Owning Identity Struggles to Align Voters during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Political candidates draw on their personal identities to build social identity-based coalitions

In this chapter, Kreiss and McGregor focus on candidate and campaign strategic attempts at “identity ownership” (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2020) during primary election campaigns, especially through digital and social media. Identity ownership occurs when voters perceive a candidate as a plausible “prototype” (Jackson and Hogg, 2010) for a particular group. This prototypicality is marked by the perception that a candidate fits within and represents said group’s characteristics, norms, and values.  To date, a robust body of literature has analyzed candidate “issue ownership” (e.g., Egan 2013), wherein politicians seek to align themselves with the issues their party is perceived by voters as having unique competency to address. Here the authors build on their previous work to analyze and empirically document how during primary elections candidates craft rhetoric and campaigns create communications that attempt to make some identities salient in the minds of voters, align candidates and their platforms with particular intrapartisan social identities, and craft and “extend” their own identities for electoral gain. Their argument is that through communication, and especially given the affordances of digital and social media that facilitate speaking to narrow slices of the electorate (Kreiss, Lawrence, and McGregor 2018), candidates and campaigns strive to construct and convey the identities of the groups of constituents they seek to represent, including conveying information about the policies they will pursue through the lens of appealing to these particular social groups.