One more thing that presidential candidates attempt to manufacture to differentiate themselves from their competitors. My initial response to Trump’s —Make America Great Again — was that it was clunky, trite, and hackneyed. Then began to wonder if perhaps I was missing something about it. Including if presidential campaign slogans are important and effective in winning or irrelevant to election outcomes?
Surveying past slogans, which appears to have started with William Henry Harrison’s 1840 campaign and Tippicanoe and Tyler Too (which is still catchy), I noticed a few things about these slogans. They contain one or more of three characteristics.
- Highlights a personal quality or unique accomplishment of the candidate.
- The times colored with emotion with the stated or implied solution being the candidate.
- Functions as the theme for a candidate’s campaign.
(A less frequent tradition is the anti or attack slogan that began in 1884 with “Rum, Romanism and rebellion.” Generally not effective or counterproductive. An answer anti-slogan has mixed results — Wilkie’s 1940 “No Fourth Term Either” didn’t help him, but the 1964 “In your guts, you know he’s nuts” probably further hurt Goldwater.)
The better or more effective slogans seem to have a higher resonance or concordance quality with the candidate, times, and/or theme.
In my opinon, Give Em Hell, Harry! hits all the right notes. (And just learned that I’m in agreement with many presidential historians.) It reinforced that Truman was tough, reflected the times (the destructive 1947-1948 GOP Congress), and Truman would continue to fight against the anti-New Deal Republicans.
Some strongly hit a single note. The candidate: “I like Ike” and “All the way with LBJ.” The perception of the times: 1980 “Are you better off than you were four years ago” and “It’s the economy, stupid.” And some hit no notes: 1988 “Kinder, Gentler Nation.” That one was reformulated and more effective a dozen years later as “Compassionate Conservatism.” The candidate and the times: 1980 “Change We Can Believe in” or the distilled version of simply “Change.” (Note: the word “change” was also used by Carter in 1976 and Clinton in 1992.)
One of the more pathetic ones was McCain’s 2008 “Reform, prosperity and peace.” Other than campaign finance reform (later blown away with the Citizen’s United decision) and of limited interest/importance to most voters was the only part that could have attached to the candidate. “Prosperity” by late 2008 for a GOP candidate was toxic. “Peace” was tacked on for a third “p” word and is rarely this inappropriate for a candidate. (Note, it borrowed from Ike’s 1956 slogan, “Peace and Prosperity.)
The slogans of most candidates, for both winners and losers, are unmemorable because they seem only weakly to contain one or more standard slogan characteristics for the person, times, and campaign themes. Obama’s 2012 slogan, “Forward,” fell too far short of the mark for his record and the times. (Might have been dynamite for FDR in 1936.) However, it injected an active instead of passive voice into a slogan and that may be a positive.
Consider three other slogans that fell short:
Kerry 2004: “Let America Be America Again”
Romney 2012: “Believe in America”
Paul 2012: “Restore America Now”
Again and again we’re implored to believe that there was some golden age in this country and we want to go back to that imaginary time. “Change” and “Forward” are far more rational and adult perspectives even if the candidate is more status quo oriented. Team Trump has borrowed from both. Less irrationally nostalgic and an active voice:
Make America Great Again
This thing hits three notes:
- Trump is Great
- These times suck
- Trump’s proposals fit with once was. The golden age for American men (roughly 1945-1970). (And yes, that appeals to a high percentage of women as well.)
A bit of tarnish on the Great Trump reputation, doesn’t deactivate the other two components.
While I’m far from ready to conclude that team Trump has consciously put together a winner of a slogan, have to recognize it for what it is and it does make the task for all the other candidates that much more difficult.