Over the past summer, I volunteered with Congresswoman Barbara Comstock’s (R-VA-10) reelection campaign, going to festivals, phone-banking, and going door-to-door. Republicans have a history of having strong, grassroots, ground-games, in a way that Democrats, excluding Presidential races since\u00a0Obama in 2008, have failed to emulate. Republicans have data going back decades about voting records and tendencies. We were armed with mobile apps when we went door to door that told us what path to take, which houses to go to, which houses had Democrats and which have Republicans, and who could be convinced to jump the aisle. These statistics, in my experienced, proved highly valuable and accurate. While walking around neighborhoods, or calling homes, I would often be amazed by how precise the calculations and predictions were. We were able to tailor our pitches based on what we gleaned from the application, and we inputted what we learned from the potential voter back into the application, training the\u00a0system for future users.<\/p>\n
Elections have become increasingly data driven, targeting potential voters from the get-go, and not wasting time with party loyalists. Political advertisements have taken information from users’ tendencies and preferences to target their views, in the same way that Wal-Mart or Target (ha pun intended) would single out users’ traits. For example, as a college student, I’ve seen motley Bernie Sanders ads about college debt; however, I have yet to see an ad about social security.<\/p>\n
Further, social media has begun to play an unprecedented role in elections. Republican Nominee for the President of the United States Donald Trump (wow, it’s honestly worse thinking of him with that formal title) can command the news cycle for weeks with a single Tweet. And, that’s his entire strategy: use buzzwords and crazy ideas to remain the headline. This also allows politicians to interact with the youth, as both Trump and Secretary Clinton are highly active on all forms of social media, ranging from Instagram to Facebook to Snapchat. In this way, they can access voters in their more personal fields, while they’re socializing and relaxing, rather than while they’re actively seeking news and information.<\/p>\n
This, however, furthers social media echo chambers. The Wall Street Journal is able to compare Liberal and Conservative viewpoints<\/a> on certain news issues based on the types of posts potential voters see on their Facebook News Feeds. Potential voters Tweet, Share, and Post media that they believe in, even they will do nothing to change your friends’ minds<\/a>. Ultimately, you only see the posts for pages that Facebook and Twitter believe you will like or do like; thus, you will only see one side of the story. Either you’ll see NowThis videos, or you’ll see Breitbart report videos. There’s very little in between, albeit most of the nation is moderate, leading to increased partisanship and polarity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over the past summer, I volunteered with Congresswoman Barbara Comstock’s (R-VA-10) reelection campaign, going to festivals, phone-banking, and going door-to-door. Republicans have a history of having strong, grassroots, ground-games, in a way that Democrats, excluding Presidential races since\u00a0Obama in 2008, have failed to emulate. Republicans have data going back decades about voting records and tendencies. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8098,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29779],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-freshman-seminar"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8098"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions\/26"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/interestinglyenough\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}