Campaigning is a funny thing. I mentioned the media before, and now's the time to talk about them.
The media have a way of influencing our political choices...not control, necessarily. But influence.
See, they tend to decide which candidates are 'serious', even ahead of time...and they decide who to write stories about and who to cover. Every presidential election has candidates who we never, ever hear about. Like Rocky de la Fuente, Mike Smith, Richard Duncan, or Laurence Kotlikoff. Candidates we never hear about, don't even know are running.
Some of it is because they don't have that (D) or (R) by their name. Some are jokes, like Vermin Supreme. Some of them are probably not deserving of much media attention. Who knows? We never saw enough of them to decide for ourselves.
In politics, name recognition is huuuuuge. A third party candidate with name recognition and significant resources (i.e. is independently wealthy) might have a chance. Anyone else? Good luck.
So campaigns...well, this gets highly speculative in that there are many people out there who build careers off of trying to run a successful campaign. Their tactics and techniques vary, and after the results are in there can still be tremendous debate over what worked and what didn't. And why it worked (or didn't). It also doesn't help that we are adaptive. That things that worked one year may fail the next, especially as people become used to it.
All of which is a way of saying this is not a hard science, and there's a lot of room for speculation.
That out of the way -
Campaigns have a certain...hmmm...lifecycle? At the beginning there's the well-known names, and they tend to soak up all the media attention. Then there's the campaign process, where a relatively-unknown candidate may get surprising support. Or not. If they get that surprising level of support, they may start getting more media attention...and more people take notice of them...and that leads to more media attention...and more people take notice of them.
They build momentum. They build support. Everything kind of feeds off of and reinforces everything else.
This, btw, is part of why I don't really support having all the primaries at the same time. That seems to favor the well-known candidates and doesn't give time for a relatively unknown candidate to build support. Politicos may know all about the Dennis Kucinich's and Evah Bayh's of the political world, but unless the candidate has a history in that state most voters don't. Honestly, most voters don't even know who Nancy Pelosi is, or Kevin McCarthy (I had to look that one up.) They don't know what a Majority Whip and Minority Whip does (Steve Scalise and Steny Hoyer). You're lucky if they know who their own representatives are, much less any of the other state representatives. Or state governors, for that matter. So watching who outperforms expectations in a primary is part of what starts the momentum.
And voters...well, voters can be funny. They don't always vote just off the issues, or which candidate is best for them. It's well known that superficial things like appearance and height play a role. This article, for example, explores whether polls create self-fulfilling prophecies. People like to think they voted for a winner...so much so that they will even forget and lie about who they voted for after an election.
So what's the point of all this? Mainly that in 2016 we had Hillary Clinton as the clear front runner, from the get-go. Campaigning on her inevitability. Trying to convince people she was the clear winner, to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where people would vote for her and make her the winner. (And boy, were people angry when Bernie Sanders interfered with building that momentum!).
Some of which is...well, pretty much what every campaign does, right? It's not necessarily nefarious or illegal.
Yet it also means that we are left with all sorts of questions, all sorts of "what if's" that can never be truly answered.
The push to make her appear 'inevitable' was, to my mind, pretty heavy-handed. How many people voted for Clinton because they didn't see an alternative, and assumed she'd be the winner all along? Bowed to the inevitable and voted for the presumed winner? How many people would have voted for Joe Biden or some other candidate if they'd had the chance?
And how much did her relationship with the media matter. That...well, I could write a long bit about that by itself. Mostly because people have such varied impressions of her relationship with the media - her supporters claim she had little support, negative news cycles, and blame the media in part for her loss. Others talk about the 'Clinton News Network' and see a lot of puff pieces and media support that (from their perspective) gave her an unfair advantage.
Snopes has a good article breaking down who does and doesn't have ties to the Obama administration - and presumably wanted ties with a future Hillary administration. The article notes that a relationship does not necessarily mean biased reporting, and discusses which relationships were outdated by that time. Still, it's interesting that the very last sentence was "...the ban on politics isn’t total; in April, Shipman filed a report on the “buzz” about former secretary of state Clinton’s 2016 presidential ambitions."
I don't know about all that, but I do know that something funny appeared to be going on with my newsfeed in 2016. That is, I've monitored a news aggregator site for the last decade. It allows me to keep tabs on the headlines of the day, dig deeper on the topics I'm interested in, and I don't have to waste my time sitting through crap I'm not interested like you do if you watch the news on a TV. Since I check it periodically throughout the day, I see which articles seem to blow up, which disappear, etc. There's kind of a lifecycle to it, depending on what other news is going on at the moment.
In 2016 I noticed something funny, though I've got no solid data to illustrate with. Basically any time an article critical of Hillary came out, almost immediately there were two or three articles refuting it...and then the whole thing seemed to get buried remarkably quickly. I do believe the e-mails found from the DNC hacks (as reported by the Intercept. The e-mails of which have not been refuted as false yet) explain some of it. Particularly the way her campaign planted stories and controlled reporting about Hillary. All of which means I think there's quite the Clinton media machine.
Which is funny, given the complaints about hostile reporting...from my perspective they made things a lot easier for her than they should have.
Anyways...to bring this back to rigging the system, it's hard to say just how much media influence and the constant refrain of 'inevitable' boosted Hillary's chances beyond what they otherwise would have been. From certain perspectives, you could even argue that everything was what any good campaign would do - if they had the connections and pull to do so.
And yet that level of control, that sense of a political machine pushing a candidate (despite her high unfavorability ratings) also contributed to the sense that the system was rigged.
Or rather, that it was her connections and party support that made her the lead candidate even though she was always one of the most unfavorable candidates.
