Researcher ORCID Identifier

0009-0003-5989-2314

Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Politics and International Relations

Reader 1

Mar Golub

Reader 2

Thomas Kim

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Rights Information

© 2026 Meredith Whitehall Morello

Abstract

This thesis examines how presidential candidates have invoked Appalachia in campaign rhetoric from Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 election through 2024, arguing the region functions not as a geographic reference but as a strategically deployable political symbol. Through mixed-methods analysis of 83 campaign-period sources archived in the American Presidency Project, a structured thematic coding schema traces how candidates frame the region across six decades using two analytically distinct modes: objective-economic and moralized-culture framing.

Five major structural patterns emerge: Johnson's institutionalization of the region as bounded domestic poverty; strategic silence during national instability; reframings enabling rhetorical reentry; symbolic portability across ideological projects; and, most recently, de-regionalization and embodiment.

This project contributes the first systematic campaign-period analysis of presidential references to Appalachia across six decades, extending scholarship on the rhetorical presidency by demonstrating how a regional identity becomes institutionalized as an electoral resource. Appalachia's rhetorical utility derives not from regional conditions, but from an accumulated political construction–evolving from a bounded policy object to a flexible symbolic terrain for arguments on poverty, industrial decline, and national identity.

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