1. Introduction
[1.1] Debate watch parties have become popular over the last five US presidential elections and are significant in that they involve practices and rhetorics typically found in American political culture, such as political consumerism, activism, and political cynicism. Audiences who participated in the 2020 US presidential election debates by organizing or attending debate watch parties further reflect why these parties became meaningful for those audiences and organized their meaning-making. While previous scholarship explores how debate watch parties in general increase political engagement (Kumler and Whittaker 2020), I am more interested in the typologies of the audience members as they participate at these events.
[1.2] Audience performance studies offer nuanced means of investigating fan practices that occur in localized communities and events, such as debate watch parties. People in modern capitalist societies, according to this branch of study, blur the line between audience and performance as diffused audiences, always performing as members of a society (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998, 68). The notion of the diffused audience refers to four interconnected processes. The first is that society is drenched in media (69). Second, media is constitutive of everyday life—music, television, and especially the internet are "integrated into the routines of everyday life" (70). Third, diffused audiences are created by what Baz Kershaw (1994) calls the performative society, with the example of a waiter or flight attendant who is "encouraged to add a flick of performative spice to the fare" (166). These last two processes correlate with what Nicholas Abercrombie and Brian Longhurst (1998) define as the narcissistic society, by which they mean "the idea that people act as if they are being looked at, as if they are at the center of the attention of a real or imaginary audience" (88). Members of a diffused audience are always performing, not just as they interact with media, but throughout their everyday, quotidian life. Thus, their very identity is articulated through performances embedded in spectacle and media.
[1.3] To analyze the nuanced typologies of these audiences, as present at past debate watch parties, I use concepts of audience performance. Specifically, I demonstrate how three performative roles I identified at 2020 debate watch parties use sports fandom as a framing device. Ultimately, rhetorics of sports fandom, such as team comradery and rivalries, were a predictable way for audiences to adapt the debates to their needs. This predictability benefitted audience members who I refer to as Public Seekers, Activists, and Marketeers. Public Seekers attended the watch parties to alleviate negative feelings about electoral politics, mainstream news media election coverage, and the merits of presidential debates through the public interaction that watch parties offer. They sought out the benefits of healthy agonism in public interactions at watch parties as long as the public was curated by like-minded individuals, that is, debate viewers on the same team. Activists and Marketeers, meanwhile, were watch party organizers who attempted to use sports fandom as a framing device to increase political engagement. But unlike Public Seekers and Activists, Marketeers were often not interested in curating public comradery. They instead used the framing of team rivalries found in sports fandom to advertise the debates as sports media spectacles.
[1.4] Most case studies of political fandom involve fans engaging in unauthorized behavior that is disruptive to politics. Scholarship in Transformative Works and Cultures has paid special attention to politics and online fandom, such as Amber Davisson's (2016) analysis of a mashup video created by online fans of Hillary Clinton. Paul Booth and colleagues (2018) offer the term "political poaching" to explore how everyday people in grassroots participatory cultures actively "poach" from various fandoms and political institutions to create and circulate political campaign messages (6). In these two case studies of political fandom, as well as most others, users mashed together content from political campaigns with texts and imagery from popular culture; enthusiastic fans behaved in unauthorized ways that are disruptive to dominant political discourses. In contrast, the 2020 watch parties organized by Activists and Marketeers used more of a sports fandom framing because the rituals and behaviors of sports fandom are often more rigid and predictable. Activists further used sports fandom rhetorics to frame political engagement in predictable ways, aligning with—rather than disrupting—elite campaign and political party messages. Meanwhile, the Marketeers with whom I spoke wanted to portray their bars and restaurants as nonpartisan businesses so as to not alienate any potential clientele; therefore, their watch parties often framed the debates as a sort of boxing match, without showing support for one candidate or political party over another.
