Copyright by Vincent Harris 2019

Vincent Harris

2019

The Report Committee for Vincent Harris certifies that this is the

approved version of the following report:

Digital Barometers for Effective Political Campaigns: Social Media Engagement, Visibility, Digital Barometers for Effective Political Campaigns and Entertainment Media

SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Sharon Jarvis, Supervisor

Barry Brummett

Digital Barometers for Effective Political Campaigns

Vincent Harris

Report

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of the University of Texas at Austin

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin

August 2019

Dedication

This paper is dedicated to my two grandfathers: Rev. Robert Harris, who taught me to think critically about politics, and Dr. George Thoms, the ardent advocate for my continued education.

Thank you for your sacrificial love for your family.

Digital Barometers for Effective Political Campaigns

Vincent Harris, M.A.

The University of Texas at Austin, 2019

SUPERVISOR: Sharon Jarvis

Abstract

This paper explores phenomena that affect how modern political campaigns communicate, educate, and persuade voters online. The three main phenomena discussed are: social media engagement, visibility of online content, and entertainment media. These phenomena serve as barometers for political practitioners who aim to generate attention online.

Relevant literature and research from each phenomena is discussed in detail and supported with examples from recent political campaigns. The author is a political practitioner who specializes in digital media and content production. Specific instances from his work are shared as further analysis. A conclusion is drawn that, without significant changes in government regulation and voter behavior, political campaigns will continue to produce entertaining and hyper-partisan content online.

Keywords: social media engagement; political campaigns; visibility online; entertainment media; political communications; social media politics; social media campaigning; republican campaign

v Table of Contents

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1

Engagement and Social Media…………………………………………………………………….3

Visibility within the Attention Economy………………………………………………………...11

Entertainment Media……………………………………………………………………….…….19

Future Study…………………………………………………………………………………...…28

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………………32

References……………………………………………………………………………………..…35

Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………….42

vi Introduction

Contemporary America is the land of the free and the home of the easily distracted.

Endless push notifications and our favorite mobile applications are morphing us into a culture of finger-scrolling zombies. Modern political dialogue has drifted from the policy-centered oratory of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and Federalist Papers, into one of name-calling, infotainment, and Twitter fights. A politician who shouted, “You Lie!” at the President in the middle of nationally televised State of the Union Address raised over a million dollars online immediately following the outburst (Bailey, 2009). Controversy, incivility, and brashness generate attention and in today’s economy, attention is our rarest commodity. The entertaining 2016 election debates set records for viewership, outpacing the previous record set in 1992. We live in an age of digital memes and political tribalism. In such an environment, is it possible to have a serious policy discussion? There are a lot of pessimistic opinions who believe that in the age of social media, voters have become hardened into their self-created echo-chambers of anger (Hughes &

Van Kessel, 2018).

Americans have become attached to their mobile devices with The Pew Research Center estimating 81% of Americans owning a smartphone (2019). Our digital-first world has become filled with personalized news, mobile applications, and social networks, which all compete for our attention. Since attention is in short supply, content producers have become desperate in their competition for eyeballs, and often seek to out-shock or surprise one another. Partisan selective exposure has further deconstructed the commonality of information that once existed within the electorate. Driven by political ideology, voters are only consuming information from sources that are congruent with their pre-existing belief system.

As a political practitioner, my company is involved in the online marketing of political candidates and political issues. Our work has put us in daily communication with representatives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other digital platforms and provided insight into not only on the theoretical aspect of digital campaigning but very much the practical application of the industry. Over the course of the past decade the technique in which digital campaigns are run has changed dramatically as the electorate has become more polarized and partisan in the way they engage with political content online. As a campaigner, my mandate is to use digital platforms to achieve our clients’ goals. As an academic, my interest in these platforms is to discover more about their impact on political efficacy and to better understand the impact that the changing nature of campaigning has on our Democracy.

Three themes that intersect the applied world of political campaigning in 2020 and contemporary political communications research are: social media engagement, visibility within the attention economy, and entertainment media. I will review existing literature relating to each theme and discuss their relevance to modern campaigning techniques. My conclusion will offer some questions for future research discussion.

Engagement and Social Media

“If you need a break from stress, negativity, partisanship, and need to declutter your head, then get off of social media.” My Pastor said these words to our congregation a recently when talking about ways to lessen anxiety in order to better focus on God’s plan for our lives. As a society, our time spent on social platforms has continued to increase with some teenagers spending more than nine hours a day online (Wallace, 2015). On average, Americans spend more than two hours a day on social media platforms with one study showing that people spend more time on Facebook than with their pets (Brustein, 2014). The psychological effects of this growing expanse of time has so far shown that social media can make people feel anxious, depressed, and lonely (MacMillan, 2017). While the impact of social media on mental health appears to be correlated with negative effects, social media does elicit many positive effects in the political and advocacy space. Social media has made people feel more informed about political news (Avirgan, 2016) and able to participate directly in ways limited before its inception (Fromm, 2016).

