The Presidency and Social Media

Discourse, Disruption, and Digital Democracy in the 2016 Presidential Election

Dan Schill, John Allen Hendricks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351623186
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The media have long played an important role in the modern political process and the 2016 presidential campaign was no different. From Trump's tweets and cable-show-call-ins to Sander's social media machine to Clinton's "Trump Yourself" app and podcast, journalism, social and digital media, and entertainment media were front-and-center in 2016. Clearly, political media played a dominant and disruptive role in our democratic process. This book helps to explain the role of these media and communication outlets in the 2016 presidential election.

This thorough study of how political communication evolved in 2016 examines the disruptive role communication technology played in the 2016 presidential primary campaign and general election and how voters sought and received political information. The Presidency and Social Media includes top scholars from leading research institutions using various research methodologies to generate new understandings—both theoretical and practical—for students, researchers, journalists, and practitioners.

Part 1
Media Use

Political Engagement and Digital Democracy

1
Discourse, Disruption, and Digital Democracy

Political Communication in the 2016 Presidential Campaign

Dan Schill and John Allen Hendricks

Digital and social media were influential in past presidential elections, but in 2016, the digital campaign was the story as online communication played a significant and integral role during the primary and general elections for both Trump and Clinton. “It is not an exaggeration to say that political campaigns today are social media campaigns” (Hendricks & Schill, 2017). Social and digital media disrupted long-standing campaign norms and practices—including how the candidates ran their campaigns, how the media covered the news, and how citizens received and shared information—in what New York Times media columnist Jim Ruttenberg (2016) characterized as a “media hurricane” (para. 12). Old distinctions were made quaint and erased. As Stanford’s Nate Persily (2017) concluded:

the 2016 campaign broke down all the established distinctions that observers had used to describe campaigns: between insiders and outsiders, earned media and advertising, media and nonmedia, legacy media and new media, news and entertainment, and even foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication.

(pp. 63–64)

Or, as Michael Slaby (2016), the Chief Integration and Innovation Officer for President Obama’s 2012 and 2016 campaigns, summarized: “The 2016 cycle has been categorized by unprecedented unpredictability, not as much from the perspective of technology disruption, but a whole-scale shift in the norms of campaign communications” (para. 19). In 2016, history, logic, and even facts themselves appeared not to matter (Ignatius, 2016; Rampell, 2016). Alex Conant, a senior strategist for Republican primary challenger Marco Rubio, described the 2016 media/politics ecosystem this way: “There was no news cycle—everything was one big fire hose. News was constantly breaking and at the end of the day hardly anything mattered. Things would happen; 24 hours later, everyone was talking about something else” (para. 14). And although television news and other legacy media sources remained influential, digital media drove the national conversation and social media were Donald Trump’s primary communication channel. Brad Parscale, Trump’s digital director, made this exact point: “Facebook and Twitter were the reason we won this thing. Twitter for Mr. Trump. And Face-book for fundraising” (quoted in Lapowsky, 2016, para. 3). The purpose of this chapter is to describe and discuss how these digital and social media outlets disrupted political discourse and participation in the 2016 presidential election and to illustrate how communication technologies are impacting our continuously evolving digital democracy.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton

After long and hard-fought primaries for both political parties, the 2016 general-election candidates were chosen by a very polarized electorate. New York real estate billionaire Donald J. Trump clinched the Republican Party’s nomination on July 22, 2016, and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton clinched the Democratic Party nomination on July 26, 2016. Trump had 16 opponents in the Republican primary compared to Clinton’s five opponents in the Democratic primary (Andrews, Lai, Parlapiano, & Yourish, 2016). Trump cast himself throughout the campaign as a “change agent” who would “drain the swamp” in Washington. In seemingly constant, pungent, and pointed tweets and in large campaign rallies, his “America First,” outsider message resonated with many voters outside of the nation’s capital who had grown weary of hollow political promises from establishment politicians. Trump was the first president ever elected who had never served in the military or in elected office prior to his victory, and his lack of political experience was a significant part of his appeal to voters. Trump’s change message was accepted to the point that voters were willing to overlook an audio recording of Trump bragging that he had sexually abused women in the past. The outsider, populist message resonated with voters to the point that not even a significant fundraising advantage could propel Clinton into the Oval Office. To no avail, Clinton outspent Trump fairly significantly. In total, she spent $1.4 billion whereas he spent $932.3 million (Gold & Narayanswamy, 2016). Clinton won the popular vote 48.5% (65,853,516) to Trump’s 46.4% (62,984,825) whereas Trump won the needed electoral college votes, 306 to 232, to become the nation’s 45th commander-in-chief (Krieg, 2016).