[1.5] Studies of political fandom often analyze a fan text or fan object through which fans connect, expand, or retell to participate in civic action (A. Hinck 2019). Situating debate watch parties as political fandom requires a less literal interpretative lens in that there is no fan object or fan text from the sphere of popular culture. Instead, it is the political sphere that is being consumed as fandom. In this case, the televised presidential debates themselves are a fan text, or occasionally one of the presidential candidates themselves, but the narratives of sport rivalries and sports fandom provide the popular narratives that watch party organizers and attendees shape, share, and consume. It is often not the case that audiences at watch parties are fans of a presidential candidate or the debate itself in a way that merits framing their behavior as political fandom. There are, of course, watch parties that are organized around a particular political group—the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) for Bernie Sanders, for example—and my field research reflects how they expressed this group affiliation in 2020 through T-shirts, stickers, pins, or a life-sized Bernie poster. One could argue, however, that wearing buttons and hosting campaign events has been part of political support for a long time and that these behaviors at watch parties are not like the creative and unpredictable demonstrations of political fandom studied by Davisson (2016) and Ashley Hinck (2019).
2. Literature review
[2.1] Scholarship in the fields of political science and political communication has investigated how rhetoric and media technologies influence audience reception of presidential debates. These studies are generally based on large-scale quantitative methods, usually surveys, in which participants answer questions prior to watching debates to determine baselines for their feelings of political cynicism, political efficacy, and political information efficacy. Recent studies counter the claim that presidential debates have negative effects on viewers. Diana B. Carlin (2005) begins with the premise that political dialogue is often compromised by hyperbolic media and the strategy frame of political news coverage that, as communication scholars Joseph N. Cappella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (1997) argue, leads to a "spiral of cynicism" in the public's view of politics (224). However, Carlin (2005) ultimately counters this claim, examining the role that presidential debates play "in creating a public sphere for ordinary citizens to discuss public policy and provide feedback to those who desire to be our leaders" (225).
[2.2] Studies of debate viewership and media technology have uncovered the various ways in which audiences supplement their viewing of televised debates with a second-screen. Second-screening, also referred to as dual-screening, is the audience practice of using social media platforms such as Twitter to read commentary from other users, as well as posting their own feedback while they watch the live debate broadcast. Audience studies of presidential debates also investigate this social watching practice, the use of the internet and social media technologies, and their role in facilitating political engagement among debate viewers (Chadwick, O'Loughlin, and Vaccari 2017). For example, Mitchell S. McKinney, J. Brian Houston, and John Hawthorne (2014) researched live-tweeting behaviors during a 2012 Republican primary debate, finding little to no difference in social media discourse between elite and nonelite groups. Rather, nonelite users tend to co-opt narrative frames produced by elite groups, that is, national news networks and political figures (McKinney, Houston, and Hawthorne 2014). Studies have also emerged on dual-screen debate viewership via video-conferencing platforms such as Zoom. George Kim and colleagues (2021) found, after manipulating the social dynamics of a Zoom chat with either ideologically homogeneous or partisan chats during a 2020 presidential debate, that participants reacting to a homogeneous chat were more likely to engage in collective negative criticism of their out-group presidential candidate. This team mentality behavior is amplified in virtual debate watch rooms like Zoom that connect viewers more closely than on Twitter, and it is amplified even more in debate watch parties, where viewers themselves take on the role of organizing the party and advertising it to prospective attendees. Facebook has also been used as a platform for second-screening, with scholars such as Lindita Camaj (2020) finding that audience interactions on broadcasters' Facebook pages during the live 2020 debates contributed to rational and civil political deliberations.
[2.3] Debate watch parties are a social watching practice that may utilize second-screening; however, not all second-screening during a debate counts as a watch party. What sets debate watch parties apart is the higher level of organization. Second-screening generally places individual audience members on social media in an open fashion, connecting them to any users across the globe who are sharing debate commentary on the platform. Debate watch parties, however, place audience members in much smaller groups of several hundred to as few as four or five people. Unlike second-screening in general, watch parties are hosted by private organizations or individuals, such as partisan political groups, colleges and universities, or businesses. Laura M. Kumler and Brooke M. Whittaker (2020) explore debate watch parties organized by college and university groups, finding that these groups see an increase in student political engagement.