Political campaigning techniques have changed drastically in the past decade, away from traditional “push” media towards the more interactive “pull” media of the Internet (Webster,

2014). Voters now have the option to avoid spending time engaging with political content, which has made political marketing increasingly difficult, as political content is in constant competition with other forms of entertainment. This competition has led desperate campaigns to forgo producing heavy-laden policy content in favor of digital content that elicits engagement.

In order to deliver relevant content to its user base, Facebook built an algorithm which rewards engagement with higher visibility. The more likes, shares, and comments on a piece of content, the larger the potential reach of that content. The common name for this algorithm

EdgeRank. EdgeRank is an important element in political communications because it is responsible for the way political Facebook pages can reach potential voters. Most campaigns use

Facebook as a primary form of digital communications and must tailor messages for shareability to the EdgeRank algorithm. Campaigns that seek to achieve higher visibility will produce content tailored to the algorithm, which in turn affects the style, medium, and even the text of the content being shared. For example, a photograph of a political candidate might be altered to add a

Facebook “thumbs up!” icon before it is posted on Facebook to generate more engagement and hopefully more reach.

Each social media platform and digital property operates uniquely in how it determines reach of their content. Facebook defines reach as, “the number of people who had any content from your Page or about your Page enter their screen” (Facebook Help). Facebook offers two forms of reach for a content provider: organic reach and paid reach. Organic reach is defined by

Facebook as, “The number of people who had an unpaid post from your Page enter their screen”

(Facebook Help). Paid reach is defined by Facebook as, “The number of people who had a paid post from your Page enter their screen” (Facebook Help). Facebook will not concretely define how a marketer, or in the case of this paper, how a political campaign, can expand their organic reach. It is apparent though that the number of people who view content from both paid and organic reach is impacted by the level of engagement with each piece of content. If more people share a video then more people will have the opportunity to see a video. The visibility of content is directly linked to the amount of engagement a piece of content receives.

While Facebook defines paid and organic reach it does not tell advertisers exactly how their proprietary algorithm operates. What is known is that most of the interaction with Facebook occurs on a mobile device (Lopez, 2016). We also know that the majority of Facebook

engagement happens on Newsfeed, which is the main landing page from which Facebook users see content from the pages they like and their friends. An average Facebook user has more than a hundred friends (Smith, 2014) and likes a variety of brand pages (this includes political candidates, brands, sports teams, etc.). Every Facebook page/brand and friend are in constant competition for views of their content on the Newsfeed. This competition serves as a catalyst for content creators to publish content that generates engagement. Historically, political marketing has consisted of repeating a few research-tested messages via television advertising, but contemporary political marketing consists of repeating a message online that also solicits engagement. Greater content engagement online leads to a larger potential audience and enhanced visibility. I will discuss the theme of visibility more in the next section of this paper.

Digital content that elicits engagement not only guarantees enhanced reach, but it has the added benefit of lowering the cost of political advertising online. For example: Facebook has built a relevance score for advertisements and the more engagement an advertisement gets, the cheaper the cost of the advertising unit. Political campaigns save money and generate more eyeballs on their content if an advertisement on Facebook is engaging. The Facebook advertising system is built in a way to discourage bland advertisements and encourage advertisements that solicit engagement. It is therefore cost-efficient and wise to try and create advertisements that are shared online by the target audience.

The issue that arises by putting engagement front and center in a content-creation strategy is that the desired audience segments are hyper-partisans. Often this means that content is created for the political base of a campaign because these are the people most likely to share, comment,

“like”, or otherwise engage online. An average voter may not have the opportunity to view or subsequently to share a piece of political content online. Contrast that with the party faithful

who feel passionately about an issue or political candidate and wish to publicly showcase their opinions online. The party faithful want to be associated with a party brand or divisive issue but many Americans do not.

But why do voters share content at all online? The answer to this question is still up for some debate. Users may share content to “make themselves seem more influential” or to “stand out from a crowd (Ho & Dempsey, 2010, p. 1002).” The idea of sharing content to help inflate a sense of knowledge and intelligence was echoed by Wojnicki & Godes (2008) who concluded that content sharers often share selectively in order to propagate positive opinions of themselves with their online networks. This idea fits perfectly within the context of a political campaign creating a “grassroots movement” online. Some political issues reach a point where it becomes the socially cool thing to discuss online. Social pressure can have a big impact on a voter’s willingness to engage with political content.

