Digital media impact on US elections – the after-shock

The dust has settled and Donald Trump is settling in to his Presidential future. Meanwhile, Doug Sacks takes a long look at what happened prior to the Presidential Election 2016 and how candidates leveraged digital media. 

The American political system may not be broken, but traditional polling based on outdated statistical modelling certainly is. Every poll, pollster and ‘talking head’ political analyst showed Hillary Clinton had a comfortable 4-6 point lead going into election day. But no-one told the voters this. Only Twitter had Hillary Clinton losing, with a steady downtrend in sentiment that foreshadowed her stunning defeat to Donald Trump on Election Day.

The 2016 campaign featured more than 300 million tweets mentioning Clinton or Trump, with the Republican commanding a dominant two-to-one share of that conversation. From his June 16, 2015, campaign announcement through Election Day, tweets mentioning Trump were 51 per cent positive (+1). That compares to 51 per cent negative (-1) for Clinton since her announcement on April 12, 2015, according to data from social media analytics firm Brandwatch provided exclusively to Bloomberg.

Down-ticket House, Senate, Gubernatorial and State Republicans benefitted from the Trump coat-tail effect with significant gains. One thing you have to say for Donald Trump, he energised and motivated a voter segment that usually sat-out elections. And that may have been the margin of victory although the exact causes will be debated for the next century. Ironically, when Hillary was leading all polls, the headlines were all about the impending demise of the Republican Party and its poor choice of putting up the only candidate who could lose to Clinton. Now with the tables turned, it is the Democratic Party fighting for relevance and Hillary being blamed as the only candidate unpopular and distrusted enough to have lost to someone as divisive as Trump. And so it goes . . .

How could the experts have been so wrong? Easy. They can’t reach a representative sample of the voters any more while using last century’s modelling practices. Polling is still done by telephone. Reaching an ever-increasing number of people who don’t have landlines and use mobile voice calls only sparingly will force a change in the statistical sampling industry. Even exit polls which interview voters after they have voted, proved inaccurate. People weren’t talking.

A long overdue result of the election is to hold Facebook and Google accountable for the lack of filtering and fact-checking they do. News Feed and Trending Topics on Facebook, for example, were disseminating blatantly false, misleading ‘news’ stories. Example: ‘Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump.’

As long as the ad revenue poured in, Facebook and Google turned a blind eye to what was being posted as news saying it wasn’t their responsibility to police news content. Yet, when their own algorithms identify when a high number of people are clicking on a story and then instantaneously spread the story, it is easy for false stories to ‘go viral’.

Time to change the algorithms, guys.

With 50% of users getting their news primarily from social media sites – in itself a sad commentary on modern life – it was ripe for manipulation. We’ll see if the attempts to control this by cutting off the ad revenue being funnelled to certain creators of popular content are successful or long-lasting. Once the public furore dies down, they may just go back to their old ways until the next election cycle.

New era blows in with digital media

The media mix used in past elections is changing rapidly. American Presidential elections, and to a lesser extent, state and local ones, used to be like Christmas in July for direct marketers. Once every four years, Santa’s bag would open and gifts would be distributed to the good little girls and boys at advertising agencies, TV and radio stations, media buying companies, list brokers, lettershops, newspapers, printers, sign makers, billboard display companies, consultancies and telemarketing companies. This Christmas pudding was large enough for all to feast upon. No-one got a lump of coal. The election ad spend could keep a company or individual viable for years, much as Christmas holiday sales can make or break many retailers.

New winds began to blow in 2008 when the Obama campaign machine used digital and social media with exceptional success to reach the Millennial and Generation X voters.

In 2016, the Trump campaign machinery effectively utilised massive free media exposure on cable news channels, tweeting, re-tweeting and social media ads to further change the dynamic of campaign ad spending.

Early statistics show that spending on US elections decreased for the first time in history. Previously, the trend had been for every election cycle to set a new spending record.

Spending through September 2016 was 3.2 billion for Presidential, Senate and House campaigns, or roughly $210 million less than in 2012 according to data provided by the Campaign Finance Institute. Last minute spending as the race tightened due to the FBI’s announcement of further investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails will mitigate this decrease. But the trend will not change. Spending may or may not decline in future elections. But the trend is for a significant change in the balance of media used. There was much less reliance upon traditional television and radio ads as few under the age of 50 access these (check out the figures here). Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and huge amounts of free media coverage on cable news networks made up the difference. Why pay for something when media groups are lining up to give it away for free? Candidates’ tweets and not just Trump’s 3am rants about a former Miss Universe, reached more than 25 million followers and then were picked up and re-tweeted much further by countless individuals and just about every media outlet.