[2.4] While social media platforms offer the opportunity for users to offset dominant, discursive narratives, presidential debate scholarship without a fan studies perspective has shown little evidence of this occurring. Presidential debate scholarship alone does not uncover how audiences actively participate with or "talk back" to presidential debates (E. Hinck 2019, 7). This apparent passivity justifies interventions that apply a fandom studies framework to studies of debate audiences and second-screening. Recent scholarship has documented second-screening as a standard fan practice. For example, political scientists Deen Freelon and Daniel Karpf (2015) explore how Twitter users who second-screened the 2012 presidential debates utilized fan-like behaviors in the creation and sharing of humorous Big Bird and horses and bayonets memes to express anti-Romney sentiments. Fan studies scholars Amber Davisson and Ashley Hinck (2019) provide two other case studies of the second-screening of presidential debates: the Hillary Shimmy and Nasty Woman memes. This vein of fan studies emphasizes active audiences in participatory culture.
[2.5] Scholarship on political fandom uncovers all the various ways that people actively contribute to participatory culture and, particularly of interest here, political campaigns. Cornel Sandvoss (2012) argues for a broad classification of fandom that does not rely on the self-identification of individuals or groups as fans (70). Instead, Sandvoss isolates enthusiasm as a main distinction of political fans, as opposed to simply political supporters of a candidate or political party. One might expect to see behaviors at debate watch parties that correspond to the affective relationship of politicians or other political texts to fans (Sandvoss 2012; Davisson and Hinck 2019). Affect is defined as "a feeling in the body before it takes form in the mind and is given a name" (Davisson and Hinck 2019). Cornel Sandvoss (2005) defines fandom as "the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text" (8). This last definition emphasizes two aspects of fandom: a practice of consumption that has become a routine or regular commitment and the public's affective relationship to the popular narratives and texts being consumed. My findings show that organizers of a debate watch party hosted in 2019 by DSA activists in support of Bernie Sanders expressed the enthusiastic, affective environment of their watch parties in a way that corresponds to political fandom as outlined by Sandvoss (2012) and Davisson and Hinck (2019). Ultimately, though, the interview participants who expressed that affective relationship still framed it within the rhetoric of sports fandom.
3. Materials and methods
[3.1] The key theoretical underpinning of my first research question is the concept of the diffused audience. This notion emphasizes audiences' performative roles when participating in political communication, as audiences at watch parties do much more than listen and judge the candidates on screen. Debate watch parties, therefore, allow audiences to seek out and create a wide array of meaningful experiences not afforded by the traditional mode of private viewership. This leads to my first research question:
[3.2] How did audiences negotiate challenges in 2020 American political culture by organizing and/or attending debate watch parties? How did these parties help these audiences make meaningful experiences in relation to—but not exclusive to—political engagement, activism, political consumerism, political cynicism, and/or sports spectatorship?
[3.3] Theories within cultural geography about the social construction of space directed me to the bar rooms and online platforms used to host watch parties. The concept of creative narrative appropriation is helpful in framing the practice of watching debates as sport as an act of borrowing from one cultural sphere (sports spectatorship) and reapplying it to another (electoral spectatorship). This leads to my second research question:
[3.4] Even as audiences actively negotiated challenges in American political culture by participating in debate watch parties, how did different settings during 2020 debate watch parties—particularly online platforms and commercial bars—organize the roles that audiences performed?
[3.5] Prior to starting this study, ethical approval was obtained for all protocols from the institutional review board (IRB) at Bowling Green State University to confirm that the study met national and international guidelines for research on humans. Data were collected using four qualitative approaches to compile participant observations from debate watch parties. First, using Google, Facebook, and Instagram, I searched for past or upcoming debate watch parties. Second, I attended debate watch parties myself during the 2020 Democratic primaries and general election and recorded my own participant observations by engaging with attendees and taking field notes. I attended six online debate watch parties and six held in bars for a total of twelve events. Third, after interacting with organizers and general attendees of these parties, I provided them with a link to an open-ended Qualtrics survey that I had written for them to offer the basic impressions of their participant observations. With approval from Bowling Green State University's IRB, this survey allowed participants to confidentially provide their contact information if they wished to speak with me further in an interview. Finally, I conducted phone interviews with these participants—from all across the political spectrum—to record the nuances and detailed observations about their experiences at debate watch parties and the significance of these parties in relationship to American political culture. The participants' names and places of employment have been withheld to maintain the subjects' anonymity. The participant observations taken from my field notes, open-ended survey data, and interviews allow for an ethnographic narrative excavation of debate watch parties held in bars and online platforms during the 2020 presidential election.
