Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns

Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns
Author: Janet Johnson
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2020-12-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1498540848

Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns explores how social media influenced presidential campaign rhetoric. The author discusses media use in American presidential campaigns as well as social media campaigns for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. This book addresses how presidential candidates adapted their rhetorical performances for newspapers, radios, television, and the Internet. Scholars of rhetoric and political communication will find this book particularly useful.

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign
Author: Robert E. Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2021-10-18
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1793654417

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign explores a wide range of communication elements, themes, and topics of the 2020 presidential election. The introduction provides a brief snapshot summarizing the role of more traditional elements of campaign communication as well as the newer elements of social media and journalistic practices that transformed the political landscape in 2020. Each chapter serves as a stand-alone study focusing on the role and function of communication within the context of the chapter topics and the 2020 election.

Words That Matter

Words That Matter
Author: Leticia Bode
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0815731922

How the 2016 news media environment allowed Trump to win the presidency The 2016 presidential election campaign might have seemed to be all about one man. He certainly did everything possible to reinforce that impression. But to an unprecedented degree the campaign also was about the news media and its relationships with the man who won and the woman he defeated. Words that Matter assesses how the news media covered the extraordinary 2016 election and, more important, what information—true, false, or somewhere in between—actually helped voters make up their minds. Using journalists' real-time tweets and published news coverage of campaign events, along with Gallup polling data measuring how voters perceived that reporting, the book traces the flow of information from candidates and their campaigns to journalists and to the public. The evidence uncovered shows how Donald Trump's victory, and Hillary Clinton's loss, resulted in large part from how the news media responded to these two unique candidates. Both candidates were unusual in their own ways, and thus presented a long list of possible issues for the media to focus on. Which of these many topics got communicated to voters made a big difference outcome. What people heard about these two candidates during the campaign was quite different. Coverage of Trump was scattered among many different issues, and while many of those issues were negative, no single negative narrative came to dominate the coverage of the man who would be elected the 45th president of the United States. Clinton, by contrast, faced an almost unrelenting news media focus on one negative issue—her alleged misuse of e-mails—that captured public attention in a way that the more numerous questions about Trump did not. Some news media coverage of the campaign was insightful and helpful to voters who really wanted serious information to help them make the most important decision a democracy offers. But this book also demonstrates how the modern media environment can exacerbate the kind of pack journalism that leads some issues to dominate the news while others of equal or greater importance get almost no attention, making it hard for voters to make informed choices.

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign
Author: Robert E. Denton, Jr.
Publisher: Lexington Studies in Political Communication
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2021
Genre: Communication in politics
ISBN: 9781793654403

Studies of Communication in the 2020 Presidential Campaign explores a wide range of communication elements, themes, and topics of the 2020 presidential election. Each chapter serves as a stand-alone study focusing on the role and function of communication within the context of the chapter topics and the 2020 election.

The Reasoning Voter

The Reasoning Voter
Author: Samuel L. Popkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 022677287X

The Reasoning Voter is an insider's look at campaigns, candidates, media, and voters that convincingly argues that voters make informed logical choices. Samuel L. Popkin analyzes three primary campaigns—Carter in 1976; Bush and Reagan in 1980; and Hart, Mondale, and Jackson in 1984—to arrive at a new model of the way voters sort through commercials and sound bites to choose a candidate. Drawing on insights from economics and cognitive psychology, he convincingly demonstrates that, as trivial as campaigns often appear, they provide voters with a surprising amount of information on a candidate's views and skills. For all their shortcomings, campaigns do matter. "Professor Popkin has brought V.O. Key's contention that voters are rational into the media age. This book is a useful rebuttal to the cynical view that politics is a wholly contrived business, in which unscrupulous operatives manipulate the emotions of distrustful but gullible citizens. The reality, he shows, is both more complex and more hopeful than that."—David S. Broder, The Washington Post

Lessons from Trump’s Political Communication

Lessons from Trump’s Political Communication
Author: Marco Morini
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 135
Release: 2020-02-22
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3030390101

This book explores Donald Trump’s political communication as a candidate and in the first two years in office. The 45th US President is dominating the media system and 'building the agenda' through the combined action of five strategies. He disintermediates his communication and manufactures a permanent campaign climate based on strong and inflammatory language to attract a constant and decisive media coverage. In disarticulating old-style political rhetoric, he privileges emotions over contents, slogans above thought. Trump’s jokes, mockeries and distinct rhetoric – showing similarities to rhetorical strategies of Nazis during the 1930s – help him impersonate the populist ‘everyday man’ who fights against the elites. His dominance of the news cycle also reflects a desire for higher TV ratings and Web traffic numbers. Essentially, Trump has critically exploited the media’s news logics and taken advantage of the American public's lack of trust in journalism.

