Class, inequality, and symbolic workers : how candidates construct economic identity in U. S. presidential spots (1952–2024)

Abstract

PURPOSE: This article examines how U.S. presidential campaigns construct economic identity through the recurring figure of the symbolic worker, a communicative form rooted in mid-twentieth-century industrial iconography and later reshaped by post-industrial inequality, cultural polarization, and the economic anxieties of the digital era.

DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: Using over seven decades of presidential general-election audio-visual advertising, the article traces the evolution of blue-collar symbolism from its mid-century roots in manufacturing prosperity to its contemporary role in narratives of decline, precarity, fairness, and populist grievance.

FINDINGS: Through combined textual analysis and rhetorical-economic interpretation, the study argues that symbolic workers function as a durable political shorthand for structural inequality. They serve as embodiments of national resilience, victims of economic transition, or moral exemplars of “real America,” depending on partisan emphasis.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: These developments reveal how candidate rhetoric now uses the symbolic worker not simply as an economic figure but as a vehicle for representing social belonging, inequality, and moral desert.

ORIGINALITY/VALUE: Building on the concept of group-interest Democrats—candidates who claim to represent the economic and moral interests of working-class voters through imagery of factories, miners, machinery, and industrial labor—this study expands the historical analysis to incorporate the 2020 Biden–Trump campaign and the 2024 Harris–Trump contest.