Week 6: Highlights and Polls

This week, I met with my advisor and continued watching snippets of the 1992 debate between Bush, Clinton, and Perot. Throughout the debate, the trend of remaining sedentary and close to the stand was constant. My advisor explained to me that analyzing body language in the duration of the entire 90 minute would not be practical, so I would have to choose some specific moments and analyze them in detail. Typically, the highlights of the debates contain memorable moments that resonated with the audience (for both good and bad reasons), so I started watching the highlights from the Town hall debates in 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016. In 2000, Al Gore intimidated George Bush by encroaching in on his personal space. In 2016, Donald Trump was generally awkward by pacing around Clinton and constantly grabbing the chair.

Later, my advisor and I looked through the Gallup polls of candidates from the Town hall debates to get an idea of which candidate was the perceived winner of the respective debates.

For my project, I finalized that I am going to analyze what is effective or ineffective for a candidate in terms of his/her body language during these highlights in hopes of eventually making a pragmatic guide for candidates during Town hall Debates. In the upcoming days, I intend on analyzing the body language in these highlights while focusing on whether such movements contributed to either a positive or negative image of the candidate/moment.