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Introduction xv exited the primary campaign. Framing her analysis of their concession speeches via the gendered voice, Spiker argues that each of these women candidates broadened voters’ perspectives of what a powerful woman politi- cal leader looks like in 2020 and beyond through their communication styles, messages, focus on issues important to their constituencies, and their unique worldviews. Her study also serves to extend the findings of previous research on the genre of concession speeches through its focus on gender and the presidential primary. The final two chapters in this section explore the impact of the reinvigo- rated calls for social and racial justice in the wake of high-profile police kill- ings in the summer of 2020 through quantitative analyses of survey data. In Chapter 4, “Partisan Motivations for News Use: Implications for Threat Perceptions during the 2020 U.S. Election,” Andrea Figueroa-Caballero and Julius Matthew Riles examine under what conditions the relationship between partisan and like-minded news consumption was exacerbated or diminished in the 2020 political campaign. Specifically, through an analysis of survey data using the differential susceptibility to media effects model, they focus on how certain social identities—Chinese people, Black people, and the police—were presented as threats in news coverage of the COVID-19 global pandemic and the 2020 summer demonstrations against police brutal- ity and other forms of ongoing racial inequity following the high-profile kill- ings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others. Chapter 5, “Navigating Difficult Conversations in the Family in the 2020 Election Environment,” utilizes family communication patterns theory to better understand how families managed difficult conversations about race relations, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2020 election. Authors Xavier Scruggs and Colleen Warner Colaner analyze survey research data to exam- ine family communication patterns along four dimensions of conformity orientation—ranging from pressure to adopt parental values to being allowed to question parental authority and beliefs—and the frequency of political talk between young adults and their families. Their study offers socially rel- evant insights into parent–child communication as family dyads navigate communication on such difficult topics as those presented during the 2020 election. The book’s second part—Disrupting the Campaign—includes five chap- ters that focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected political campaigns on the state and national level. Chapters in this section analyze how candi- dates, political parties, and celebrities organized and communicated amidst the constraints presented by the pandemic through content analyses, sur- veys, ethnography, and case studies. This section opens with a content analysis by Daniel Montez and Kate Kenski of tweets posted by the Democratic and Republican national commit- tees during the 2020 presidential campaign. In Chapter 6, “Political Party