During the Democratic National Convention in August, it did not take a political communications professional to glean that the Biden camp was using “empathy” as a slogan. As a rhetorical strategy, this was a smart way to highlight some of the character deficiencies of President Trump. This was never an official campaign slogan, but it was a catchword they used, alongside “decency,” quite intentionally. “Empathy matters in a president,” a Biden campaign video on Facebook was titled. There was a meeting about it, I assure you.

There’s nothing nefarious about this. Political campaigns use communications strategies involving repeating certain bits of language designed to bring attention to the areas in which their candidate has the advantage in terms of appeal. The ability to notice, care about, imagine, and account for the potential hurt feelings of others is an area in which Biden has an optics edge on Trump. On the last night before Election Day, Trump spent about a half-hour of one of his rallies doing an extended series of mean improv comedy bits about how bad a job the audio tech people had done in setting up his microphone. When a tech guy came onstage to fix a feedback problem, Trump had the crowd of thousands jeer at him and cracked that maybe the campaign wouldn’t pay for the services.