Adding onto this idea, research across marketing and advertising fields has even shown that social media users share content to look smart to their friends (Taylor, Strutton, &

Thompson, 2012) or to bring valuable/entertaining content to their online networks (Moon,

2014). If we wish to be perceived a certain way by our friends, engaging with political content is a way to instantly evoke responses online. Voters who seek approval in the form of engagement on their own social media pages will likely find it by sharing a funny or entertaining political video.

Content might also be shared because it possesses qualities or attributes that stimulate a response. Writing for the Journal of Marketing Research, Berger and Milkman (2012, p. 3) conclude that “emotional arousal” is a key component of viral content. Content that elicits extreme, positive, or negative sentiment is most likely to be shared, including anger and anxiety-

provoking pieces. People share content that they enjoy but also content that they dislike or want to comment further on (Botha, Karam, Ogbonna, Payne, & Stiehler, 2016). This concept fits perfectly within the context of attention and political communication, where for example, a

Democrat might share a post from President Trump but only to add their own negative opinion with it.

For example, in 2016 President Trump shared an image of himself eating a Taco Bowl on

Cinco de Mayo. The now infamous social media post was one of the most attention-grabbing pieces of content from the election cycle and generated strong opinions from those who saw it.

Some people shared the post along with comments of disgust, others shared it as a piece of comedy, still others shared it in support of the Trump campaign. From my anecdotal personal experience on campaigns, Facebook does not differentiate between positive sentiment associated with an engagement and negative sentiment. Regardless of the reasons it was shared, the post worked well online because it elicited so much engagement and drew people onto the platforms.

The post fit well within the digital world of engagement and benefitted the social platforms as well as the content creator due to the visibility and engagement it produced.

Our candidate-centered politics (Aldrich, 1995) has produced competition among politicians, all seeking to grow their personal brands online. Politicians are products that need to perpetually market themselves in order to reap tangible rewards that benefit their campaign.

These rewards involve some level of participation among the electorate, even if that participation is as simple as watching a video clip or clicking “like” on a Facebook post. Digital media has created an instant feedback-loop and political campaigns are salivating over every engagement metric because of their tangible benefits to the organizational side of a campaign.

When a voter engages with a piece of political content online, a campaign receives a new datapoint for which they can use in order in micro-targeted fundraising solicitations or get-out- the-vote operations. Every engagement in any form online offers a campaign more information and the opportunity to target a voter even more precisely. The importance of these engagements as a mechanism for creating a proprietary database of information on voters is one of the main causes of our current non-stop political climate. Politicians are rewarded with new information every time they generate enough attention for voters to click, subscribe, sign-up, donate, or simply share a video. Candidates directly benefit when they insert themselves and their brand in front of voters daily. This includes on topics that are not even relevant to their official job duties.

Often, the best ways to collect data and elicit engagement are around cultural issues such as former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernik’s refusal to stand for the pledge of allegiance.

Campaigns often hire digital agencies years before their official election dates in order to utilize engagement to build a proper database. For example, in 2014, my company was hired to work for Ohio Senator Rob Portman. One of the first initiatives we undertook was to create an issues-survey that asked voters to select an issue most important to them. This issue survey was promoted across social media channels with a goal of segmenting the broad database into subsets based on the issue selection. The survey had a secondary goal of gaining new email addresses for communications purposes. E-mail has been the main medium of digital fundraising over the past decade (although this seems to be shifting some) and within the campaign world, the “cost per e- mail” is a valuable metric that success is judged upon. During this survey initiative for Senator

Portman, target voters were filling out information and opt-ing into the campaign’s email list for less than $3.00. Once voters selected their preferred policy issue, that information was transferred back into the database, and used throughout the entirety of the campaign. People who

filled out the survey received personally relevant fundraising messages, and tailored videos from

Senator Portman based on the issue they selected. Closer to the election when campaign staff visited the doors of voters, the issue preferences collected online were used to inform the literature left in mailboxes.

Campaigns are incentivized and benefit from every digital action. Just like Pavlov’s dog, politicians have been conditioned to speak and act in ways that provokes attention from the media and online. The more outlandish the act, the more media attention they generate. Increased attention from the media develops into an increase in website visitors and social media searches about the politician. Unless the public begins to act differently in response to a politician’s actions, they are incentivized to continue behavior that elicits engagement and thus benefit their campaign.

Campaigns can also gain insight from interactions in the form of online comments. One of my clients was an important statewide elected official in Texas. This official would read

Facebook comments nightly before he went to bed and would sometimes respond himself. On a few occasions, this official rethought policy positions based upon the feedback solicited online.