The media have a way of influencing our political choices...not control, necessarily. But influence.
See, they tend to decide which candidates are 'serious', even ahead of time...and they decide who to write stories about and who to cover. Every presidential election has candidates who we never, ever hear about. Like Rocky de la Fuente, Mike Smith, Richard Duncan, or Laurence Kotlikoff. Candidates we never hear about, don't even know are running.
Some of it is because they don't have that (D) or (R) by their name. Some are jokes, like Vermin Supreme. Some of them are probably not deserving of much media attention. Who knows? We never saw enough of them to decide for ourselves.
In politics, name recognition is huuuuuge. A third party candidate with name recognition and significant resources (i.e. is independently wealthy) might have a chance. Anyone else? Good luck.
So campaigns...well, this gets highly speculative in that there are many people out there who build careers off of trying to run a successful campaign. Their tactics and techniques vary, and after the results are in there can still be tremendous debate over what worked and what didn't. And why it worked (or didn't). It also doesn't help that we are adaptive. That things that worked one year may fail the next, especially as people become used to it.
All of which is a way of saying this is not a hard science, and there's a lot of room for speculation.
That out of the way -
Campaigns have a certain...hmmm...lifecycle? At the beginning there's the well-known names, and they tend to soak up all the media attention. Then there's the campaign process, where a relatively-unknown candidate may get surprising support. Or not. If they get that surprising level of support, they may start getting more media attention...and more people take notice of them...and that leads to more media attention...and more people take notice of them.
They build momentum. They build support. Everything kind of feeds off of and reinforces everything else.
This, btw, is part of why I don't really support having all the primaries at the same time. That seems to favor the well-known candidates and doesn't give time for a relatively unknown candidate to build support. Politicos may know all about the Dennis Kucinich's and Evah Bayh's of the political world, but unless the candidate has a history in that state most voters don't. Honestly, most voters don't even know who Nancy Pelosi is, or Kevin McCarthy (I had to look that one up.) They don't know what a Majority Whip and Minority Whip does (Steve Scalise and Steny Hoyer). You're lucky if they know who their own representatives are, much less any of the other state representatives. Or state governors, for that matter. So watching who outperforms expectations in a primary is part of what starts the momentum.
And voters...well, voters can be funny. They don't always vote just off the issues, or which candidate is best for them. It's well known that superficial things like appearance and height play a role. This article, for example, explores whether polls create self-fulfilling prophecies. People like to think they voted for a winner...so much so that they will even forget and lie about who they voted for after an election.
So what's the point of all this? Mainly that in 2016 we had Hillary Clinton as the clear front runner, from the get-go. Campaigning on her inevitability. Trying to convince people she was the clear winner, to create a self-fulfilling prophecy where people would vote for her and make her the winner. (And boy, were people angry when Bernie Sanders interfered with building that momentum!).
Some of which is...well, pretty much what every campaign does, right? It's not necessarily nefarious or illegal.
Yet it also means that we are left with all sorts of questions, all sorts of "what if's" that can never be truly answered.
The push to make her appear 'inevitable' was, to my mind, pretty heavy-handed. How many people voted for Clinton because they didn't see an alternative, and assumed she'd be the winner all along? Bowed to the inevitable and voted for the presumed winner? How many people would have voted for Joe Biden or some other candidate if they'd had the chance?
And how much did her relationship with the media matter. That...well, I could write a long bit about that by itself. Mostly because people have such varied impressions of her relationship with the media - her supporters claim she had little support, negative news cycles, and blame the media in part for her loss. Others talk about the 'Clinton News Network' and see a lot of puff pieces and media support that (from their perspective) gave her an unfair advantage.
Snopes has a good article breaking down who does and doesn't have ties to the Obama administration - and presumably wanted ties with a future Hillary administration. The article notes that a relationship does not necessarily mean biased reporting, and discusses which relationships were outdated by that time. Still, it's interesting that the very last sentence was "...the ban on politics isn’t total; in April, Shipman filed a report on the “buzz” about former secretary of state Clinton’s 2016 presidential ambitions."
I don't know about all that, but I do know that something funny appeared to be going on with my newsfeed in 2016. That is, I've monitored a news aggregator site for the last decade. It allows me to keep tabs on the headlines of the day, dig deeper on the topics I'm interested in, and I don't have to waste my time sitting through crap I'm not interested like you do if you watch the news on a TV. Since I check it periodically throughout the day, I see which articles seem to blow up, which disappear, etc. There's kind of a lifecycle to it, depending on what other news is going on at the moment.
In 2016 I noticed something funny, though I've got no solid data to illustrate with. Basically any time an article critical of Hillary came out, almost immediately there were two or three articles refuting it...and then the whole thing seemed to get buried remarkably quickly. I do believe the e-mails found from the DNC hacks (as reported by the Intercept. The e-mails of which have not been refuted as false yet) explain some of it. Particularly the way her campaign planted stories and controlled reporting about Hillary. All of which means I think there's quite the Clinton media machine.
Which is funny, given the complaints about hostile reporting...from my perspective they made things a lot easier for her than they should have.
Anyways...to bring this back to rigging the system, it's hard to say just how much media influence and the constant refrain of 'inevitable' boosted Hillary's chances beyond what they otherwise would have been. From certain perspectives, you could even argue that everything was what any good campaign would do - if they had the connections and pull to do so.
And yet that level of control, that sense of a political machine pushing a candidate (despite her high unfavorability ratings) also contributed to the sense that the system was rigged.
Or rather, that it was her connections and party support that made her the lead candidate even though she was always one of the most unfavorable candidates.
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