Are Masks The New Campaign Button?

Reported by: Aurora Biggers

Photographed by: Danny Walker

NEWBERG, Ore. – While the 2016 election was all about red “Make America Great Again” hats and blue Hillary Clinton buttons, this year, a new venue to express political affiliation has emerged: the mask.

In the United States, the very act of wearing a mask may be considered a political statement. Mask mandates across the U.S. have caused division within the nation. To parody Shakespeare, “To wear a mask or not to wear a mask, that is the question.”

In an article about the politicization of masks, Politico noted that campaign advertisements for Trump and Biden were more likely to include people wearing masks in ads targeting suburban areas than ads targeting more rural, GOP-leaning regions of the nation.

When asked whether wearing a mask is a political statement, Mark Weinert, George Fox University (GFU) associate professor of history said, “It seems to have become so, though I find it kind of puzzling … face masks themselves have become a political issue.”

This Gallup poll, shared with The Crescent by Weinert, shows precisely how divided the U.S. is on the face mask issue. Democrats are 91.5% likely to wear a face mask indoors, while Republicans are 48% likely to do so. Within both Democratic and Republican circles, women are more likely to wear a mask than men.

Beyond the inherent political statement the mask makes is the potential for political expression. A subset of the face mask design industry is explicitly political. Voters can purchase face masks with messages supporting Trump, Biden, Black Lives Matter, gun rights, and any number of beliefs within the political milieu — a phenomenon unique to 2020. Even mask-wearers of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, which abutted the 1920 election, were less flamboyant in their mask expression.

According to Weinert, face masks could be the new campaign button. “I don’t see it as any different from things like them that we’ve had through history,” Weinert said, of things like campaign buttons, t-shirts, and bumper stickers. “Campaign buttons are not as popular as they were a few decades ago. I don’t see too many of them these days,” he said.

Weinert is currently teaching a presidential elections course at GFU, wherein an array of political views are present among the students. Weinert tries to keep the atmosphere neutral and bipartisan, and in an attempt to do so, oscillates between wearing Trump and Biden masks.

While the campaign button may be a dying relic of 20th and 21st century politics, campaign merchandise is still booming. In part due to the runaway success of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) trucker hats, Trump has generated $4 million off merch, according to the campaign. Biden’s campaign sells face masks and so does Trump’s, though only after Biden’s campaign added face masks to their merch repertoire. Additionally, Biden’s campaign paused the sale of merch for several weeks due to COVID-19 concerns and never ran any merchandising advertisements.

Yet, Weinert says he has noticed a decline in sporting political identifiers in public. “I do think since our politics have become more and more bitter, there is more reluctance to wear political identifying things … in public,” Weinert said, “sometimes for fear of political violence.”

This may account for why a recent poll conducted by The Crescent, via Instagram, found that only 9% of students say they wear political facemasks, though comments suggested respondents may have questioned what exactly is “political.”

The Seattle Times suggested in 2016 that the sale of campaign merch is correlated with election results (Trump’s merch sales were gangbusters compared to Clinton’s). But how can we predict the outcome of the 2020 election, if voters are less inclined to sport campaign merch or COVID-19 restricts the sales of merch?

If Weinert is correct, then face masks are the new campaign button and have become as much a political identifier as MAGA hats.