The role of race and gender in US elections

While most attention seems to go to Trump's behaviour and Covid19's role in the US Elections 2020, we want to turn our attention to the role of race and gender. With communication scientist Penny Sheets Thibaut, we looked specifically at their role in news coverage and puzzled over why Kamala Harris appears so rarely in mainstream news these days. The US elections come at a time when race and gender are central to the discourse. The murder of George Floyd boosted the Black Lives Matter movement worldwide and brought racial justice firmly on the political agenda and into the campaigns. Riding on the wave of the #MeToo movement and the call for more women in power, Biden promised to choose a woman as his running mate, eventually choosing Senator Kamala Harris, while Donald Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court could also be seen as a his own promotion of women in politics. And what to think of Trump's desperate tries to seek the support of suburban white women? Race and gender matter in these elections. Penny Sheets Thibaut from the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam, originally from the U.S., studies and teaches about the role group identities-including race and gender-play in elections, examining not only how race and gender feature in news coverage, but also how these portrayals affect voters. In bi-racial electoral contests, media will focus disproportionately on the race of the non-White candidate