The Reason Why Some Political Addresses Are Called “Stump Speeches”

Every election season, U.S. presidential candidates hit the campaign trail to deliver what’s known as a stump speech. So what exactly is it, and why do we call it that?

1. The Origin of Stump Speeches
2. The State of the Stump Speech

The Origin of Stump Speeches

Back in Revolutionary War–era America, orators in rural communities sometimes stood on actual tree stumps to elevate themselves above listeners. By the early 19th century, the terms stump orator and stump oratory had started appearing in newspapers, and stump speech was in print by 1820. In June of that year, for example, the Knoxville Register mentioned the stump speech of a West Tennessee man running for a seat in the state legislature.

“It was proposed, we are informed, in a stump speech delivered by the candidate, with loud exclamations of applause to a number of the electors of the county,” the paper wrote (emphasis theirs), “That if they would elect him he would use his talents and influence to have a law passed laying a tax on the state which should be applied exclusively to paying the debts of all those who are involved.”

The passage illustrates what a typical stump speech involved (and still involves): a political candidate telling local people why they should vote for said candidate. Eventually—though it’s hard to say exactly when—stump speeches stopped featuring literal stumps.

“e often mount the stump only figuratively: and very good stump-speeches are delivered from a table, a chair, a whiskey barrel, and the like. Sometimes we make our best stump-speeches on horse-back,” Baynard Rush Hall wrote in his account of pioneer life in Indiana for the 1855 edition of The New Purchase. During the climax of one memorable stump speech given from an ox cart, pranksters removed the pins keeping the cart level, causing the speaker to tumble into the dirt.

Hall’s book may also shed light on why stump speeches are associated with the United States. Throughout the 19th century (and beyond), as the nation expanded its borders and communities coalesced into new towns and cities, there were more opportunities to run for office. He described the “social state” as “always in ferment; for ever was some election, doing, being done, done or going to be done; and each was as bitterly contested as that of president or governor. … And everybody expected at some time to be candidate for something; or that his uncle would be; or his cousin, or his cousin’s wife’s cousin’s friend would be: so that everybody, and everybody’s relations, and everybody’s relations’ friends, were for ever electioneering.”

Not everyone viewed the importance of public speaking in elections as positive (or at least neutral). In an 1850 pamphlet, Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle eviscerated the stump orator as a “mouthpiece of Chaos to poor benighted mortals that lend ear to him as to a voice from Cosmos.” Carlyle disputed the correlation between being able to talk about accomplishing things and being able to actually achieve them—and he felt voters were too dazzled by the former to see the difference. Moreover, Carlyle believed that the focus on public speaking prevented the best leaders—in his estimation, doers, not talkers—from even running for office, leaving voters to stack the government with charismatic windbags.

“Your poor tenpound franchisers and electoral world generally, in love with eloquent talk, are they the likeliest to discern what man it is that has worlds of silent work in him? No,” Carlyle wrote. “Or is such a man, even if born in the due rank for it, the likeliest to present himself, and court their most sweet voices? Again, no.”

But the reality, then and now, is that candidates have to convince people to vote for them, which is hard to do without talking.

The State of the Stump Speech

The modern conception of a stump speech isn’t just any speech given to a group of voters. It’s one speech that a candidate travels around repeating to various groups of voters. Naturally, we hear about them most frequently during presidential campaigns, which involve lots of travel and the largest constituency (and which usually get the most attention). While today’s presidential candidates don’t orate atop whiskey barrels or ox carts, that homespun spirit is preserved in some of the locations they choose as campaign stops: churches, union halls, and even barns.

The media often references a stump speech in conjunction with its recurring themes. In November 2020, for example, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette mentioned that Joe Biden “gave some of his standard economy-focused stump speech.” Earlier that year, The Buffalo News said that Amy Klobuchar’s “entire stump speech littered with appeals to the heartland.” During the 2016 campaign season, the same paper noted how John Kasich’s stump speech almost never failed to cover “his work to produce a budget surplus” during his time on the House Budget Committee. “He brings a national-debt clock to town halls,” the article said.

However, candidates modify and refine their stump speeches on the campaign trail—not unlike how stand-up comedians workshop bits while touring. In 2008, The Washington Post published an anatomy of Barack Obama’s 45-minute stump speech (transcribed from one appearance in Boise, Idaho), detailing what points were added when and even which parts garnered applause or laughter. 

“Many of the additions are riffs that he’s created in response to criticisms made against him, lines of attack that he absorbs and tries to turn against the opposition,” The Post wrote. After fellow candidate John Edwards accused him of being “too nice a guy” and “too conciliatory” to effect change, for example, Obama made it a selling point in his stump speech, claiming that his willingness to “reach out across the aisle” was a product of his strong principles and clear view of what he was fighting for.

Another tentpole of the stump speech is tailoring it to the audience with a little local color. When Hillary Clinton addressed a crowd at Tampa’s University of South Florida in September 2016, she started with, “I know I’m only the second most exciting thing that’s happened here in the last few days. Your big win to open your football season got some attention.” When Mitt Romney spoke in Bedford, New Hampshire, in December 2011, he thanked people for “coming out on a cold winter night” and mentioned that the state’s ski resorts would probably “start making snow … and get people from Massachusetts across the border to come up and ski.”

Generally, stump speakers are always searching for the perfect balance between specificity and universality. You want your audience to feel understood and confident that you’re committed to fixing their issues, but you also want to be broad enough not to alienate voters. So stump speeches can be heavy on the hedging. In 2016, when FiveThirtyEight tasked former Republican speechwriter Barton Swaim and former Democratic speechwriter Jeffrey Nussbaum with writing a completely bipartisan stump speech, they filled it with wording like “We need to start thinking seriously” and “The U.S. will not ignore.” As Swaim pointed out, “to ‘start thinking seriously’ about something isn’t actually to do anything,” and “not to ignore something isn’t necessarily to act.”

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