Settle for Biden: The scalar production of a normative presidential candidate on Instagram

Abstract

This article performs a multimodal digital discourse analysis to examine how the 2020 social media political campaign called ‘Settle for Biden’ successfully encouraged young Progressives to vote for Joe Biden. In contrast to previous US presidential campaigns that highlight the extraordinary capabilities of their candidates, this campaign utilized the scalar and chronotopic production of normativity to highlight Biden’s ‘mediocre’ capabilities. The campaign’s focus on ‘settling’ for a mediocre candidate was feasible only in the sociopolitical context of 2020, at a time when Donald Trump’s leadership had come to be perceived as chaotic and dangerous. While using humor to make salient the normal nature of Biden, the campaign used semiotic strategies appealing to interconnected unmarked normativities associated with class, age, race, and gender. To draw on Hall (2021), the campaign produces ‘language in the middle’, constructing Biden as neither extraordinary nor reprehensible yet preferable to the abnormality of his competitor. (Normativity, scales, chronotopes, multimodality, intertextuality, politics, social media)*