Women's Rights and Gender Issues in the 2024 US Presidential Campaign: A Video-Style Analysis of the White House Candidates' Campaign Ads

The paper aims to analyse the role that gender issues and women's rights played in the 2024 US presidential election campaign. The analysis of the communication strategies adopted by Donald Trump, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris will focus on the election commercials released by the three candidates who placed gender issues and women's rights at the centre of their political narratives. The videos were subjected to analysis in their verbal, non-verbal and production components. This was achieved through the construction of an audiovisual content analysis form, which was developed by combining the video-style analysis methodology proposed by Kaid and Johnston (2001) with the coding and content analysis methodology used by the Wesleyan Media Project (Fowler et al., 2023). Ultimately, the form was integrated with a bespoke set of variables designed to identify and classify the ideological and value-based references present in the examined multimedia texts, whether implicit or explicit. The objective is to understand the extent to which gender, family, and women's rights issues were pivotal in the construction of the different campaigning strategies and in the configuration of the axes of conflict on which the electoral competition was played/decided.