The ability for constituents to use online mediums to directly communicate with public officials is positive and easy to do. That being said, Facebook commenters and profiles are often manipulated; most manipulated accounts are not representative of the majoritarian position and thereby can be misleading.

As a society we are struggling with the impact that social engagement and information shared online has on our electoral process. Perceived negative effects from social media has spurred regulatory efforts to control digital platforms. Political campaigns have traditionally been run as months-long sprints leading up to the election and outside of the United States, many

countries have continued this tradition by enacting strict laws that mandate when a campaign can spend money on their campaign. For example, in France it is only legal to spend money in the few months leading up to a Presidential election. Political campaign spending is also capped at

16.8 million euros (Becker, 2017) for French candidates and limits communication mediums. In

Israel, the law states campaigning can only begin 101 days from the election (Library of

Congress, 2009). These countries (among others) aim to severely limit the amount of time a campaign can legally spend money, put up signs, canvass neighborhoods, and consume national conversation. While these laws are noble in their pursuit of tamping down an endless campaign- season, in reality, social media platforms provide shrewd politicians the ability to campaign without spending money. For example, a politician could use campaign funds to accumulate an audience on their Facebook page during campaign season and continue to post to the expanded audience after the formal campaign season has ended. Before social media, it was simple to formulate a cost for paid advertising efforts from a campaign, but now it has become more nuanced. What is a Facebook post from a politician that reaches over ten million people worth?

How much is a campaign email list of 1,000,000 subscribers worth? What is the monetary value of an Instagram post to 50,000 followers? Because there are no cut-and-dry answers, campaign finance regulations are often outdated. Complicating this problem, many of the legislators who could enact change are aloof about the platforms on which modern campaigns operate.

Visibility within The Attention Economy

Writing in The Attention Economy and the Net, Michael Goldhaber (1997) argues that

“attention, at least the kind we care about, is an intrinsically scarce resource.” In our complex and distracted world, generating attention is an important step in the process of persuasion.

Without a voter’s attention, there is no ability to persuade. A 2013 Microsoft Study found that the attention span of an average person dropped over the past decade to only eight seconds

(McSpadden). This is one second less than the attention span of a goldfish. An average person uses nine smartphone apps a day, and an average Facebook user spends fifty minutes a day across Facebook’s platforms (Stewart, 2016). The contemporary American polity is distracted by the internet (McCoy, 2013), but also by a plethora of content choice. Ben Parr (2015), The former editor of the popular social media website, Mashable, summarizes his book Captivology by saying, “Attention is the conduit through which we experience our world. If you don’t have somebody’s attention, no amount of effort you put into your product, music, art, lesson plan, or project will matter” (p. 221).

Candidates looking to generate earned media on their candidacy will often hold stunts or use controversial rhetoric in an effort to gain attention for themselves. The media attention is often a goal in itself. Campaign press secretaries become giddy at the ability to showcase to their colleagues a lengthy list of press clips or by posting a friendly article about their boss on social media. Smart campaigns look to spin negative media attention into a positive by working to prove the adage, “there is no such thing as bad press.”

For example: During the live 2013 State of the Union response, Florida Senator Marco

Rubio famously stopped mid-sentence to get a drink of water. Rubio’s act was panned by critics, late-night talk show hosts, and turned into countless memes online. Seeking a moment to

capitalize on the added attention, and despite being out of cycle, the Rubio campaign began selling water bottles on their website and raised over $125,000 in a matter of days (Bernal,

2013). Even negative attention, bottled in the right way (pun intended), can become useful in today’s constant campaign.

Successful modern political campaigns must organize around the concept of attention- getting rhetoric in order to open the opportunity for persuasion, but that rhetoric is often best received when it is steeped in situationally appropriate ideological overtones. I have already discussed the need for campaigns to create engaging content online and now want to dive deeper into what obstacles a campaign faces online that well produced content can overcome.

Digital strategists formulate content online in a response to voters’ media consumption patterns. One of the strongest predictive patterns is the relationship between a voters’ partisan affiliation and political content preferences online. The theory of selective exposure explains why voters select content from media outlets that are similar with their pre-existing political beliefs. Selective exposure is an important concept in understanding how campaigns formulate budgets and communicate with voters in our modern fragmented media environment. If the visibility of political content is a dependent variable, then it is impacted greatly by selective exposure when voters become caught in an echo chamber of their own worldview.