[3.6] Ethnographic research is crucial to uncovering behaviors at debate watch parties that relate to fan studies. Occasionally, but not always, watch parties at bars can mimic the rowdiness of sports bars, for instance. My observations during these events were thus focused on the behaviors and performances of the patrons, their drinking habits, and how their drinking behaviors supplemented their performances as an audience. At each watch party I attended, I took notes, usually on my phone, detailing the bar and how it was used to host the event. I noted the number of televisions tuned to the debate, whether any displayed another event, such as a ball game, as well as whether or not a big projector screen was used to amplify the debate. I noted if any special interest groups helped promote the event, such as the Democratic Socialists for Bernie. It is my responsibility as a researcher recording my own participant observations to notate the feel of the room as well. I recorded big applauses, clapping, shushing, booing, and laughing—or when a patron shouted something specific like "eat the rich!" in response to a candidate's comment. Alcohol can be a large part of the experience for the audience as well, especially at watch parties held in bars. These sites of research illuminated how participatory politics and audience performance were organized by the setting and how audiences of presidential debates used rhetorics of sports fandom to negotiate American political culture within these settings.
[3.7] During the 2020 Democratic primaries, I was able to attend debate watch parties at bars in Ohio and Michigan during all but one debate night, from which I conducted seven interviews of approximately one hour each. During commercial breaks, I floated from table to table, using an IRB-approved recruitment speech to solicit attendees to take the online Qualtrics survey. My goal was to speak to everyone in the room who would allow me to introduce myself and give my recruitment speech. After the party ended, I could view the survey results and contact any participants who agreed to an interview in the survey's final question. Participants for these interviews included bar owners, campaign organizers, activists, and general audience members looking to socialize and perhaps network for future political community organizing opportunities. For the general election, I also collected data by attending debate watch parties and recruiting interview participants; however, due to restrictions and complications that arose from the Covid-19 pandemic, the setting shifted from physical bars to online virtual settings, such as Zoom. Interview recruitment during these watch parties occurred in the same fashion as in bars but using the chat feature of the video-conferencing platform rather than approaching attendees in person. The interviews themselves were also conducted and recorded by phone as before the pandemic. I was able to recruit eight more interview participants during the general election debates of 2020 for a total of fifteen interviews. Unlike political science, in which electorates are often constructed by polling data, the purpose of these interviews was to provide participants a platform in which to provide a narrative to reinforce, elaborate on, complicate, or even contest how their experiences at these events relate to dominant discourses in political culture and how they construct electorates, activists, voters, or debates in general. This interviewing method allowed me to understand the audience's active role in meaning-making processes during these events.
4. Audience performance at debate watch parties
[4.1] Debate watch parties are multivocal performances that signify different things to different people, and occasionally these meanings come into contention with one another. There is ambivalence among participants about what these events are meant to accomplish, and this ambivalence can often be found along the different roles participants play as organizers, hosts, or general attendees. My collected participant observations revealed that alongside the roles of organizers, hosts, and general attendees, the audiences at 2020 debate watch parties performed additional roles that are more nuanced and complex. I describe these roles as Public Seekers, Activists, Marketeers, Antagonists, Hosts, and Reluctant Partiers. Public Seekers were general attendees who joined the debate watch parties at bars or on online platforms to alleviate negative feelings about the debates through public political interaction, comradery, and social drinking. While Public Seekers believed that spectators benefit from public political interaction, they did not necessarily attend a watch party to facilitate further political engagement after the debate ended. Activists, on the other hand, viewed the televised debate not as an end in itself but as a means to join an activist group or increase the membership of a group in which they already participated. Marketeers organized debate watch parties with the goal of enticing customers into a business establishment. Hosts were in charge of two main responsibilities during watch parties: entertainment and guarding against antagonists who wished to disrupt the watch party. Lastly, Reluctant Partiers were spectators who did not join a debate watch party for the comradery of public political interaction but found themselves under circumstances that pressured them to attend. Often, these attendees would rather watch privately but perhaps had a technical issue at home or attended the party to appease a friend's wishes. In total, I spoke to ten Hosts, nine Activists, three Public Seekers, three Marketeers, and two Reluctant Partiers. I focus specifically on Public Seekers, Activists, and Marketeers, as the data on these roles offer the most insight into how debate watch parties during the 2020 US election deployed sports fandom rhetorics and framing.