Hillary Clinton’s spend was 26% less than Obama’s was in 2012. Senate and House election spending was also down $200 million through September. So say the published statistics. But was spending really down or just distributed differently? Hard to say. Obviously, ad spend has shifted away from TV and radio as people’s eyes and ears have shifted more to digital channels. And these channels are less expensive. Most Millennials and Generation Xers get the news from digital sources now. So data crunchers and campaign mavens who direct the election ad spends follow the crowds.

So yes, it is shifting dramatically. But is it decreasing? That’s impossible to determine right now thanks to the unpopular 2010 ‘Citizens United vs Federal Elections Commission’ Supreme Court decision which opened the door to unlimited and largely untraceable campaign donations from corporations, unions and individuals. This has led to a massive proliferation of nebulous political action committees (PACs) which report to no-one and are independent of Republican and Democratic national committee oversight and even that of the candidates themselves. Not only does this create a black hole as far as money spent, but it has led to a proliferation of vicious attack ads which, thanks to advanced data mining, geo-location capabilities, the flexibility of digital media ad placement and the ongoing inability of social media to filter out inaccurate, deliberately misleading and thoroughly offensive material, can drill or trickle down all the way to local elections. These can be targeted to the precise town a voter resides in and no candidate is immune, regardless of how insignificant the race may be.

Case Study: Connecticut Employee Unions vs William Petit

The small New England state of Connecticut has a total population roughly equivalent to 1% of the US total. Needless to say, its presidential primary has zero significance and national candidates pretty much ignore the state except for the occasional drive-through from New York City to Boston. But local elections, like everywhere, can get pretty heated, especially in this year of vicious campaigning. This trickle-down nastiness has, like a sewage leak, seeped into the smallest regional/town elections sullying all that it touches. And the smell lingers.

State and local Republican candidates were concerned that an anti-Trump feeling – especially regarding his comments about women and immigrants – would impact their election fortunes. Democratic rivals and the PACS formed to support them, jumped all over this trying to tar all Republicans with the Trump brush. That strategy as we saw, failed spectacularly.

In little Connecticut, a state known for its civility and called ‘the land of steady habits’, a PAC funded by public and private employee unions targeted a dozen Republican candidates as they fear a Republican state legislature will lessen the huge salary and pension benefits they have been awarded in the past-the result of which is an equally huge state budget deficit. With the help of data driven statistics and flexible digital ad capability, ads could be placed in each candidate’s constituency and personalised with the candidate’s name. So, if you live in Mary Jones’ district, you would only see a disparaging ad about Mary, not about the 11 other candidates whom you’ve probably never heard of any way. Very effective. Very digital and 21^st century. So when you visit a website, even if it’s a national or state-wide site, the ad will be targeted to where you are accessing from geographically and the appropriate message is delivered. Fairly basic digital marketing 101 these days. Effective, inexpensive, localised and can be updated or changed multiple times almost in real time.

As mentioned earlier, these PACs are not controlled by state or national committees or even any candidates and therefore the content of the ads is not properly vetted either for truthfulness or decency. Case in point, a digital ad featured a large photo of Donald Trump with a caption reading, ‘Stop Donald Trump and William Petit’s attack on women and families.’

Bit of a stretch, but a highly predictable manoeuvre, considering the nastiness of the national campaign.

The problem here was that Dr William Petit was injured, having been beaten with a baseball bat tied up and thrown in the cellar and his wife and two teenage daughters murdered, in a vicious 2007 home invasion that shocked and continues to shock the entire state. In their memory, he has established a Foundation to provide assistance to, among others, women, families and victims of violence. Dr Petit called a press conference to alert the public about this ad campaign. A media firestorm quickly roared to life. Even his opponent, an 11-term incumbent and his neighbour, joined him in renouncing the campaign as unforgiveable and a disgrace to our election process. For once, Democrats and Republicans agreed. Dr Petit won his election. And the high-level union official responsible for placing the ad was forced to resign.