Presidential concession speeches

This study examines the specialized communication patterns in Nigerian Presidential Election Petition Tribunal judgments through a genre-based analysis framework. Using Halliday's Generic Structure Pattern (GSP) as the theoretical foundation, the research analyzes the linguistic features, rhetorical strategies, and structural elements that characterize this specialized legal discourse. The study focuses on the 2023 Presidential Election Petition cases, particularly the Supreme Court judgment in Atiku v. INEC (No. 2) [2023] 19 NWLR, to identify recurring patterns and develop a comprehensive GSP equation for this genre. The findings reveal a systematic structure comprising both obligatory and optional elements that serve specific communicative functions within the Nigerian legal system. This research contributes to the understanding of legal discourse in post-colonial contexts and provides insights into how specialized communication operates within institutional frameworks.

The present study is a discussion of the transitivity systems in Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari's 2023 New Year Speech. While this speech holds sociological and semiotic significance as the president's last public speech of that kind, the speech, as critical as it is in understanding the president's ideologies and experiences in his eight years administration, has not enjoyed adequate scholarly conversations from linguistic perspective. Following the undermining of this critical element of the president's speech little was known about the linguistic resources and transitivity systems that organized the representations of the president's ideologies. In order to recover this important component of the discourse, this study employed transitivity systems rooted in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar to discuss how certain linguistic resources were contextualised to underscore the positions of the president on issues that were sacrosanct to the Nigeria's society. Using purposive sampling methodology, eight Clauses were identified and downloaded from BusinessDay News, Nigeria, using Google Downloading tool. Textual analysis was deployed to describe the manifestations of the transitivity systems that were employed to organise the president's ideologies and experiences. Results show that Material, Relational and Mental processes were utilised to inform Nigerians, of their collective responsibilities, for a secured country, among other related issues. The study concludes that transitivity systems are significant in organising the ideologies embodied in clauses. It recommends that more researches on President Buhari's 2023 New Year Speech should be conducted from other analytical perspectives.

Este estudo investiga os significados semântico-pragmáticos do modal – intenção (quero), obrigação (devo), capacidade (posso) – no discurso do presidente Goodluck Jonathan durante o jubileu de 50 anos de independência da Nigéria, e faz uma análise das implicações sociolinguísticas. Levando em conta as características sociais da comunicação burocrático-política, traz à tona uma abordagem coerente e bem definida na análise de discursos políticos. Tendo em foco o discurso do presidente Jonathan durante o 50º aniversário da independência da Nigéria para identificar o impacto do discurso sobre a população nigeriana, também para identificar os significados da ideia pragmática. Conclui que este não é apenas um discurso de congratulações apenas, mas um discurso destinado a lembrar-nos (nigerianos) que o futuro e o desenvolvimento como nação depende da vontade e da união de todos e exorta-nos a esquecer as diferenças tribais e religiosas e promover a unidade entre as diversas tribos. Lamento...

This study examines the presidential campaign communication of American sitting and former vice presidents. In recent history, four sitting U.S. vice presidents have run for president with only one (George H. W. Bush) succeeding. Three, Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, and Albert Gore in 2000, lost close elections, with Nixon and Gore losing in very close and controversial contests. In the two cases of former vice presidents who ran for president, Nixon prevailed in 1968, whereas Walter Mondale failed in 1984. All of these candidates faced similar rhetorical problems attributable to their vice presidential status, particularly in defining their relationship with the president and their role in the administration. This study is a content analysis and historical analysis of campaign speeches, statements made during debates, and television advertisements by sitting and former vice presidents in the elections of 1960, 1968, 1984,

This paper employed the qualitative research approach to investigate the use of epistemic modality (EM) in four selected inaugural speeches of ex-presidents in the fourth republic of Ghana. It was underpinned by the interpersonal metafunction in Hallidayan's (1994) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory which dovetails into the concept of EM. The analysis was done with the aid of corpus-based computer software-AntConc. The findings revealed a preponderant use of modal verbs with a frequency of 165 representing 84.2% while lexical verbs occur 13 times representing 6.6%. Adjectives and adverbs are minimally used with a frequency of 11 and 7 representing 5.6% and 3.6% respectively. The findings also revealed that Ghanaian presidents in the fourth republic dominantly use high values of EM to present themselves as bold, confident, committed and forthright in their utterances. Additionally, they were also communicatively sensitive as they use tentative markers when addressing sensitive issues. The study bears implications for pedagogy, theory and practice as it boosts the concept of EM and its appropriate use in political discourse.