[4.2] Activists held a performative role that engaged in enthusiasm much more than the other roles at watch parties. Activist participants mapped their watch parties onto highly niche political organizations and causes. An example of enthusiastic activist fandom occurred at a debate watch party I attended on June 27, 2019, in a Detroit bar, as organized by the Cincinnati chapter of the DSA. A number of attendees wore "DSA for Bernie" and "Metro Detroit for Bernie" T-shirts. Before the debate started, attendees used their camera phones to take selfies with a life-sized Bernie poster that had been placed by the front door. Members of the Cincinnati chapter made a speech thanking the DSA and Metro Detroit for Bernie, then passed out bingo cards and announced a 50/50 raffle. They spoke about Bernie's campaign strategy in five states, plugged an app that had been developed for the 2020 campaign, and also promoted local events that the DSA would be organizing. Finally, they asked for all attendees in the bar to pose for a group photo while holding free "Feel the Bern" bumper stickers that had been passed out. Engagement with the DSA and Bernie Sanders enthusiasm such as this allowed the audience to perform activism beyond just the DSA volunteers. Many organizers and attendees of this and other debate watch parties hosted by Activists expressed the enthusiastic, affective environment of their parties in a way that corresponds to political fandom as outlined by Sandvoss (2012) and Davisson and Hinck (2019). However, during their interviews, the Activists framed that affective relationship within the rhetorics of sports fandom.
[4.3] Unlike most case studies of political fandom, which are often composed of enthusiastic fans behaving in unauthorized ways that disrupt dominant political discourses, watch parties organized by Activists and Marketeers used more of a sports fandom framing than a popular culture fandom framing because the rituals and behaviors of sports fandom are often more rigid and predictable. Accordingly, Activists used sports fandom rhetorics to frame political engagement in predictable ways, aligning with the campaign messaging handed down from their preferred candidate. Marketeers, however, were far less likely to engage in partisan enthusiasm due to their desire to attract a wide net of customers. For instance:
[4.4] Interview Participant #4: I think different debate watch parties that may need broader appeal, which I would suspect are not candidate-specific, tend to be non–action oriented, even more so probably in a general election. Especially if the bar is proposing it just to keep the lights on, you might want to have the possibility of Republicans and Democrats being there.
[4.5] As this statement shows, Marketeers are often motivated by entrepreneurship and seek to increase foot traffic at the bar. Even though the bar owners and managers may have had their own personal political affiliations and voting habits, they generally marketed their 2020 watch parties as nonpartisan events. This is because they felt that to advertise their support for a particular candidate would alienate potential customers. However, Marketeers did use a sports fandom framing to generate general, nonpartisan interest in their debate watch parties.
5. Sports rhetorics of spectatorship, rivalry, and comradery at debate watch parties
[5.1] Debate watch party participants engage in sports rivalries and sports spectatorship rhetorics in a practice known as creative narrative appropriation, categorized in political fandom studies as retelling (A. Hinck 2019). This is an effective way to describe the prominent feelings about and performances of sports spectatorship at these events. The idea that political debate is often framed in metaphorical sports terms is nothing new in media studies (Balbus 1975; Lakoff and Johnson 1980), which documents how the use of sports metaphors has transitioned throughout the history of American political discourse. For example, the metaphor of politics as boxing later transitioned into politics as American football, as applied by both politicians and political media pundits. In addition, Jeffrey Bineham (1991), Kathleen Jamieson (1992), Cappella and Jamieson (1997), Jeffrey Segrave (2000), and Michael L. Butterworth (2014) explore how the rhetoric of institutionalized sports plays a role in contemporary American electoral discourse in ways that frame elections as games or horse races, audiences as passive spectators, or that promote political cynicism.