Political predispositions motivate voters’ media choices (Stroud, 2008) and lead to a news selection bias in which policy positions are reinforced through partisan media outlets such as Fox News or MSNBC. When people have an opportunity to read news congruent with their beliefs or challenge those beliefs, they tend to gravitate towards stories that reinforce their beliefs

(Garrett, 2009). Even the amount of time-consuming news and information is likely to increase for attitude-consistent content (Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009). A study by Iyengar and

Hahn (2009) concluded that partisan affiliation concerning media choice runs so deep that voters will choose their preferred outlets even for soft news and popular culture stories.

Writing in Niche News (Stroud, 2011) Talia Stroud unpacks the impact that tailored media has on our perceptions of global events. “Conservatives and Republicans are more likely to read newspapers endorsing a presidential candidate, browse conservative-leaning magazines, listen to conservative talk radio, watch Fox News, and access conservative Websites” (3920

Kindle). A recent Pew Research study confirmed that conservative leaning Fox News was the main news source for Trump voters during the 2016 election (Gottfried & Mitchell, 2017) while

Clinton voters sought information from CNN or MSNBC.

Since the majority of competitive elections occur within each party’s primary system, it is of critical importance to political actors to formulate policy positions that will resonate on partisan media outlets. To generate attention from heavily partisan outlets, conservative politicians must take hardline positions or risk being branded one of the career killing monikers of: “Republican in Name Only (RINO),” “moderate,” or heaven forbid a “Rockefeller/liberal

Republican.”

Favored partisan outlets are the main agenda-setting agents within both mainstream

American political parties. They are also essential to raising the profile of political candidates and assist as an important mechanism to the fundraising apparatus of campaigns. During the

2012 Texas Senate race, Ted Cruz’s campaign team utilized on-air appearances on conservative television and talk radio to effectively fundraise in small dollar donor increments. There was a direct correlation with the amount of media appearances on conservative media outlets and the amount of money the Cruz campaign raised online.

Selective exposure is not only important in explaining how partisan actors choose their media sources but concurrently in understanding the rising lack of news media exposure to voters. The shared commonality of news information that unified Americans the latter half of the twentieth century has collapsed. Instead of a limited number of broadcast news channels,

Americans now have the option of large television channel packages which allow media consumers to easily opt-out completely of news and political programming.

These new media consumption options have caused a split dichotomy of consumers: voters who choose to watch news (news-seekers) and are much more likely to turnout to vote; and voters who avoid news content, gather less political knowledge and are less likely to turnout to vote (Prior, 2005). Many people who opt out of hard news still consume news latently through entertainment programming or soft news programs. The public’s thirst for entertainment content will be discussed in greater detail in the next section.

Selective exposure research has identified news-choice as a strong predictive variable concerning political participation, knowledge, and turnout (De Vrees & Boomgaarden, 2006).

The concept creates a framework to understand the evolving media consumption patterns of the electorate and the need for disruption by political actors. As a campaigner, one of my main goals is to achieve visibility for my political clients. I am paid to ensure their political advertisements reach voters online. I am paid to help increase the percentage of voters who recognize their name in a survey and to reach persuadable voters with persuasive messages. The phenomena of selective exposure makes these goals difficult and has forced campaigns to think creatively about how to generate attention online. To paraphrase the previously mentioned Ben Parr quote,

“without someone's attention, nothing else matters.”

Social media platforms such as Facebook are built to reward content that is engaging.

Facebook is incentivized to personalize content because it increases usage of the platform.

People concerned with polarization in the electorate should be concerned with this continuing dynamic of tailored content. Below is a fictional further example of how the feedback loop of engagement, selective exposure, and content creation works on Facebook:

Joseph Cortez is a Democrat living in Texas and is active on Facebook. Joseph is scrolling one day on his NewsFeed and comes across that one of his friends has posted a link from Fox News in support of President Trump. Joseph is one of the 83% of people referenced in the Pew study who does not like, comment, or share on the post because he disagrees with it.

Samantha Thomas is a Republican living in Texas and is active on Facebook. Samantha is scrolling one day on her NewsFeed and comes across a friend that has posted a link from Fox

News in support of President Trump. This link is posted by the same friend as Joseph and the exact same link. She is supportive of the President and clicks to share that information with her

Facebook friends.

Joseph continues to scroll through his feed and sees an advertisement for the Washington

Post asking him to LIKE their page to receive updates. Because he politically agrees with the

Washington Post, he opts to LIKE the page and clicks on the ad.

Samantha continues to scroll and likes multiple posts originating from a page called

“Protect the Second Amendment” that her friends have shared. On one post she comments with

“Heck yes!” because she is an enthusiastic gun owner.

