Can they agree on what to disagree about? Patterns of issue agenda setting in the 2020 US presidential election

Abstract

American voters, politicians, and media are increasingly hostile toward out-partisans and frequently disagree about the content of policies. This development raises an even more fundamental question about the nature of politics in highly polarized societies: Can the political actors even agree on what issues to disagree about, and why? To answer this critical question, we generate a massive new dataset covering communication by key actors from the last 2 months of the 2020 US Presidential election, including the presidential candidates (all tweets by Donald Trump and Joe Biden), the main news organizations (CNN and Fox News), and a large and original voter survey (N ~ 24,000) with daily representative data. Surprisingly, we find that the patterns of agenda setting in the 2020 election reduced rather than fueled agenda diversity and that the major political actors generally agreed on what the most important issues were in this otherwise polarized election.