In Ghana, a Presidential Inaugural Speech (PIS) is an important part of the inauguration and swearing-in ceremony, and the new president seizes the opportunity to promote his policies, and appeals for the people's unity, support, and trust in the new era. Using the Genre Theory (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990), the current study investigated the move structure and linguistic characteristics of His Excellency Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo's (President of Ghana) 2017 PIS. The study revealed that Akufo-Addo employed eight (8) generic moves, namely: 1) Salutation, 2) God's name, 3) Transition, 4) Patriotism, 5)Challenges, 6) Change, 7) Promises, and 8) Closure. The study also found that Akufo-Addo's PIS was characterized by the heavy use of inclusive elements (such as "we," "us," and "let us,") and discourse structure that reached out to all Ghanaians. Finally, the study concludes that, though the PIS involves reminding the audience of the campaign promises, it generally adapts to the audience, managing and respecting their (audience's) boundaries. The finding of this research has implications for scholarship on PIS, ESP pedagogy and further research.

When language is used to communicate to an audience, the listeners are given an insight into the intention of the speaker. This study analyses the concession speech made by President Goodluck Jonathan. It adopts the speech act theory in the classification of the illocutionary acts which are contained in the speech. The simple percentage is used in computing the frequency of the various illocutionary acts. Our findings show a preponderance of the representative speech act and the absence of the directive.

This paper investigates the first inaugural addresses of two presidents: Nigeria’s Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (2011) and America’s Barrack Obama (2009). These speeches have been selected because they come from speakers and leaders who are products of two conspicuous socio-political regions. Working within the Speech Acts Theory, the study considers the illocutionary forces in the speeches as well as the face-threatening and face-saving acts respectively, with the aim of identifying the similarities and differences in the speeches. The result shows that the speeches are relatively alike because each speaker speaks for his entire nation, regardless of his political party, and both speeches show a preponderance of ‘representatives’ and ‘commissives’. However, while President Jonathan’s commissives show predominance in the use of modal verbs to express intention, President Obama’s commissives consist of modal verbs and infinitive clauses to project volition and intention.

When language is used to communicate to an audience, the listeners are given an insight into the intention of the speaker. This study analyses the concession speech made by President Goodluck Jonathan. It adopts the speech act theory in the classification of the illocutionary acts which are contained in the speech. The simple percentage is used in computing the frequency of the various illocutionary acts. Our findings show a preponderance of the representative speech act and the absence of the directive.

An election campaign serves ritual functions for the American political system, beyond its manifest functions of determining which persons and interests will govern the country. The campaign ritual is analyzed in terms of Durkheim’s concept of the totem, including its regeneration and sacrifice. The dirty campaign is a sacrificial feast that establishes conditions for a proper mating between the candidate and the electorate. Voters declare their fidelity to the totem victor and receive a sacrificial promise in return

IntroductionA laborious search in the United States National Archives, the Library of Congress, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Library, the United States Department of State Library, Washington Metropolitan Area university libraries, and the Internet yielded a relatively small number of works on United States foreign policy toward Ghana and none that compares the policy instruments of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama towards the country. The available works comprise general treatises of United States policy instruments towards the country or look at certain aspects of Ghana within the context of West Africa. This paper provides a critical analysis of the available postulates on the topic. It is therefore imperative to say something about the Critical Analysis Approach before embarking on the analysis of the postulates for those readers who may not be familiar with the method.The Critical Analysis Approach can be generally defined as a sys...

