats and, eating the dogs, eating the cats.

One of the things that has been really interesting online is that young people have been using satire and comedy to undermine this. And so, again, like, this feels like a sort of, like, fresh new thing. Instead of just saying, this is racist, this is going to put people at risk, which it has.

Of course,

like, schools have gotten bomb threats and, you know, universities have had to close

because of their Haitian populations

in Springfield, Ohio.

But on social media, young people remixed the Trump line from the last debate "they're eating the dogs they're eating the cats" into a dance trend, which very much pokes fun.

at

how absurd it is. And so it very much sort of

uses this strategy of satire and comedy to reveal how ridiculous some of the disinformation that is being spread. Some of the sort of, like, bigoted or biased, you know,

propagandist kind of messages that are being spread. And instead of, like, sort of clutching pearls and, performing being offended, young people are saying, come on, seriously, like, you can't really think we're so unsophisticated and so gullible that we think people are eating the dogs and eating the cats.

And so this has become sort of, like, a trend. and that the, trend doesn't undermine how serious, the impact of some of this kind of information can be, as in the example that

you gave. But I do think it's interesting to see how, ordinary folks, who maybe otherwise wouldn't be, like, that engaged, right, on, like, thinking about propaganda or thinking about disinformation, are actually, taking it up in these playful ways that undermine it.

I think that's really interesting.

Yeah.

It's, I think what you just said also goes back to the weird comments where, I think a lot about

about

groups and social identities and

this image that the right has of itself as tough and serious and manly and the weird comments, the making fun of your, you know, your nonsense,

is neutering them. And it strikes right at the heart of their own identity, of how they see themselves. And that's, I think,

uh,

why it's so effective. You know, that it

weakens them to the, on exactly the part where they think they're the strongest.

I think that's

so interesting. I mean, the rally size thing is just like a source of endless amusement for me because it is such so clearly an allegory for other size comparisons and Obama even did it, you know, with a hand gesture at the DNC.

but I think this is really interesting. And I think you're right, Yph. And it also gets us back to affective politics, affective polarization, that this is about masculinity in lots of ways. And I mean, even to think about it as neutering, is it implies a kind of, a jab at your masculinity and the ways in which, Trump and other Republicans have just been like, so defensive about that it kind of reveals how important this particular identity is to the MAGA party, and lots of Republicans, that this idea that of sort of rugged masculinity and that nostalgic understanding of America and that that is American

identity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm just thinking about,

it's not only masculinity, but it's also

other memes or ideas that have been coming out recently, like trad wives, hot girls for Trump. It's this very,

traditional,

backwards, identity that they're trying to push as this is what it means to be a Republican.

and maybe that's what make America great again means. I don't know.

Yeah, I

think one of the interesting things about that, too, is at least if for me, because I'm in the middle of collecting data for this TikTok study about how people are making memes from the election, is that, you know, if we look at the demographic data,

Z is the most diverse American generation in history, right?

More members of Gen Z identify as being LGBTQIA, more members of Gen Z identify as being, like, bi or multiracial, right?

And so I think there's, like, something that's really interesting about

the

appeal of a,

let's return to a traditional type of gender politics, let's return to a period when we were othering racialized groups by saying they eat weird food and our animals, which is such a, like, straight out of the 18th century kind of, like, orientalist trope, right?

And um, so, it makes you wonder if the republicans are trying to garner younger voters, but then at the same time we keep seeing these things being written up about how Gen Z men

are actually moving more to the right. And so, I don't know if you have any of that in your data Yph, but I would love to hear what you think about some of those competing discourses about how supposedly diverse Gen Z is, but then at the same time, how young men in Gen Z in particular seem to be developing more conservative politics in

this moment.

And turning more towards religion, from some of the studies.

Yeah, um, I think political scientists talk a lot about how public

opinion is, is thermostatic, meaning like when policy and Zeitgeist moves too far to the left or to the right, there's always going to be some pushback. so when Donald Trump became president, the country suddenly became much more left wing on issues of race, on issues of immigration.

and I think what you see among young men is this kind of thermostatic or backlash happening where they look around and they feel that the policies have moved too far to the left. And the response is not necessarily let's just go to the center. It's kind of leapfrogging, right? It leapfrogs to, let's listen to Andrew Tate or whatever and, go extreme.

And I think that's one aspect of polarization is not that you move back to the center, but that you leapfrog from,

or at least it's perceived to be leapfrogging, you know, from far left to far right. at least in the eyes of the other side.

That's really

interesting.

Yeah, that is super interesting, and it's kind of a, a good note to at least stop this part of this conversation, um--

I feel like

we could talk about this for hours.

I feel like I want to talk to you, Yph, about trad wives and about hot girls for Trump--

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And there's so many things, um, that, that I've been thinking about in this conversation. And I also, am so grateful because while I know, what you both work on, this kind of conversation between the two of you really, I think shows us like how important it is to have a kind of interdisciplinary approach to thinking about politics and democracy and, affect in the role that it plays.

For sure. And I, it's like also one of the great things about the field of communication, right, is that Yph and I, as scholars, are trained very, very differently and so we bring in sort of a different set of language and a different set of training but we're

both thinking very seriously about these questions of democracy and, hopefully forward moving, not backward moving, democracy.

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Thank you so much for listening to the inaugural episode of Annenberg Conversations, and we promise we'll be back soon with some more amazing research and amazing faculty here at Annenberg. See you later.

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