The subtle, quick decisions both Joseph and Samantha made have changed the information and advertisements they will receive on Facebook in the future. Because Joseph did not like his friends post from Fox News, he is less likely to see updates in the future from his

friend with alternative viewpoints. Because Joseph chose to LIKE the Washington Post’s advertisement, he could now be further categorized and advertised to by liberal interest groups,

Democratic political campaigns, and will now be likely to see content posted from the

Washington Post.

Because Samantha shared her friend’s Fox News post, she is now more likely to see posts from her friend, and potentially from Fox News. Her liking of the “Protect the Second

Amendment” Facebook page posts means she will likely see more updates in the future from that page and her page “likes” have categorized her as someone that cares about the second amendment. This in turn will allow groups such as the National Rifle Association to advertise to her and recruit her as a member. Additionally, Facebook has likely profiled her as a conservative, and now all conservative group will begin to advertise to her. Local Republican political campaigns in her area will now pay for sponsored updates. She could never see an advertisement from a left-wing group or politician again.

Both Joseph and Samantha created echo chambers for themselves and brought about significant changes to the way they will receive information on Facebook by just a few clicks.

Even in Josephs case, a lack of engagement will change what content he receives. It is also possible that this information does not only remain on Facebook but through a variety of means becomes matched back to a voter database. This in turn will change what advertisements both

Joseph and Samantha view on television, mail they receive in their mailbox, and who canvasses them at their door. All of these significant changes stemmed from a few clicks.

Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms are for-profit companies that benefit from having users actively interacting with content. Worldwide in 2018, Facebook brought in more than $55 billion in advertising revenues (Williams, 2019). Most of the platforms used by political

campaigns for mass communications online exist on advertising revenues. Their sales pitch to advertisers highlights the number of users on each platform, daily active users, and time spent on each platform. If relevant content is available to users, then it is more likely a user is to spend time on each platform. Increased user usage in turn leads to more money from advertisers and content creators. Visibility is important not only to the marketers but to the platforms themselves.

The era of long-form rational argument is dying. Our clickbait culture permeates all aspects of advertising, media, and has made its way into the central communications strategies of campaigns. Effective rhetorical style within a political campaign means communicating messages that are pithy, tweetable, and delivered in soundbite format. The average news soundbite has decreased substantially since the era of televised political campaigns began; by the

1980’s only 4% of soundbites were 20 seconds or longer, placing emphasis on the need for candidates to be effective communicators (Hallin, 1992, p. 34). One study by Harvard researcher

Kiku Adatto (1990) discovered the average sound bite shrunk from 42.3 seconds in 1968 to 9.8 seconds in 1988. It is impossible for a politician to explain with rational arguments, complex and nuanced issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in 9.8 seconds.

Our sound-bite news environment benefits candidates who are apt at hamming-up their political speeches in an effort to try and influence media coverage. Writing in his book The

Sound Bite Society, Jeffrey Scheuer (1999) states, “A sound bite society, in which slogans, and images supplant arguments and ideas, favors certain kinds of claims and values and certain modes of communication” (p. 82). Scheuer believes the deconstruction of American political rhetoric into soundbites is correlated with a decline in political knowledge and interest. Slogans now trump ideas. Style now trumps rational argument and style sells.

America’s Presidential campaigns have become enormously expensive undertakings that require significant money to operate. This has led to the creation of large-scale digital fundraising efforts within each campaign looking to the web as a significant source of revenue. A study from the Campaign Finance Institute (2017) found that during the 2016 Presidential campaign, 69% of the Trump campaign’s individual donors came from donors of $200 or less.

This study found that Trump’s campaign raised more from small-dollar donors than the oft- mentioned Obama digital effort. It is often the candidates with the most-successful online fundraising operations who are the ones messaging to the extremes of their party and can co-opt controversy for their own financial benefit.

Entertainment Media

Successful modern campaigns generate visibility in today’s attention economy by producing engaging, and often entertaining content. Donald Trump wrote in his 1987 memoir,

The Art of the Deal, “People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole” (p. 305). These words were written two decades before Trump would become President and foreshadowed the merger between entertainment and politics. Entertainment politics has culminated in the election of President Trump, a reality show actor, showing that style can trump substance.

Historically, political communication literature has looked at entertainment through the prism of media concepts such as agenda-setting, priming, and framing. These three concepts see entertainment media as core to setting a framework for debate, but they imply entertainments’ impact on politics is that of an external force. Considering the convergence of entertainment with the political arena, we need to begin to view it as an internal force. Our current media environment is forcing effective campaigns to become their own media outlets. In the recent

Israeli election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party created their own digital news network. The party hired television newscasters and provided an entertaining “Likud” viewpoint on current events. The once clear line between entertainment and politics is gone and has been replaced with a 24/7 news-cycle that profits off of political intrigue and drama. Like large corporate brands looking to sell a product, campaigns are in the business of selling their candidate's personality and ideas. Modern campaigns are utilizing flamboyant rhetorical style as a method for breaking into news coverage and onto the social media feeds of entertainment-first voters.