Given the fact that presidential persuasion is a central feature of presidential power and leadership, this essay explores the persuasive strategies employed by President Buhari in three selected speeches. Although much research has been done on the rhetoric of presidents at crucial moments in Nigeria, most of these studies focused on international affairs or linguistic appraisal rather than domestic socio-political situations. Interestingly, many of the essays on this subject matter are vagaries from columnists and journalists with seemingly partisan disposition. The thrust of this essay, therefore, is premised on the hypothesis that the three speeches were meant to strike the psychological and political minds of the citizenry during the period under review. Do the speeches reflect any ideological preference, espouse grounded policy framework or unravel novel ideas to knotty issues in the polity with a view to assuaging the tension-soaked polity? The methodology for conducting this analysis draws upon Thoemmes and Conway's seminal work on integrative complexity. It similarly advances rhetorical presidency as a theoretical instrument; focusing on a singular regime-presidency in Nigeria as against the usual practice of comparative analysis spanning different regimes. josha.org

Defeat comes to politicians with shock and the default response of disappointment; nevertheless, its management has implications for peaceful transition, national stability, and aspirants' democratic and public image. Extant works on election speeches have focused on different aspects of meaning in defeat concession, but have overlooked the ideational aspect of the speeches. Yet, it has the potential of revealing how losing aspirants use language in the realisation of their experiential meanings, within the context of their election defeat. Therefore, this study investigates the linguistic representation of candidates' election defeat experience as embedded in variant themes, together with associated realities that suggest certain political postures. Using Thematics and the Transitivity system of the Systemic Functional Grammar as theoretical framework, representations were purposively taken from presidential concession speeches delivered in Nigeria and the United States, between 2012 and 2016, and subjected to linguistic analysis. The selected data are Romney's Concession Speech (RCS), Jonathan's Concession Speech (JCS), and Clinton's Concession Speech (CCS), which all together comprise 2,145 word corpus and 209 clauses. The analysis identifies the prominent use of four Transitivity processes, which are Material, Relational, Mental and Verbal Processes; and these encrypt candidates' defeat realities across nine themes: Appreciation, Concession, Good Wishes, Recalling Defeat, Closing Ranks, Inclining to Democracy, Framing, A Plea to Fight on, and Benediction. More specifically, the study reveals the actual act of concession to be a Verbalisation in a clause. The paper concludes that the ideational reading of a concession speech transcends yielding to bringing closure to an election, and includes resetting post-election narrative, renewing tarnished image, and keeping the fold together as political postures for future elections.

This study examines appraisal resources deployed by Nigerian online community to air their views, construe attitudinal meanings and steer public perception about the representations of presidential candidates during the 2015 election. Data were drawn from the WhatsApp broadcast messages of these online users on the representations of the two key contenders during this period namely, Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The study applies the tenets of appraisal theory. The study reveals that in appropriating evaluative strategies, online text producers inscribe and invoke negative and positive instantiations to portray an ideological stance about the contenders. The study concludes that WhatsApp provides suitable platform for Nigerian electorate to challenge bad governance, monitor the unfolding events in the nation, actively participate in the Nigeria's nascent democracy and serve as change agents in 2015, and suggests that adequate attention should be paid to interrogating the evaluative strategies citizens appropriate during electoral processes to act as the social conscience of the nation.

Defeat comes to politicians with shock and the default response of disappointment; nevertheless, its management has implications for peaceful transition, national stability, and aspirants' democratic and public image. Extant works on election speeches have focused on different aspects of meaning in defeat concession, but have overlooked the ideational aspect of the speeches. Yet, it has the potential of revealing how losing aspirants use language in the realisation of their experiential meanings, within the context of their election defeat. Therefore, this study investigates the linguistic representation of candidates' election defeat experience as embedded in variant themes, together with associated realities that suggest certain political postures. Using Thematics and the Transitivity system of the Systemic Functional Grammar as theoretical framework, representations were purposively taken from presidential concession speeches delivered in Nigeria and the United States, between 2012 and 2016, and subjected to linguistic analysis. The selected data are Romney's Concession Speech (RCS), Jonathan's Concession Speech (JCS), and Clinton's Concession Speech (CCS), which all together comprise 2,145 word corpus and 209 clauses. The analysis identifies the prominent use of four Transitivity processes, which are Material, Relational, Mental and Verbal Processes; and these encrypt candidates' defeat realities across nine themes: Appreciation, Concession, Good Wishes, Recalling Defeat, Closing Ranks, Inclining to Democracy, Framing, A Plea to Fight on, and Benediction. More specifically, the study reveals the actual act of concession to be a Verbalisation in a clause. The paper concludes that the ideational reading of a concession speech transcends yielding to bringing closure to an election, and includes resetting post-election narrative, renewing tarnished image, and keeping the fold together as political postures for future elections.

