First in their hearts
For some voters, the presidential race is all about decency and compassion. Welcome to the election for the first lady of the United States
The seventy-two-year-old nurse’s voice shook, not from the frosty conditions in which she had been standing outside for two hours lining up to vote, but because the weight of the action brought her to tears.
When she finally got back to her car, there was one person she wanted to speak to about what she was feeling: Jill Biden.
“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so emotional about my vote,” said Kathleen Burnham in a video posted to Facebook as she took off her mask, her voice wavering. “Dr. Biden, the turnout is incredible in Syracuse, N.Y. And I just feel like we have to do something.”
Burnham posted her voting vignette to a Facebook group called “Dr. Jill Biden for First Lady.”
It’s a page that has one obvious, if indirect, mission — to encourage people to vote for democratic candidate Joe Biden or, as he referred to himself at this past August’s Democratic National Convention, “Jill Biden’s husband.”
The video call-out — one of thousands directed at the former second lady of the United States mostly by women across the country — points to the distinct focus of a certain subset of American voters in this U.S. presidential campaign: Their notion of the candidates’ characters. And on the question of character, experts say, candidates’ spouses have always had an outsized role.
Perhaps never has that been the case as much as in 2020.
Lauren Wright, a researcher at Princeton University, has studied how spouses act as “secret weapons” within presidential campaigns — simultaneously reaping benefits of their outsider status as non-professional politicians, while offering the ultimate insider perspective into their husbands’ characters.
It’s as though they get the best of both worlds in the public eye: They’re not expected to answer the same tough questions as their husbands, and they are trusted as the candidates’ very closest observers.
The campaign for first lady is a fiction, of course, with no spouses’ names on ballots. Yet spouses have been an essential part of presidential campaigns, and even though the focus of this campaign is fixed firmly on the two male candidates, the roles taken up by Jill Biden and Melania Trump may prove more meaningful than those of any other campaign surrogates — including vice-presidential candidates.
“They’re not just a multiplying force on the campaign trail; they’re this unique force,” Wright said. “My research shows they’re more effective messengers than, sometimes, the candidates themselves.”
Wright’s 2015 research showed that Melania Trump, when she showed up on the campaign trail and gave interviews and speeches, did more to boost Donald Trump’s reputation than did appearances by the man himself. That’s based on a survey of 3,150 Americans, which showed independents were more likely to be persuaded by positive mes
sages about Trump’s character when they came from Melania, rather than from Trump himself or another campaign surrogate.
The Trumps, who met at a party in 1998, married in 2005. Prior to that, Melania had been a model, and started her own jewelry line after their marriage. They have one child together, Barron Trump, who is14 and usually kept out of the spotlight.
Wright’s research was an extraordinary display of how the mere presence of a person who has chosen to spend their life with a candidate can, over time, shift into a positive light the narrative of who that person is.
“She offers a different perspective than other surrogates do. She does appear to be the most effective messenger the Trump team has,” Wright said.
But, while Melania Trump made periodic, high-profile appearances throughout the 2016 campaign, her activity level has dropped for her husband’s reelection, having given her first individual “stump speech” of the 2020 campaign just this week, in Pennsylvania. Wright believes that’s a significant loss for the Trump campaign.
It also has created an opening for Jill Biden, especially in the crucial task of appealing to undecided female voters. Jill has essentially doubled her husband’s reach by acting as his surrogate at rallies and campaign events across the country.
“The campaign has benefited from her because they can be in more places at once,” Wright said. “She also is this force unto her own, she just is this really good campaigner and speaks with authority about her husband as a person.”
Jill Biden benefits from a strong reputation as a former second lady, and from having learned to work with communications staff to meet voters where they are on nonpolicy issues, such as family values.
“Jill Biden comes across as very open — ‘Look I’m an open book here, I’m just like your neighbour,’ ” said Katherine Jellison, an Ohio University history professor and frequent commentator on the role of first ladies. “I don’t think the American people feel they know who Melania Trump really is.”
Jellison is quick to point out that there’s no official job description for first lady, and that it’s essentially a made-up role with which the American public has become fascinated.
“It’s been a fixation for Americans, and obviously people around the world, at least in the mass media age since Eleanor Roosevelt,” said Jellison. “People are fascinated by American first ladies and feel frustrated if they feel they don’t know the person, and even resentful.”
But the fact that the role of the first lady is not defined doesn’t stop Americans from caring a lot about the potential first lady’s relatability.
On the issue of relatability, Jellison thinks Biden has a clear advantage.
Case in point: a video, paid for by the Biden campaign and released last weekend, in which Jill Biden recites her family recipe for chicken Parmesan. In it, she talks about the smells she associates with memories of her own grandmother, and cooking for her grandchildren in turn.
“It’s one of the things I’ve missed so much during this pandemic because I can’t have them over for dinner,” she says.
With some Americans, that’s the message that resonates the most. Jill Biden’s story as a mother and grandmother is well known, as is her long resume as an educator. She holds a doctorate in education and worked at Virginia Community College as an English professor while her husband was vicepresident.
Jill and Joe Biden were married 43 years ago, after Joe’s first wife, Neilia, died in a car crash along with the couple’s daughter. Jill became a stepmother to Joe’s sons Beau and Hunter, and mother to Ashley Biden.
In a personal moment at the Democratic National Convention, Joe recalled how he told his two sons that their mother had sent Jill to complete their family, after their loss.
“She is so likable,” said Lynn Anne Miller, who became one of the moderators of the unofficial but flourishing Dr. Jill Biden for First Lady Facebook page.
“Yes, we all vote for politicians, but people don’t intuitively love their politicians the way most Americans end up loving the first lady.”
The group, which has 26,000 followers across the U.S., was started by Brooke Clagett, an ardent Pete Buttigieg supporter who was disappointed when her candidate withdrew from the Democratic race, and was looking for ways to carry forward his key messages — joy, inclusion, and welcoming “future former Republicans.”
“I’ve always liked and respected Dr. Jill, but I didn’t know much about her,” Clagett said.
“I started the group on an impulse, but as it played out, I realized how Dr. Jill, like Mayor Pete, can bring people together by tapping into different aspects of their identity and connecting with people who share certain aspects but not necessarily others.”
Membership in the group has doubled in the past two months, according to Miller, and moderators make sure all the posts maintain the positive tone that attracted members in the first place.
The emojis in the group title, Miller explained with a chuckle, are essential. They are a bumble bee, an ice cream cone and sunglasses: All Joe Biden symbols that are more folksy than they are substantive. It’s a clear signal: This is a place for levity, not policy.
“More and more as the group came together, it was a place for people to escape the constant negativity of the campaign,” Miller said. “Jill speaks of Joe with such incredible devotion and pride that it is remarkable really. She’s such a unifying force.”
That’s the force that drew Kathleen Burnham, the Syracuse voter, to the group.
“Dr. Biden’s Facebook page gives me the motivation to put one foot in front of the other,” she said. “The group’s interactions are very uplifting and supportive, and Lord know we need this desperately at this time.”