Technology & The 2016 Election part 4: A New Age for Political Campaigning

In this latest post in our series, we’ll look at how lessons from the 2016 campaign will be applied in all future campaigns – and not just at the national or presidential level…

Will this year’s election change the way campaigns will be run from here on out? In a word, yes. Is this due to any single innovation or any single campaign or candidate? Not really, the trends that emerged this year encompassed new techniques that worked across campaigns as well as old ones that failed unexpectedly in others. Let’s take look at what worked and what didn’t.

What Worked in 2016 across Campaigns? Here are a few items:

• Platforms as Memes
• Momentum Building & Fund Raising through Social Media
• And Free Media
• Targeted Polling / Selective GOTV / Sentiment Analysis

Platforms & Candidates as Internet Memes – The two candidates who exploited this best were Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Both employed what seemed to be odd or unconventional messaging, but messaging that soon took viral flight. ‘Build the wall,’ ‘Feel the Bern’ and “Drain the Swamp” combined with other images or phrases helped to shape campaign identities and build a sense of community among supporters. The successful Memes were ones that harnessed or stoked discontent but discontent that was coming from both ends of the political spectrum. Memes are somewhat complex and a bit difficult to understand for people who are deliberately setting out to create them – they tend to take on a life of their own and are often unpredictable. I suppose a good analogy to what existed before I politics that was somewhat like this were extremely famous campaign jingles or something like the “Daisy Ad.” Memes combine public relations, advertising, political discourse into neat recognizable bundles – a trend that also extended to other aspects of messaging this year.

Exploitation of Social Media as the Primary Channel to Reach Voters - This was new and as noted in a previous post, President Elect Trump is still using it even now as his primary mode of communicating with the electorate. The traditional media establishment wanted to write off both Bernie and Trump so their campaigns both bypassed it and this year – that actually worked. Social media was how all momentum was created in both campaigns and it was well integrated with the rallies. One might think of these campaigns as ‘crowd-sourced politics’ – with each candidate raising most of their funds from small donors (more the case with Bernie than Trump). This latter development was perhaps the most shocking aspect of the campaign given the recent flood of dark money into politics after the Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court in 2010. Had Bernie won instead of the Billionaire Trump, the crowd-sourcing aspect of the election would have taken on much greater significance, potentially heralding an end to big money influence in politics. The fact that Trump used it to win though makes it all the more fascinating.

Free is Good, and now it’s Effective Too – The King of Tabloids knew from the start that a certain type of communications approach was likely to garner non-stop free election coverage. The fact that other candidates were able to generate almost as much attention without sounding quite so sensational was surprising. If effectiveness is measured in how many people hear a message and actually listen, then the free media given to Sanders and Trump definitely eclipsed traditional media buys this year. In some ways, it might be worthwhile to pronounce the traditional campaign ad as obsolete. Although, that might be a bit premature, as some state races saw effective use of television buys as in Ohio. But in the Ohio Senate race for example, it was a traditional media campaign poised against another poorly funded traditional media campaign instead of a proactive social media campaign. In the future, all media will likely start in Social Media and if it expands into Traditional media buys, it will do so as part of a larger campaign still driven from Social Media (to reinforce its effectiveness). For example, the cost of one professionally produced campaign video distributed let’s say on a state level, one could easily create 100 social media videos or podcasts and distribute them free nationally. The fact that media looks perfect isn’t what should be important here – it’s getting the message across to the audience that needs to hear it. If it isn’t as slick as a Hollywood movie so what – if it looks and feels genuine – so much the better.

Zeroing on the Voters – GOTV – We learned in 2016 that getting out the vote can definitely be more efficient and that discouraging the vote is now a widely accepted campaign practice by many and highly effective. The Trump campaign introduced innovations such as use of a mobile app that allowed door-knocking volunteers to register every house they visited and instantly update the information to the Cloud. This combined with a more targeted type of informal polling, designed to help drive tactics and message, made the Trump campaign particularly effective.

What didn’t work in 2016? That includes…

• Traditional GOTV
• Traditional Media
• Traditional Messaging (conservative versus sensational)

We might even add ‘Traditional Candidates’ to the list, as the overall mode for change seemed to imply that as well. Whether national discontent has been stoked beyond the realm of reason or whether it’s been justified is a difficult question. While ordinary Americans have found it hard to get ahead, the country itself has been doing pretty well by all the objective measures used by both parties in the past. Unemployment for example is down to some of the lowest levels in terms of jobless claims since the 1970’s. This is all the more incredible considering we were on the brink of a Depression in 2008. Be that as it may, though, the perception this year was that government is ineffective and the usual cast of suspects were – well suspect. That led to a lot of what had worked before to fail utterly this year.

