ABSTRACT
Discordant Democracy confronts the experiences of the modern US presidential campaign, a two-year extravaganza of advertising, public and private events, and myriad interpersonal encounters with rhetoric, spin, affect, and sound. These experiences collectively shape how we form, process, interpret, and ultimately act out our political beliefs. While there are many possible methods to investigate political phenomena, Discordant Democracy employs a combination of ethnography, primarily from work with the Texas Democratic Party during the 2008 campaign cycle, and cultural studies, through theories drawn from the humanities and social sciences. The 2008 campaign of Barack Obama versus John McCain, and the 2016 campaigns of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders offer insight into the ways in which candidates appeal to the public and use sound-affects to motivate supporters. A key question of this book is: what role do we, the public and the electorate, play in convincing ourselves and others of a candidate’s viability, appeal, and power?