Politics and politicking in Nigeria has assumed a considerably new dimension. Actors articulate their ideology and programmes, and construct their subjects and experiences in diverse linguistic processes with a view to achieving political victory. This paper examines clause structures of President Buhari’s My Covenant with Nigerians to reveal the transitivity processes employed by the President in this famous campaign speech in 2015 presidential election. This study utilized Transitivity Processes, which is rooted in Halliday’s (1985) Systemic Functional Grammar, in order to uncover different process types and main participants in the speech, and to explain the functions which these processes perform in the speech in helping the speaker to convey his ideology to Nigerians and convince them to rally support for him. Specifically, objective of this study is the uncover transitivity process types in the speech, their frequency, function and ideological underpinnings. The st...

This study examines the discourse/counter-discourse generated in/by Reuben Abati’s treatise, proclaiming that some spiritual forces must have been responsible for presidential slip-ups characteristic of some successive Nigerian Presidents who have been operating in/from Aso Villa, Nigeria’s seat of power. It juxtaposes the ideology (the presidents are not to blame for their gaffes) in Reuben Abati’s treatise with the divergent ideologies embedded in the counter-discourses of two main rejoinders by Femi Adesina and Sonala Olumhense. It analyses the stylistic markers-cum-rhetorical strategies in the texts with the aim of uncovering or discovering their underlying ideologies. It applies Jeffries’ Critical Stylistics, a model of Critical Discourse Analysis which postulates that to critically approach texts, there is need for the reader to engage some specific tools of analysis to get a clear sense of how texts may influence the ideological outlook of their recipients. It reveals that al...

IntroductionA laborious search in the United States National Archives, the Library of Congress, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Library, the United States Department of State Library, Washington Metropolitan Area university libraries, and the Internet yielded a relatively small number of works on United States foreign policy toward Ghana and none that compares the policy instruments of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama towards the country. The available works comprise general treatises of United States policy instruments towards the country or look at certain aspects of Ghana within the context of West Africa. This paper provides a critical analysis of the available postulates on the topic. It is therefore imperative to say something about the Critical Analysis Approach before embarking on the analysis of the postulates for those readers who may not be familiar with the method.The Critical Analysis Approach can be generally defined as a sys...

Defeat comes to politicians with shock and the default response of disappointment; nevertheless, its management has implications for peaceful transition, national stability, and aspirants' democratic and public image. Extant works on election speeches have focused on different aspects of meaning in defeat concession, but have overlooked the ideational aspect of the speeches. Yet, it has the potential of revealing how losing aspirants use language in the realisation of their experiential meanings, within the context of their election defeat. Therefore, this study investigates the linguistic representation of candidates' election defeat experience as embedded in variant themes, together with associated realities that suggest certain political postures. A Plea to Fight on, and Benediction. More specifically, the study reveals the actual act of concession to be a Verbalisation in a clause. The paper concludes that the ideational reading of a concession speech transcends yielding...

This paper examines President Buhari’s inaugural address of May 29, 2015. It aims to elucidate the meanings encoded in the inaugural speech and the functions they perform in an actual context of use. It uses the quote, ‘I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody’ as the anchor for a socio-pragmatic analysis of the speech. The paper attempts to elicit how President Buhari uses language to project his determination and commitment to transform the Nigerian polity. Using the speech act theory, context, politeness principle of face and relevant sociolinguistic factors, this paper also provides an insight into the main intention in the inaugural speech. The speaker uses contrasting situations and collective strategy to project the sociolinguistic variables in the speech. Thus, the socio-pragmatic analysis of the speech helps to reveal that the main intention of President Buhari is to seek for cooperation, teamwork, understanding and support from everyone in order to achieve true federal...

The speeches delivered by Al Gore and George W. Bush at the conclusion of the contested 2000 U.S. presidential campaign are of especial interest because they represent a type of political speech that is virtually unique and, because the speakers and their staffs had no previous models to fall back upon, as spontaneous as political utterance currently gets. This paper analyzes those speeches, focusing on the relationships between their forms and what their speakers feel they have to do, and finds interesting similarities as well as differences, in style and content, between them.