[5.2] Past literature notes the positive and negative effects of sports rivalries on fans in terms of perceptions of in-group/out-group social cohesion, group behavior, and public collective self-identity (Tajfel and Turner 1979; Berendt and Uhrich 2016). When it comes to politics and sports, research also indicates that sports fandom correlates to political attitudes such as support for the US military, as well as the belief that capitalist free markets benefit individuals better than more socialized command markets (Thorson and Serazio 2018). Katie A. Brown and colleagues (2020) investigate the connections between sports fandom and political socialization, uncovering the complex ways in which fandom during the 2018 Winter Olympics overlapped with feelings of patriotism and nationalism. Diffused audience practices of political fandom at debate watch parties likewise require a close examination of the strategies by which audiences of the debates repurpose sports rhetorics regarding rivalries, loyalties, and spectatorship to accommodate their goals at these parties.
[5.3] Creative narrative appropriation is categorized as a substrategy of diffused intertextual production, by which members of a community repurpose "the meanings associated with an intertext (or other symbol structure) from one community to another" (Atkinson and Rosati 2020, 273). Bernadette Marie Calafell (2007) introduces the concept of narrative appropriation in her examination of the Mexican American activist El-Vez, who utilizes songs and images of Elvis Presley as a way to repurpose the predominately Southern, white middle-class narrative of American meritocracy as a critique of US immigration politics against Chicano people. Joshua D. Atkinson and Clayton Rosati (2020) develop the concept as it pertains to virtual environments in their examination of DetroitYES!, in which a particular community member utilized narratives about urban farming to bridge a discursive closure that had prevented the web community from discussing Detroit's history of structural and institutional racism in any productive manner.
[5.4] Marketeers of debate watch parties made it clear that they were appropriating and retelling a narrative of sports spectatorship in their organizing of debate watch parties. The following statement comes from the manager of a bar/restaurant in Queens:
[5.5] Interview Participant #12: I was trying to come up with ideas to create more revenue and bring customers in. If we're doing sports, everybody comes to see sports. Why wouldn't they come in and watch the debates? I mean, you have both Democrats and Republicans, they can all sit down and have their discourse or conversations. And it doesn't matter whether I was leaning one way myself or not, that the business was business. Pretty much it's tied to sporting events. It's one against the other. Politics, especially in this country, has become a bit of a sport. Two teams hit each other passionately, and it's a rivalry like Celtic[s] versus Rangers [both from Glasgow]. They're the biggest rivals in [European] football, where literally people were killed—fighting and riots every time there's something going on between the two teams. It's one of the biggest rivalries in the world, and that's how politics has now become in America.
[5.6] This statement lays bare how the Marketeers' motivation was linked to the cultural practices of sports spectatorship and rivalry. Community formations in bars often coalesce around televised professional sporting events. Bars themselves provide a physical setting for fans to not only watch and discuss a game but to socialize with their local community and culture (Weed 2006, 2007; Kraszewski 2008; Dixon 2014). Professional sports and local sports bars, in this way, become a platform for community formation. These social processes and functions are a convenient infrastructure for organizing political communities during election seasons. Marketeer-driven debate watch parties thus allowed audiences to perform in support of their political teams in a manner that was not necessarily connected to narrative frames of activist networks.
[5.7] Public Seekers such as Interview Participant #15 expressed how the appropriation of sports spectatorship and a narrative of team comradery produced beneficial agonism that they would seek out elsewhere, such as on Twitter or other social media platforms, had they not attended a watch party:
[5.8] Interview Participant #15: Thinking about the sports analogy, I feel like there's an aspect that other people's reactions are contagious, but also, it's interesting and helpful to see how other people are reacting and responding. I was kind of curious what people would be saying. I figured most people there were going to be pro-Biden/Harris, but I was curious what people might say in response to something that wasn't necessarily the most progressive thing from Kamala Harris or something like that. I was curious if people would comment on those things, or if people would cheer for their candidate and boo the other candidate, and sometimes that can be its own kind of comradery, in the same sense of people cheering for the same sports team as you. If I didn't have the option to join this party, I would probably just be scrolling through Twitter. I feel that's very similar in the sense that I'm trying to observe what people are picking up on. Maybe people are picking up on things I didn't pick up on. Maybe people are challenging statements that I hadn't really questioned before. It's useful to me to have that expand my potential viewpoints and to consider some things that I should think about more deeply.
