Candidate, News Media, and Social Media Messaging in the Early Stages of the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary

American primary elections are distinct from general elections in several ways: by definition they concern candidates from a single party vying for the support of that party’s electorate; they can involve a large number of candidates competing for news media and public attention; and the large number of candidates can infuse primary contests with a wide variety of policies, issues, scandals, and other points of discourse. Primaries can thus be useful contexts in which to observe the development and competition of narratives about individual politicians. In such a context, candidates face two fundamental challenges: to be noticed at all and to be understood in a way that is appealing to voters. We are especially intrigued to explore the process of narrative development and candidate meaning-making in the context of digital media fragmentation, and our growing awareness that multiple conversations about political topics are happening in a variety of spaces: candidates must now communicate themselves to multiple publics arrayed across a myriad of media spaces—and which themselves have the opportunity to make their own sense of the campaigns.