Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal, State, and Local Level During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• Published date: 01 May 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/1532673X231220647
• Author: Michael Heseltine
• Date: 01 May 2024

Article

American Politics Research

2024, Vol. 52(3) 187–202

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/1532673X231220647

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Polarizing Online Elite Rhetoric at the Federal,

State, and Local Level During the COVID-19

Pandemic

Michael Heseltine

1



Abstract

Times of national and international crisis are often unifying events which lower levels of division within the public and between

political elites. Yet, COVID-19 pandemic responses in the United States have been viewedas markedly polarized. Using a

comprehensive dataset of over four million social media posts sent by local, state, and federal level political off‌icials between

January 2020 and September 2022, this paper explores the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic was a rhetorically unifying

or divisive event, and whether rhetorical responses differed across levels of government. The results show that federal level

off‌icials were less likely to message about COVID-19 and were more likely to do so in a pola rizing fashion compared to state and

local off‌icials. Temporally, in the early stages of the pandemic there was indeed a collective rhetorical de-polarization across all

levels of government. However, as the pandemic progressed, COVID-related messaging became more polarizing, especially

among Republicans. Evidence also emerges of dynamic responsiveness from elected off‌icials, with relativeness attentiveness to

COVID increasing and polarizing rhetoric decreasing during time periods when local case counts were relatively high. These

f‌indings suggest that rhetorical unity is still possible, even in times of high political polarization, but that this unity is also short-

lived and tempered by political and electoral considerations.

Keywords

COVID-19, polarization, rhetoric, political communication, social media

Just as general levels of political and affective polarization

have risen in the United States in recent years (Iyengar 2019;

Mason, 2018;Theriault, 2008) political discourse in the

United States has also become increasingly hostile, partisan,

and divided (Ballard et al, 2022b;Herbst, 2010;Sydnor,

2019), both among the public and among political elites

(Berry & Sobieraj, 2014;Herbst, 2010;Jaidka et al., 2019;

Theocharis et al., 2016). However, the onset and continuation

of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 offered a rare oppor-

tunity for greater national unity and a rhetoricaldisarmament

from political leaders in the name of crisis mitigation.

In times of national crisis, unity as a rhetorical strategy

is often expected, built on rally around the f‌lag effects

(Mueller, 1970) and the need for common direction to

successfully navigate diff‌icult national conditions

(Albertson & Gadarian, 2015). Such rallying effects were

last seen in the United States immediately following the

9/11 terrorist attacks and at the beginning of the war in Iraq,

yet questions remain as to whether such effects could

similarly manifest in the contemporary political environ-

ment where political and rhetorical partisanship have be-

come increasingly entrenched.

Indeed, elected off‌icials and political candidates in

2020 were more uncivil in their social media communications

than ever before (Heseltine & Dorsey, 2022) and showed little

signs of reducing levels of divisive rhetoric (Ballard et al,

2022b), largely in part due to concurrent hotly contested

congressional and presidential elections in 2020 which also

incentivized party polarized competition and division.

Given these dueling dynamics, this paper explores the

extent to which elected off‌icials in the United States at the

federal, state, and local level sought to rhetorically unite or

polarize the public during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on

their online communications on Twitter and Facebook across

the period January 2020 to September 2022. Using a machine

learning text classif‌ier, specif‌ically f‌ine-tuned to detect po-

larizing rhetoric from politicians on social media, roughly

1

University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Michael Heseltine, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstratt 11, Amsterdam

1000 GG, The Netherlands.

Email: m.j.heseltine@uva.nl

3,200,000 tweets and 1,200,000 Facebook posts sent by

federal, state, and local off‌icials are analyzed for the presence

of polarizing rhetoric, with sub-analyses focused on the

586,003 tweets and 243,687 Facebook posts which specif‌i-

cally referenced COVID-19-related topics or the pandemic

more generally.

The results show that, at the onset of the pandemic, elected

off‌icials quickly turned their focus to addressing COVID-19,

with roughly half of all messages sent from all levels of

government focusing on COVID-related issues during the

f‌irst 3 months of the pandemic. This attentiveness quickly

fell, however, especially among federal off‌icials, with

Governors, followed by Mayors, retaining the greatest focus

on COVID across the pandemic timeline, driven primarily by

the need to oversee and implement testing, prevention, and

vaccination initiatives at the local rather than national level.

