“Why we are voting Biden-Harris”: A multimodal cohesion analysis of the Democratic party’s 2020 Presidential Campaign ads

Ana Belén Cabrejas-Peñuelas
IULMA — Universitat de València

The present study explores how text-image cohesion is achieved in a dataset of thirty-seven political ads in the playlist “Why we are voting Biden-Harris,” which is part of the 2020 Biden for President Campaign. A further objective is to analyze how multimodal cohesion contributes to persuasion in political campaign ads. Using methods from Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Hasan 1976) and multimodal views of cohesion (Tseng 2013; Bateman 2014), both quantitative and qualitative results are obtained. The quantitative results reveal that most cohesive types are of the lexical type, followed by referential, conjunction, ellipsis, and substitution. Also, the visual and verbal chains outnumber the audio chains and, thus, they are responsible for cohesion in the ads. The qualitative results show that multimodal cohesion is a powerful tool for supporting persuasion in political campaigns by appealing to emotions, a hypothetical future, rationality, voices of expertise, and altruism (Reyes 2011).

Publication history

Date received: 25 October 2022

Date accepted: 8 July 2024

Published online: 7 February 2025

Table of contents

Political advertisements form a genre, defined as “a class of communicative events” (Swales 1990, 45) to carry out “a communicative purpose” in a specific social context (ibid., 47), which in political ads is to legitimate political actions (van Leeuwen 2018, 220) and to persuade voters to pledge their vote to a candidate (Tseng 2013; Schubert 2021). For that purpose, campaigns use persuasive messages, which “form attitudes or induce actions in other human beings” (Partington and Taylor 2018, 4), on the four media contemporary campaigns they concentrate on: print, television, radio, and the Internet (Tedesco and Dunn 2021, 60). The Biden campaign advertising was no exception and in the 2020 US Presidential elections it aimed to legitimize alternative policies to the Trump administration and persuade the audience of their necessity by invoking pathos and blaming Trump for the country’s problems (ibid., 67).

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