When voters have a choice between news and entertainment media, they choose entertainment (Prior, 2007). This preference for entertainment content has created a political knowledge gap between news-seekers and news-avoiders (Lee & Yang, 2014, Ksziaek,

Malthouse, & Webster, 2010) and is a major issue for political campaigns attempting to deliver information to voters. Business author Tom Gorman (2007) writes, “...to present anything, you have to break through the clutter…” (p. 150). Campaigns seeking to break through the clutter have looked to up the ante on the production of entertainment content.

It is only when voters must choose between news and a lack of media that they become complacent in watching news. This discrepancy in media choice is clearly shown on the list of the 100 most viewed videos on the video platform YouTube (YouTube and Wikipedia). As of

October 1, 2017, only five of the 100 most watched videos are not music views and none of the remaining five are political or news related. When users have a choice, most do not choose to spend their time watching the news. This is why during the 2014 election cycle, while working on Senator Mitch McConnell’s campaign, we released a digital advertisement titled, “What

Rhymes with Alison Lundergan Grimes.” The video received hundreds of thousands of views online, generate earned media, and helped to define Grimes as a liberal in a viral and entertaining way.

Historically paid media has served as the preferred method of campaign spending, which has risen dramatically over the past decade according to the Federal Election Commission. The

Center for Responsive Government (Berr, 2016) estimates $6.8 billion was spent on federal elections in 2016 with the bulk of this money being spent on paid advertising. Campaign advertisements are a form of push media (Webster, 2014), where information is pushed by the marketer outwards into the pathway of the consumer. This form of marketing has worked best in

an environment of limited media choice. The modern marketplace has shifted away from push media and towards cord cutting (eMarketer, 2017) and online information gathering (Williams &

Tedesco, 2006, Kaye & Johnson, 2008).

Writing with great foresight in 2004, Liesbet Van Zoonen discussed a world in which self-interested political actors try to leverage the celebrity and attention from movie stars or musicians in their election campaigns. In Entertaining the Citizen, Van Zoonen makes the case that style, and celebrity can shift the traditional political paradigm away from policy outputs and towards style outputs. Political candidates propped up by complex media systems will be successful in their ability to promote glittering generalities and use entertainment to shift attention away from tangible problems and towards a comparison on personality traits. Why discuss policy when you can distract with cultural issues? Why debate issues when you can distract with meaningless mantras? Our current state of politics is perfectly summed up in the opening lines of a song from the Broadway musical Chicago,

Give 'em the old razzle dazzle

Razzle Dazzle 'em

Give 'em an act with lots of flash in it

And the reaction will be passionate

Give 'em the old hocus pocus

Bead and feather 'em

How can they see with sequins in their eyes?

The nature of politics and what voters have come to expect, and desire has changed.

While voters in a focus group might complain about partisanship in Washington, they themselves act in a partisan fashion online. While voters grumble for more policy driven discussion, they

only spend time watching pithy and entertaining videos. While voters in a survey might whine about Donald Trump’s bloviating, they reward his behavior with shares, clicks, and attention.

What voters say they want from political discourse is very different than how voters act concerning political discourse. Talking heads like to pontificate about the current dreadful state of politics, but there is very little choice for campaigns in how they can act. To be successful, campaigns must evolve into content-producers that respond to voters’ desires and media consumption patterns. This means creating content that is engaging and laced with entertainment.

Campaigns that do not are effectively forfeiting the digital space to their opponents.

America has seen a merger of pop-culture and politics. Popular late-night television shows offer interviews with both actors and politicians that have important priming effects on their audience (Moy, Xenos, & Heck, 2005). Face-time on influential daytime talk programs are highly coveted by politicians because of their ability to reach important demographics.

Politicians historically have relied on their political parties for organizational and material support for their campaigns but our continued shift into candidate centered campaigns has rewarded politicians who build their own campaign infrastructure. Reality television stars such as MTV’s The Real World castmate Sean Duffy and NBC’s Saturday Night Live comedian

Al Franken have used their television celebrity to launch successful political careers. California’s famous Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, built his political persona off of his movies and become nicknamed “The Governator” in reference to the Terminator movie franchise. We are living in the golden age of celebrity politicians.