In this paper I examine the American presidential campaign cycle as a series of ritualized sociodramas. Examples are used from the campaigns of 1988, 1992, and 1996 to illustrate the role of ritual, rhetoric, symbol, and media in the process of presidential power acquisition. These political processes are analyzed utilizing the concepts of sociodrama and rituals of rebellion extant in the literature of political anthropology. Specific cases such as the bus tours of the Clinton campaign, the Willie Horton commercials of the Bush campaign, and the case of Murphy Brown are examined in detail. The goal of the paper is to render an anthropological perspective on the process of choosing the American President in the era of teledemocracy. [American presidential campaign, ritual, rhetoric, symbol, media] Note from the Editor: I am delighted to include this article, accepted shortly after James McLeod's untimely death, in this issue of the American Anthropologist. I would like to extend my gratitude to Robin Motter for all of her work at the copyediting and galley stages to finalize this manuscript for production. Note from R. Motter: I hope that this paper will serve as a symbol of James McLeod's dedication to and love of the field of anthropology.

Concession speeches often mark the end of the tussle and jostle that characterise the political campaigns which precede elections. Existing studies on rhetoric in politics have looked at the pragmatic functions, stylistic features and politeness strategies in (American) presidential concession speeches.  The examination of the generic structure potential of the speeches is a worthy addition towards characterising the rhetorics of (American) concession speeches. This paper, therefore, examines the rhetorical structure, communicative functions and generic structure potential of American presidential concession speeches. Guided by Halliday and Hassan’s (1989) model of Generic Structure Potential, eight American presidential concession speeches which span over a period of thirty-three years were purposively selected for analysis. Ten communicative functions are identified in the speeches. Eight elements identified as obligatory are Phatic Greeting (PG), General Appreciation (GA), Personal Appreciation (PA), Call to President-elect (CP), Congratulating the President-elect (CPE), Regrets over Election Outcome (REO), Call for Unity and Support (CUS) and Prayer for America (PAM). The optional elements are Allusion (A) and Eulogising the winner (EW). This study thus concludes that the generic structure potential of American Presidential Concession Speeches is represented as:
[PG]^GA.^CP^CPE^{PA}.REO^{(A)}^{(EW)}^CUS^[PAM]. American concession speeches constitute a form of genre with a definite form. The structured form of the speeches depicts the American presidency as an institution with certain philosophies and expectancies.

The concession and victory speech is a ritual in American politics, described by Corcoran as a "rite of capitulation," in which both candidates at the end of an election sanction the legitimacy of the process, agree on the outcome, and start the political transition. Concession and victory speeches emerged as a distinct convention in the television era, but as web services like Twitter take on a larger role in electoral politics, traditions like the concession are being adapted to new formats. The literature has identified a series of substantive and procedural conventions for conceding and claiming victory, but it is unclear how these conventions hold up as technology evolves. An examination of 200 Twitter feeds from congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial candidates during the 2010 midterm elections shows that while candidates touch some of the traditional concession themes, the procedural rules to concession have not migrated unchanged to the online world. American elections unfold in a series of rituals. From town halls to convention speeches to televised debates, the media and voters evaluate candidates, at least in part, by how

Defeat comes to politicians with shock and the default response of disappointment; nevertheless, its management has implications for peaceful transition, national stability, and aspirants' democratic and public image. Extant works on election speeches have focused on different aspects of meaning in defeat concession, but have overlooked the ideational aspect of the speeches. Yet, it has the potential of revealing how losing aspirants use language in the realisation of their experiential meanings, within the context of their election defeat. Therefore, this study investigates the linguistic representation of candidates' election defeat experience as embedded in variant themes, together with associated realities that suggest certain political postures. A Plea to Fight on, and Benediction. More specifically, the study reveals the actual act of concession to be a Verbalisation in a clause. The paper concludes that the ideational reading of a concession speech transcends yielding to bringing closure to an election, and includes resetting post-election narrative, renewing tarnished image, and keeping the fold together as political postures for future elections.

