Presidential concession speeches: The rhetoric of defeat

Abstract

Concession speeches by defeated American presidential candidates constitute a readily identifiable genre, but they have been largely ignored in the massive literature on campaign communications and presidential rhetoric. An analysis of concession speeches by defeated presidential candidates from 7952 to 1992 reveals consistent patterns of strategy, style, and content. The speeches are formulaic and performed as an awkward, perfunctory gesture at a time of devastating personal stress. They are concerned with failure. Yet conceding is a settled convention in the dramaturgy of victory and defeat in the contest for power. The concession is a customary framing device imposed by the media, despite the losing candidate's other intentions. The candidate's dilemma is resolved in the concession speech by an elaborate periphrasis that converts the combative imagery of defeat into metaphors of sport, chivalry, and epic quest.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 52 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.