[5.9] Public Seekers were general attendees who joined debate watch parties at bars or in online forums to alleviate negative feelings about the debates through public political interactions. These negative feelings could be cynicism or disillusionment about the debates themselves, political media and news coverage surrounding the debates, or even broader distrust of the election and political system in the United States. Due to a political culture of distrust, Public Seekers found that watch parties helped them negotiate these negative feelings, that watching the debate in a social, public, or semipublic setting as part of an audience created additional dimensions of meaning that did not exist while watching solo or even among relatives or friends at home. So while many spectators had negative beliefs about elections, political parties, politicians, or politics in general, they found positive meaning in joining an audience of strangers who largely shared their political and social values. As such, comradery can be a powerful attraction for people who would otherwise feel anxious or upset watching the debates by themselves. Public Seekers and Activists who found that watch parties provide a beneficial counterweight to mainstream news coverage of the debate demonstrate Sandvoss's (2012) findings on how political fandoms promote trust among participants. For these partiers, the public curated by the particular organizers and/or hosts of a watch party is a trustworthy source of political agonism and interpretative community of the debates.
[5.10] This comradery was also important for those who found value in watching not only the candidates in the televised debate but also the audience, an act referred to as people watching. Public Seekers found meaning that is equally important, if not more, than the debate on screen among the audiences' reactions to certain points in the debate, like comments made by other spectators or what caused cheering and booing. This knowledge helped Public Seekers gauge their own interpretations of the candidates' performances during the debates in relation to a sample of the population, to the extent that the audience reinforced, complicated, or perhaps even challenged their beliefs. This knowledge also offset how corporate media and other news outlets covered the election debates, giving partiers additional perspectives not framed by political pundits, journalists, or reporters. In this way, the knowledge produced by people watching helped Public Seekers negotiate the negative feelings prevalent in American political culture.
[5.11] That general attendees benefited from public interaction is supported by statements made not only by the attendees themselves but by organizers as well. Interview Participant #14, a bar owner who organized and hosted debate watch parties as a Marketeer, described how bars facilitated public comradery and access to alcohol, both of which helped alleviate negative political feelings of either cynicism or disillusionment by promoting trust and healthy agonism within that public setting:
[5.12] Interview Participant #14: I absolutely agree with [the sentiment that we need to drink to get through the debate] because I absolutely despise every time Trump opens his mouth, so having to listen to the opposition for an hour and a half, you grit your teeth when you listen to him. And so, come get a drink. Generally, when you're looking for these parties, at least for me, you're trying to find like-minded people. I wouldn't go to a bar that supports the other side; I would go to the bar that supports my side. I'm a little skewed because as a gay man, I would generally go to the gay bars for this, which is usually skewed toward my political views.
[5.13] One of the goals of Public Seekers and Activists is to alleviate stress and other concerns about American electoral politics by attending a public event such as a debate watch party. This stress often derives from deep political and cultural fault lines between conservatives, liberals, progressives, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, and so on. The idea expressed here by Interview Participant #14 of like-minded people and sides is one way that 2020 debate spectatorship appropriated sports spectatorship. These participants channeled political comradery through the same type of enthusiastic revelry that accompanies sports team fandom, such as cheering the home team or booing the rivals.
[5.14] For many of the roles that audiences performed at debate watch parties, including Public Seekers, Activists, and Marketeers, public political interaction was a common goal. However, the publics were curated by a process of political branding and selected by fan participants. In other words, Trump supporters would only engage publicly with other conservatives and vice-versa when it came to Democrat supporters, liberals, or leftists. Still, both Public Seekers and Activists praised debate watch parties for facilitating the comradery of like-minded electoral spectators. Performances at these events defend why this practice worked so well:
[5.15] Interview Participant #6: I think when people react [to the debates] with a sports mentality, it's because they're seeing and allowed to put their ethics on full display. We have this kind of bad cultural norm of saying, don't talk about politics in public. Don't talk about anything of these things, and I want to be able to talk about and wear these things on my sleeve. It's a good opportunity and a catharsis to put it all out there in a public space. As opposed to tweeting or Instagram-ing or anything like that, now you're actually getting to go out in public in a safe space with your friends, comrades, and colleagues, and if someone says something you don't like, you boo it; if someone says someone you like, you support it. It is a team. There's branding associated with it. You rock the Bernie T-shirt; you rock the DSA T-shirt, whatever it is. You're a part of something, but it's bigger than you. And so it makes you feel less isolated when you see other people cheering and booing the same things you're cheering and booing. This is one of the places I can wear my T-shirt and not have to worry about people yelling and screaming at me.
