sensitive to such appeals and so to were the campaigns. Accepting that the 1988 campaign was
one in which the race card figured heavily while 92 and 96 saw a diminishment of these implicit
racial appeals, here we ask whether similar differences emerge when we examine the candidates
own words on the stump?
Although each campaign dealt with a number of issues important to the America public,
each candidate chose a key issue on which to focus, in some ways defining his campaign. The
1988 election was largely about crime, coded in a way that appealed on race by the Bush
campaign. Governor Dukakis did not fight back on this issue too much in his stump speeches,
but rather focused on education in many of his appearances. Taxes for Republicans and
education for Democrats were the primary issues throughout the 1996 election, although Clinton
did discuss taxes more in 1992 than Democrats did in the 1988 and 1996 elections. Bob Dole’s
1996 campaign focused almost entirely on a discussion of taxes, while President Clinton focused
on crime (in a non-racialized form) and education primarily, and welfare and taxes to a lesser
extent, although these two issues still had a presence in his stump speeches.,
Results
So are democratic candidates more likely to address minority audiences? Do presidential
candidates from different parties raise the same issues with white voters? Do they discuss the
same issues to predominantly African-American and white audiences? Do presidential
candidates frame the same issues differently depending on the race of the audience? We take
these questions up now. First, we examine to whom presidential candidates speak. We then turn
to the question of what candidates talk about, examining this question first in the aggregate
across campaigns and then looking at the individual campaigns separately.
Convention