The party in disservice: an ethnographic look at the Walter Dalton for North Carolina Governor campaign's relationship with the Democratic Party

The party in disservice: an ethnographic look at the Walter Dalton for North Carolina Governor campaign's relationship with the Democratic Party Public Deposited

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Abstract

This study investigates the ways in which the Walter Dalton campaign interacted with the Democratic Party during the 2012 North Carolina gubernatorial election. The evidence gathered through field observations, limited participant-observation, and open-ended interviews reveals the candidate-party relationship to be quite complex. I provide an analysis of the relations between the Dalton campaign and the various actors within the Democratic Party, and the effects of these interactions on diverse areas of campaign communication. I contend that the contemporary party-candidate relationship is more nuanced than Aldrich (1995) suggests in his approach to the study of parties in American politics, specifically his notion of the role of parties as being in service to candidates.

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