[5.16] This statement expresses the connection of three important facets of debate watch parties: political engagement, the appropriation of sports fandom rhetorics, and public interaction. This public, curated and distorted as it may be, helped these political fandoms cope with feelings of isolation, alienation, political disillusionment, and cynicism. Furthermore, this ethical team membership demonstrates the affective relationship between fans and their fan object (here, Bernie Sanders). This affective bond then facilitates the meaning (here, ethics) that fans create in their reading of fan objects (Bernie Sanders) that "must closely match the fan's expectations reflecting the projected aspect of self" (Sandvoss 2012, 73).
[5.17] Interview Participant #6: I think, especially for people who are very politically engaged, whether you're on the Trump side or the Bernie side, or whether you're passionate about seeing a woman in the White House, politics are based on ethics, for the most part, and some people see it as entertainment, but if you're really engaged, it's about your ethics. So, a lot of your ethics can be decided by the person you choose to support. The person you choose to support typically reflects what your values are, definitely not all the time, but typically, and so when that part of your brain is activated, you know, it's like fight or flight, life or death. When someone boos or cheers your candidate, you're not just seeing your candidate get booed, you're seeing your ethics get booed. So, I'm a Bengals fan, and I love the Bengals and I've rooted for them since I was ten, but if someone looks at me and says they're a Steelers fan and says the Bengals suck, I might give them a dirty look, but I don't take it personally. But if someone came up to me and said "fuck Medicare for All," I would take that incredibly personally; I would legitimately get upset.
[5.18] Fans of Bernie in 2019–2020 were often more than just supporters in that they projected their own personal ethics onto the Sanders campaign. Furthermore, the appropriation of sports fandom facilitates an affective environment where debate watch partiers experience bodily, emotional responses as they watch, cheer, and jeer during the televised debates. These performances are affective reactions to either perceived attacks on their ethics or perceived validation of them.
6. Summary and conclusions
[6.1] Debate watch parties can be an effective way for audiences to engage in participatory politics, often depending on whether or not the party was organized by Activists or Marketeers. Many of the organizers with whom I spoke praised the potential of debate watch parties at bars to galvanize political engagement in not just voting but future grassroots political movements. At the same time, nearly every interviewee brought up some notion of the debates as mere political spectacle, as well as the debates' cross-cultural similarities to sports spectatorship.
[6.2] A fan studies perspective allowed me to examine how debate watch parties are meaningful to partiers, as well as how audiences actively contribute to this meaning-making. Unlike typical studies of political fandom, the audiences that I observed were engaged with a fan text from the political sphere itself—televised presidential debates or a particular politician—and not a text from popular culture. However, the affective nature of their engagement demonstrates how the debates are consumed as sports fandom. I analyzed this affective engagement in relation to enthusiasm, ethics, and the retelling of sports fandom narratives that occur in the discourse surrounding debate watch parties.
[6.3] By framing audience participation as a diffused performance, I described specific typologies of audience practices that contribute to the mosaic of sports fandom rhetorics engaged at debate watch parties. These typologies include the performative roles of Activist, Public Seeker, and Marketeer. I analyzed how the appropriation of sports fandom rhetoric, both during and in the making of these parties, allows participants to meet various needs. Activists and Public Seekers, who both construct their identity from the political media and spectacle swirling around them, used these parties as a safe space to engage with participatory politics. Activists not only framed the debates within rhetorics of sports fandom but, unlike Public Seekers, actively used these events to perform resistance politics. Public Seekers, on the other hand, used these parties as a safe space to observe a political alignment or team without a necessary commitment to prolonged civic action post-debate. Finally, Marketeers, not caring to pursue a political agenda, instead used these parties to capitalize on the political spectacle, offering a setting where patrons could meet safely to consume the debates as a sporting event.