Both candidates held high unfavorable ratings among the American public throughout the election and both appeared to be deeply flawed at times. In fact, Clinton and Trump were the most unpopular candidates ever (“2016 campaign,” 2016; Collins, 2016). Clinton, the Washington-entrenched, status-quo politician, was consistently plagued with scandals surrounding her perceived lack of honesty and transparency ranging from giving paid speeches to Wall Street firms to using a personal server for emails during her tenure as U.S. secretary of state. She was further dogged by an alleged unethical relationship with her family’s foundation during her tenure as secretary of state. Yet, the issue that appeared to most damage her reputation in the campaign was Clinton’s response to the attack on two U.S. government CIA facilities in Benghazi, Libya resulting in the death of four American diplomats and security personnel, including a U.S. ambassador. The Chicago Tribune, in an editorial about the attacks, stated: “On the question of how Clinton and the Obama administration reacted, we see more than enough evidence to reaffirm our opinion that the secretary of state failed a crucial chance to show decisive, principled leadership” (“Editorial: Benghazi,” 2016, para. 4). After extensive public hearings, a U.S. House Select Committee published an 800-page report on the incident that found that Secretary Clinton “promoted a false narrative for public consumption” both during and after the attacks (“Editorial: Benghazi,” 2016, para. 5).

Following on the heels of the Benghazi scandal, it was revealed that, while secretary, Clinton refused to use the Department of State official email account and instead chose to set up a personal and private server in her New York home to conduct official government business. Many of the emails sent via this unsecured server were marked as “classified,” containing national security secrets that allowed Clinton’s critics to question her judgment and honesty even more vociferously. Eventually the Clinton team provided the State Department with 55,000 pages of emails and 30,490 individual email messages to review and archive (Graff, 2016). Clinton deleted more than 30,000 emails that she claimed contained “records of communications about private matters, like yoga routines, her daughter’s wedding and her mother’s funeral” (Chozick & Schmidt, 2015, para. 1). The mishandling of classified materials prompted the FBI to start an investigation into whether Clinton had violated federal laws. The FBI eventually ruled that Clinton should not be charged, but the investigation hung over the election and it resulted in an “October Surprise” when the FBI director suddenly sent a letter to several committees on Capitol Hill informing them that the FBI was reopening its investigating into Clinton’s handling of the emails based upon new evidence. This provided fertile fodder for Trump to consistently remind voters that Clinton had a penchant for not being honest and trustworthy. For example, an oft-repeated chant at Trump rallies was “lock her up!” In fact, when Clinton called for Trump to release his taxes for the sake of transparency, he replied she needed to release the 30,000 emails she deleted. That kind of attack resonated with many voters in 2016. In the end, after all of the investigations by FBI Director James Comey and his agency and the attacks Clinton endured on the campaign trail, it was determined that Clinton had not broken any laws related to the email scandal nor the Benghazi attacks.

Many anti-Clinton attacks came from and were amplified by emails and documents that were hacked from a cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee and an email phishing hack on Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, and subsequently released on the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks (see Cohen, 2017 for a timeline). The hacked documents were promoted by Trump surrogates and Trump himself, who said “I love WikiLeaks” at an October 10 rally. In January 2017, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report which concluded that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered these hacks as part of an “influence campaign” to help Trump and hurt Clinton, as well as to undermine public faith in the U.S. election system. The report detailed “a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations—such as cyber activity—with overt efforts by Russian government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or ‘trolls’” (“Assessing Russian Activities,” 2017, p. ii). Extensive connections between Trump campaign officials and Russia were revealed during the campaign, leading to multiple post-election investigations. In a March 20, 2017 hearing, FBI Director Comey publicly confirmed that the FBI was probing “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts” (cited in Cohen, 2017, para. 68).

Trump, the impetuous and egotistical New York real estate tycoon and reality TV star, also had his share of scandals and missteps during the campaign: insulting the parents of a dead war hero, an arm-flapping impersonation of a disabled reporter, and mocking John McCain’s five-year internment in a Vietnam POW camp (Thrush, 2016). Like Clinton, Trump also gained a reputation for not always telling the truth and being transparent. Breaking a long tradition that started with President Richard Nixon, he refused to publicly release his taxes claiming that he could not because he was being audited by the IRS (Disis, 2017). This provided his opponents with the ability to question what he said his net worth was, thereby questioning his business acumen, which was a cornerstone of his campaign strategy, as well as allowing opponents to question whether he had engaged in any unethical business dealings. In the presidential debate, Clinton stated:

First, maybe he’s not as rich as he says he is. Maybe he’s not as charitable as he claims to be. Third, we don’t know all of his business dealings, but we have been told through investigative reporting that he owes about $650 million to Wall Street and foreign banks. Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes.

(Wilke, 2016, para. 7)

Regarding Clinton’s allegation that he had paid nothing in federal taxes, he quickly retorted: “That makes me smart” (Wilke, 2016, para. 9).

Using Twitter, Trump was quick to troll his opponents with mean-spirited insults. In the primaries, he threatene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• PART 1 Media Use: Political Engagement and Digital Democracy
• PART 2 Media Effects: Traditional Media and Social Media Distribution
• PART 3 Candidate Discourse in Social Media: Image, Tone, and Rhetoric
• PART 4 Social Media Messaging: Candidate Branding and Agenda Setting
• PART 5 Social Media Content: Political Participation and Humor
• Index