In terms of the pandemic as a rhetorically unifying event,

the levels of polarizing rhetoric did fall sharply for all levels

of government at the onset of the pandemic and COVID

communications in particular were less polarizing then non-

COVID communications, suggesting that elected off‌icials

generally choose to take a more unifying approach to rhetoric

around COVID-19. However, rhetorical strategies were

inf‌luenced by the electoral calendar, with COVID commu-

nications by federal off‌icials actually becoming more po-

larizing than non-COVID communications in the runup to the

2020 general election. Levels of polarizing COVID rhetoric

then sharply fell immediately after election day, suggesting a

rhetorical weaponisation of the pandemic for electoral pur-

poses. As the pandemic progressed, clear divergences in

polarizing approaches to COVID also emerged along partisan

lines, ref‌lecting strategic and ideological differences based on

the changing balance of power in government following the

2020 federal elections.

Communicating in Crisis

In times of crisis, political leaders may be able to foster a

“rally around the f‌lag effect”, which drives an increase in

public approval (Mueller, 1970;Newman & Forcehimes,

2010). Political leaders can harness this rallying effect

through unifying rhetoric (Feinstein, 2020), creating a re-

duction in national partisan divisions. Major crises with an

international component are generally most conducive to

rallying effects (Mueller, 1970), with media attentiveness

helping to increase public rallying responses (Oneal & Bryan,

1995). The COVID-19 pandemic was, undoubtedly, the most

covered news story of 2020, across the globe, meaning that

the public was likely to be particularly attuned to elite

messaging on this issue (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015;Coan

et al., 2021). The extent to which leaders emphasized uni-

fying or polarizing frames, therefore, likely served to shape

public opinion around the pandemic (Ladd & Lenz, 2009;

Lenz, 2012).

Of course, different types of crises may call for and foster

differing types of rhetorical responses. Health crises, as

opposed to military crises, are less political in nature, in-

creasing the potential for collective solidarity. However, in

the absence of an international component and the need to

unify against a common opponent, rallying effects may also

be muted. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic was very

much a unique crisis, meaning that the conventional unity and

rallying effects may not map neatly onto a crisis on a scale not

seen globally for at least a century (Gates, 2020). Indeed,

rallying effects in public support have generally been found to

be immediate (Bol et al., 2021;Bækgaard et al., 2020;

Hegewald & Schraff, 2022) but short-lived (Johansson et al.,

2021, globally, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

A rallying effect, therefore, is not guaranteed (Van Aelst &

Blumler, 2021), even in times of national emergency

(Holman et al., 2021), with factors of timing, incumbency and

political partisanship shaping how the public and government

off‌icials respond to the crisis (Grossman et al., 2020;Merolla

& Zechmeister, 2013). During a health crisis, opposition

leaders may instead f‌ind strategic reason to attack the in-

cumbent government for perceived failings (Chowanietz,

2011;Druckman et al., 2021). Indeed, the combination of

a highly nationalized and polarized political environment

coupled with an ongoing election campaign for the

2020 federal elections may mean that elected off‌icials in the

United States both experienced and had incentive to directly

foster polarized responses to the pandemic along partisan

political lines (Montalvo, 2011).

To this end, far from being a period of increased unity and

rhetorical decorum, Heseltine and Dorsey (2022) f‌ind that

rhetoric from political candidates on Twitter during

2020 election campaign was especially uncivil, with con-

gressional candidates exhibiting higher levels of incivility

than in any cycle prior. Incivility was also high within public

discourse around the 2020 elections (Trif‌iro et al., 2021), with

the Democratic primaries and then the fall general election

campaigning keeping electoral politics at the center of public

debate throughout 2020. On top of this, the f‌irst wave of

COVID-19 emerged during the tenure of sitting president and

presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose unique brand of

hostile and divisive rhetoric (Stuckey, 2021) was unlikely to

take a more unifying turn in response to the outbreak and

spread of the virus. Trump’s election in 2016 also directly

inf‌luenced the rhetoric of other elected off‌icials, with steep

and signif‌icant increases in polarizing and uncivil rhetoric

occurring throughout the Trump Presidency (Ballard et al.,

2022a,2022b). Conditions for public discourse during the

core f‌irst stages of the pandemic then, where outbreaks and

partisan electoral politics overlapped, were therefore not the

most fertile for a collective turn towards a more unifying

rhetorical posture.

Therefore, while international evidence has emerged of a

rallying effect at the onset of the pandemic (Kritzinger et al.,

2021), behavioral responses in the United States were

188 American Politics Research 52(3)