This paper examines the use of futuristic rhetoric (deliberative) by the former President of Nigeria Goodluck Jonathan to communicate his re-election agenda during the run off to the 2015 presidential election. Two campaign speeches are analyzed: the declaration-of intent speech presented on November 11, 2014 and a speech to mark the formal commencement of his campaign made on January 8, 2015. The speeches are analyzed using two theories: Aristotelian rhetorical analysis and Chilton’s (2004) version of critical discourse analysis called the legitimization model. The analysis found out that Jonathan conceived the future as a binary structure.  This binary structure as presented in his speeches frames a false dilemma where only two choices are provided, namely, “old ways” and “moving forward.” Jonathan portrays his opponent as a symbol of the “old ways”, buttressing on the images of fear and brutality. He depicts the election of his opponent as threatening the country’s future. Contrarily, Jonathan positions himself as safeguarding the future for the next generation and touts himself as the person who has moved and will be “moving” Nigeria “forward” to “progress” when elected. The paper concludes that the futuristic rhetoric used by Jonathan in these campaign speeches reflect a tradition that evolved out of vestiges of colonial legacy, hence the need to always interrogate these legacies in order to reveal how Nigerian elites use these colonial discourses to legitimize their power and perpetuate inequality.

This paper seeks to investigate and compare the communicative purposes and effect of language in the presidential concession speeches of Goodluck Ebele Jonathan of Nigeria, and John Dramani Mahama of Ghana. The constructs of the Rhetorical Structure Theory were utilised to provide these insights as well as the functional potential of the texts against their historical and social contexts. The speeches were divided along pairs of spans for comprehensive analysis, and further presented in structural hierarchy to show how the speeches decompose into minimal units. The results show how the communicative functions of the speeches represent unity and coherence, and how both speeches share much more similarity than their general contextual similitude. Both Jonathan Concession Speech (JCS) and Mahama Concession Speech (MCS) were found to use Concession relation as their macro-relation, but in a slightly different way. The paper observes that the peaceful transition initiated by JCS and MCS would have positive ripple effects in West African countries preparing for election. The paper thus concludes that the democratic values and tenets of JCS and MCS should be canvassed across Africa as a democratic development initiative to bring political reorientation and improve altruistic goals.

Just over eight years ago, on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama took the stage in his hometown of Chicago on the occasion of a triumph: he had been elected by the American people as the 44th president of the United States, and the first African-American to take the nation's highest office .

Elections are sometimes seen as legitimizing institutions, promoting system-level support among citizens by providing them with input into the political process. However, prior research has found that is less true among the supporters of losing candidates, who often exhibit lower levels of political trust and satisfaction with democracy. We analyze two statewide surveys in Florida (following the gubernatorial and senatorial elections of 1998, and the controversial presidential election of 2000), and find that (1) losers do exhibit lower levels of political trust, satisfaction with democracy, and beliefs that government is responsive to citizens; (2) losers also are more likely to endorse "sour grapes" rationalizations of the election outcome, and less likely to accept "mandate" interpretations; (3) the meanings that voters ascribe to the election mediate the relationship between winning/losing and political trust, but have limited effects on other system support variables; and (4) perceptions of procedural fairness moderate the relationships between candidate support and system support. These findings suggest that the so-called legitimizing function of elections is far from a universal phenomenon.

The Eisenhower campaign planning board generated what they called “storylines”—staged situations intended to create positive Eisenhower impressions—for television and radio.  This essay contends that these storylines were also created with national newsweeklies coverage in mind as well. A major example of this would be the drama of salvaging the candidacy of Eisenhower’s vice president. After being confronted with a major political dilemma, Richard Nixon appealed directly to the television public with a monologue later commonly called “The Checker’s Speech,” but at a time when reruns did not exist and speeches were over when they were over, it was the news magazines that carried a positive narrative of the Checkers Speech for the weeks that led up to the election. Using 1952 texts mostly from Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report and Life magazine for a month following the Checkers Speech, this essay seeks to show that not only did the national news magazines reported on these made-for-television storylines, but also the closed door secret meetings and turmoil that surrounded the media event, while using remarkably similar rhetorical approaches and metaphors. The conclusion of this essay is that the major newsweeklies could not have possibly been so similar without help and direction from inside the campaign.