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Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons

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Theses/Dissertations

James Madison University

Ronald Reagan

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Full-Text Articles in Speech and Rhetorical Studies

“So How Reaganesque Exactly Are These Republicans?”: Strategic Invocations Of Collective Memory About Ronald Reagan During The 2015-2016 Republican Primary Presidential Debates, Rachel Moss May 2018

“So How Reaganesque Exactly Are These Republicans?”: Strategic Invocations Of Collective Memory About Ronald Reagan During The 2015-2016 Republican Primary Presidential Debates, Rachel Moss

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

My thesis explores the implications of the references to President Ronald Reagan in the 2015-2016 Republican presidential primary debates. I conducted a rhetorical analysis of the references to Reagan throughout these debates, while also considering their relation to public and collective memory theory. In order to analyze the different ways in which Reagan was mentioned, I divided the analysis into the undercard debates, mainstage debates, and the mainstage debate that occurred at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. In the undercard debates, candidates often utilized attention-grabbing strategies in order to aid their chances of moving up to …