Traditional GOTV – The key part of this phrase is Get Out, if your voters do not go out and vote, the candidate doesn’t win. This year there were also some fundamental errors made in terms of where to focus the GOTV efforts. The Clinton campaign lost crucial votes from minority communities and women and focused perhaps too much on trying to shore up their union and white working base. This may sound counter-intuitive given all of the commentary after the election about how Clinton lost the white working class male vote. But the fact remains and should have been recognized by the Clinton campaign that she had really lost that vote and should not have wasted time knocking on many doors that turned out to belong to Trump supporters. This was evidence of poor internal polling and an inability to quickly adjust to changing circumstances. In the 3 swing states where recounts were requested, the difference in women, African Americans and Latinos who didn’t vote at all may have carried each of those states for Clinton had she been able to get them out of the house. Previous technology innovations such as Robo-Calling weren’t working so well this year and the Clinton campaign did a relatively poor job of generating enthusiasm in much of the party base. Some of this was due to the harsh Primary but some of it was also a lack of understanding in how to properly use technology to help organize, motivate and target voters.

Traditional Media Didn’t Work – Clinton’s slick media campaign lacked the personal touch that made Bernie more accessible and Trump more exciting. Anything that was too polished, too familiar this year, was likely to remind the voters of how often they’d seen professional politics played before. That didn’t go over so well this election cycle and may not ever again. It seemed at times that the Clinton strategy was to stay above the fray and play it safe, allowing a flood of attacks to go unanswered on social media or traditional media (and using traditional media to try to respond to all of that would have been impractical).

Traditional Messaging Didn’t Work – We’ve gotten used to vague political messages that often didn’t connect with our personal concerns or interests. However, vague personal messaging seem to work pretty well. Those who made their messages more personal this year and found a way to deliver them in a more direct manner, did exceptionally well. Even if you weren’t an insider, sounding like an insider was problematic this year. This is all very understandable though if we consider that people seldom have the opportunity to communicate with their elected representatives – any message or medium that allows there to be a sense that two-way communication is happening is likely to be well-received.

Another reason traditional messaging didn’t work well this year is that the dynamic Social Media driven campaigns of Sanders and Trump understood how to condense their messaging to levels never before experienced in American politics. What does that mean? Didn’t every campaign since Washington’s depend on relatively simplistic slogans? Well, yes and no. In the past there was both the shorthand and the detailed message. The slogans, posters, ads and jingles were the shorthand – but there was generally real substance backing all of that up. This year, in the Trump campaign in particular, substance was viewed as a liability and largely disregarded – it was truly the Twitter platform. Every issue had to be explained in 140 characters or less, with little or no expectation for further elaboration.

From this point forward, we’ll see several important trends emerging in nearly every political campaign for better or worse:

1. Communications / Media directors will now probably be referred to as Social Media Directors and all communications will be coordinated in that context.
2. Voter polling and targeting within campaigns will become more selective and more accurate – with a focus on ensuring that the solid base is turned out with less concern about the margins. The margins will likely be dealt with more through messaging than with GOTV.
3. Messaging will also be likely dedicated in most campaigns to discourage the margins and some of the opposing base to vote at all. While Negative campaigning is nothing new, the art of increasing the opponent’s negative ratings has reached all time heights this year and it’s unlikely that this type of success will be ignored. And more candidates will follow the trend to “Twitterize” their platforms.
4. Campaign litigation will increase. As more voter suppression laws proliferate and Gerrymandering becomes more prevalent, the focus of election contests for decades to come will address both election outcomes and the underlying electoral systems themselves. It is important to note that at this time, there is one side in American politics that is consistently behind voter suppression but that’s not to say that someday things couldn’t flip – it’s happened before. Campaigns will be facing these types of issues in nearly every election from now on, so if you thought this campaign might finally put an end to the age of Hyper-Controversy, think again, it’s just starting.

In my next post and the last in this series, I’m going to look at how all of these types of changes will impact you the voter and how you can prepare for it in upcoming elections.

Copyright 2016, Stephen Lahanas