The 2020 Presidential Campaign

The 2020 Presidential Campaign
Author: Robert E. Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2021-06-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 153815630X

As he has done for each presidential campaign since 1992, Robert E. Denton Jr. gathers a diverse collection of communications scholars to analyze specific areas of the most recent campaign season. Topics include early campaign rhetoric, the nomination process and conventions, candidate strategies, presidential debates, political advertising, the use of new media, and coverage of the campaigns. This volume looks at the 2020 presidential campaign from three perspectives. The first section addresses the major political campaign communication areas, including pre-primary/candidate surfacing, the conventions, the debates, political advertising, social media, and news coverage of the campaign. The second section includes two unique perspectives on political branding and the politics of food in the 2020 campaign. The final section of the volume provides the broad overviews of campaign spending and finance as well as the national perspective of explaining the vote. Thus, the chapters cluster around the themes of campaign communication, studies of unique or special topics relevant to the campaigns, and the overall election.

The Bitter End

The Bitter End
Author: John Sides
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0691253986

What an intensely divisive election portends for American politics The year 2020 was a tumultuous time in American politics. It brought a global pandemic, protests for racial justice, and a razor-thin presidential election outcome. It culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol that attempted to deny Joe Biden’s victory. The Bitter End explores the long-term trends and short-term shocks that shaped this dramatic year and what these changes could mean for the future. John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck demonstrate that Trump’s presidency intensified the partisan politics of the previous decades and the identity politics of the 2016 election. Presidential elections have become calcified, with less chance of big swings in either party’s favor. Republicans remained loyal to Trump and kept the election close, despite Trump’s many scandals, a recession, and the pandemic. But in a narrowly divided electorate even small changes can have big consequences. The pandemic was a case in point: when Trump pushed to reopen the country even as infections mounted, support for Biden increased. The authors explain that, paradoxically, even as Biden’s win came at a time of heightened party loyalty, there remained room for shifts that shaped the election’s outcome. Ultimately, the events of 2020 showed that instead of the country coming together to face national challenges—the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder, and the Capitol riot—these challenges only reinforced divisions. Expertly chronicling the tensions of an election that came to an explosive finish, The Bitter End presents a detailed account of a year of crises and the dangerous direction in which the country is headed.

Political Advertising in the United States

Political Advertising in the United States
Author: Erika Franklin Fowler
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2018-05-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0429977905

Political advertising is as important as ever, ad spending records are broken each election cycle, and the volume of ads aired continues to increase. Political Advertising in the United States is a comprehensive survey of the political advertising landscape and its influence on voters. The authors, co-directors of the Wesleyan Media Project, draw from the latest data to analyze how campaign finance laws have affected the sponsorship and content of political advertising, how 'big data' has allowed for more sophisticated targeting, and how the Internet and social media has changed the distribution of ads. With detailed analysis of presidential and congressional campaign ads and discussion questions in each chapter, this accessibly written book is a must-read for students, scholars and practitioners who want to understand the ins and outs of political advertising.

Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy

Trump, Twitter, and the American Democracy
Author: Yu Ouyang
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2020-06-29
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 303044242X

This book takes a social science approach to address two related questions: (1) what does Donald Trump say on Twitter? and (2) why? Since entering the 2016 Presidential Election, Donald Trump’s tweets have been a major part of his communications strategy with the public. While the popular media has devoted considerable attention to selected tweets, it is less clear what those selected tweets tell us about Trump the businessman, the political candidate, and, finally, the President of the United States. We argue that to fully understand Trump, we must take a more comprehensive approach to examining all of his activities on Twitter. Overall, our analysis presents a strikingly complex picture of Trump and how he uses Twitter. Not only has his pattern of tweets changed over time, we find that Trump’s use of Twitter is more deliberate than he has been given credit. Like most other politicians, Trump is strategically-minded about his presence on social media.