2016

The quest for data-driven campaigning in 2012—creating massive databases of voter information for more effective micro-targeting—found greater efficacy and new controversy in 2016. The Trump campaign capitalized on the power of digital advertising to reach the public to engage in unprecedented mass-targeted campaigning. His campaign spent substantially more on Facebook and other digital media paid ads than Clinton. Yet, the company that Trump worked with, Cambridge Analytica, closed up shop in 2018 under a cloud of controversy about corrupt officials and voter manipulation in several countries, as well as ill-begotten data of Facebook users that drove their micro-targeting practices. The Clinton campaign modeled itself on data-driven successes of the Obama campaign, yet the algorithms that drove their decision making were flawed, thereby leading her campaign to underperform in essential swing states. Similar to the Romney campaign’s Narwhal challenges on Election Day when the campaign effectively was flying blind on get-out-the-vote numbers, the Clinton plane was flying on bad coordinates, ultimately causing her campaign to crash in critical swing states.

2012

The 2012 presidential candidates refined proven practices and ran the most data-driven campaigns in history. The candidates deployed social media, strategic online ad buys, and used their websites as the cornerstones of their campaign practices in the increasingly complex, hybrid media environment. Obama’s and Romney’s campaigns produced a variety of tactics to interact with supporters in a way that suggested that controlled interactivity had been perfected. They built massive voter files to target usual demographic groups while expanding to new groups typically unreached by campaigns and conducted careful message testing to yield maximum effect. Yet, for the carefully scripted work to structure interactivity between supporters and the campaign and among supporters to greatest advantage for the candidate, a substantial challenge remained: how to manage messaging in the complex, hybrid media environment where gaffes and opposition discourse can be amplified in ways unintended and with unknown consequences for campaigns.

Conclusion

This final chapter recaps the arguments and discusses implications of how campaigns have used DCTs. By only looking at digital practices of political campaigns, it is worrisome that we fail to see that for most campaigns digital media is still only a small part of the overall focus of campaigns. Greater appreciation is needed for understanding DCT use in the context of other factors of a campaign. Campaigns have dramatically changed their strategies over time as they learned the benefits and the challenges of communicating with the public and the media through DCTs. In 1996 they barely interacted with the public and controlled the message as much as possible. By 2016, they were using a variety of interactive affordances to mobilize supporters, attack opponents, and influence the news media’s agenda through their digital media accounts. They also learned to capitalize on the public’s data that they generate about themselves when they interact with the campaign online and in partnering with digital technology companies, such as Facebook, to engage in unprecedented micro-targeting through paid ads.

2004

This chapter examines the practices of the 2004 presidential campaigns. This election cycle exhibits an important shift from the mass media campaigning paradigm to the networked media campaigning paradigm. Howard Dean’s remarkable rise in the polls and financial largesse came after capitalizing on the affordances of DCTs for two-step flow. The best illustration of this paradigm shift, though, is in the candidacy of Wesley Clark, which started as a “netroots” movement and eventually became a frontrunner campaign. The clash between the netroots and a new way of campaigning and the historically professional way of mass-mediated campaigning illustrates the paradigm shift. In the meantime, George Bush continued to build a comprehensive data file of offline and online voter behavior for microtargeted messaging. And John Kerry conducted analytic testing of website design and e-mail messaging features to maximize effects. Both practices were harbingers of future election cycles.

1996

The 1996 presidential campaigns were the first to experiment with DCTs. Democratic President Bill Clinton and his challenger, Republican Bob Dole, built the first presidential campaign websites, and their experimentation established the core genre of the campaign website. Ironically, it was the seventy-year-old Republican who had the more cutting-edge website, while the president’s site was more cautious—reflecting a pattern in future elections in which challengers are more forward thinking and experimental than incumbents. They have more to lose when experimenting with untested communication technologies. The campaigns demonstrated the mass media paradigm of campaigning, while dabbling with digital media. The absence of human-interactive affordances in their DCTs underscore that the underlying attitudes campaigns held toward citizens is that they are to be managed and controlled, persuaded but not empowered except in the most limited sense.

2008

If the 2004 presidential campaigns demonstrated a paradigm shift as mass-mediated campaigning gave way to networked media campaigning (which in turn changed the power dynamic between supporters and campaigns), the 2008 election was about learning to control supporters through networked interactivity to the campaigns’ greatest advantage. The Obama campaign built on not just the innovations from 2004 but also on the earlier practices from 2000 and 1996, establishing an effective digital media strategy for fundraising and organizing. Other candidates, especially Democratic primary candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican primary candidate Ron Paul, experimented with and centralized DCTs as key components of their campaigns. The financial disadvantage John McCain’s campaign had compared to Obama in the general election was substantial. McCain's campaign had little choice but to focus on tried-and-true mass mediated campaigning and could not fully build enough with DCTs to work their advantage.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of key arguments and goals. A key mission of the book is to help scholars of political communication and digital media contextualize and better understand the shifting practices by campaigns long before Barack Obama was a household name. To do so, this study borrows from the work of Robert Denton, looking especially at the political and social context, the organization, fundraising, and image construction of the candidates, as well as factoring in the role of journalists and the hybrid media environment and public opinion polling. I also examine citizen involvement in the campaign. I describe how campaigns’ use of digital communication technologies and the specific affordance of interactivity bring to light that the objective of a campaign is to win—not to fully engage citizens in the campaign. This chapter concludes by providing a brief outline of the book, underscoring the shifting campaign practices that occurred between 1996 and 2016.

2000

The 2000 campaigns focused on experimentation with DCTs. Changes in election laws made collecting contributions online feasible, which became a focus of campaigns. John McCain was savvy at capitalizing on fundraising, establishing the infrastructure to channel enthusiasm into money following key events. George W. Bush built a massive voter file for microtargeting. Steve Forbes constructed an image as the first “Internet candidate,” while Al Gore, who also should have done so, instead used DCTs conservatively. Bill Bradley developed a community involvement kit, a clear indication that campaigns began to see the potential of two-step flow. Yet, campaigns were still generally distrustful of what might happen if they let their supporters genuinely engage with the campaign. As hierarchical organizations with professional and highly paid senior staff who at their gut level—and through their experience know how to campaign—the idea of more citizen-driven efforts in political campaigns was unthinkable.