We are living in a very visual society. Visual communications mediums such as video give the electorate the ability to judge candidates across personality traits including negative responses to debate reactions (Seiter & Wagner, 2005) and possible correlations between vocal

frequency and electoral outcomes (Gregory & Gallagher, 2002). The triumph of style over substance within our political system goes so far as to reward better-looking political candidates with expanded television coverage (Waismel-Manor & Tsfati, 2011) and helps voters make rapid judgements affecting electoral success (Olivola & Todorov, 2012). Appearance-based candidate evaluations can also be party specific, with one study finding that Republican primary voters prefer stereotypically looking Republican candidates (Olivola, Sussman, Tsetsos, Kang, &

Todorov, 2012).

Entertainment politics serves as an intersecting variable when discussing the previously discussed phenomena of visibility and reach. Most studies that have categorized styles of digital content have found entertainment content among the most engaged formats. The Internet is a medium that rewards entertainment content with social sharing (Moon, 2014) and entertaining headlines with more clicks (Blom & Hansen, 2015). As the dissemination of political content continues to shift towards digital means, the entertainment element associated with the content will grow in importance.

We live in an era where consumers can self-select what to watch and when to watch it and therefore pull media reigns supreme. If information is boring or a viewer is apathetic about the content, they will click off, swipe right, or scroll away to another piece of content. This is why entertainment politics is rewarded with more airtime and creates a cycle of earned media and attention that can dramatically affect voter perceptions and alter an election. In 2016 one estimate projected Donald Trump to have generated more than $2 billion in earned media coverage (New York Times), a fact that irked many of his political rivals but provided record breaking television ratings for debates.

It is not only campaigns looking to leverage entertainment media for their own advantage, but traditional entertainment media looking to politics as a source of laughs and viewership. These soft news entertainment programs have led into an interesting field of research on the effects they have on voter education and candidate perception. Studies about the political effects of late night programming such as The Daily Show are mixed, with some showing the satirical nature of the programs as causing voter discontent (Baumgartner & Morris, 2006) while others saw positive effects on political attentiveness from low-information viewers (Cao, 2010

Holbert, Lambe, Dudo, Carlton, 2007).

Endless cable, subscription, and digital programming has also led to an increased need for on-air talent, and booking controversial politicians helps producers generate headlines that they hope will turn into viewers. The popular television show Dancing with the Stars booked former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay on their program where one journalist said he,

“shakes his booty to ‘Wild Thing’” (Gastaldo, 2009). It seems the odder the situation, the more likely it is to be booked on television. The public’s macabre fascination with scandal ridden politicians even extends to spouses. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevic, who is incarcerated for corruption convictions, asked his wife Patti to join a reality show where she ate tarantulas on a deserted island (Hamilton, 2009). This sad situation highlights the extent to which politicians, the media, advertisers, and the public are connected in a morbid symbiosis. Every crestfallen politician can find some reality show or podcast that they can host or appear on. The bigger the scandal, the larger the potential audience.

The media is overflowing with information at an almost voyeuristic level for the

President and his family. This excess of information has led to the public to develop a sense of closeness with elected officials that didn’t exist before the rise of mass media. There is some

evidence that when a well-known elected official dies, the public mourns as in similar ways to if a close friend died. All of this despite most of the public having never met or knowing the deceased! Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl (1956) coined the term “para-social relationship” to describe the process in which an audience comes to believe that it has an intimate relationship with someone simply because they are aware of every detail of their life. With a continuous increase in consumption of imagery, biography, and information of celebrity via mass communications, our society will likely continue to experience the fallout from para-social relationships with our politicians.

While serving as Chief Digital Strategist in 2016, I coordinated the Rand Paul campaign’s live stream of an entire day on the campaign trail. The idea initially came as an effort to accomplish overcoming many of the phenomena discussed in this paper. I felt the idea was entertaining, would generate visibility, and achieve a high number of social shares. From sunup until sundown, a camera filmed Paul in Iowa while doing everything from eating a meal, to riding in a car, to critiquing the music on the radio. These were mundane and ordinary events, but the stunt earned the Senator some press and provided our campaign with strategic successes.

The day of the live-stream became one of the most-trafficked on the campaign website and delivered the campaign with signups, fundraising dollars, and store product sales.

Vulnerability and transparency provide positive and tangible tactical returns for campaigns.

During the live-stream the Senator commented about the event itself being “dumbass” , leading to a viral moment online (Gass, 2015). Scott Detrow (2015) at National Public Radio wrote a headline, “Dumbass or Not, Rand Paul’s Livestream may be the Future of Campaigning.” We were also able to sell tee shirts in the campaign store that said, “I watched Rand Paul’s Dumbass

Livestream.” The event was a big success for the campaign and the idea was mimicked on the television show House of Cards.

The effects on American political discourse from infotainment are not all negative. A growing body of research has found some priming effects and positive association with political knowledge formation from soft-news exposure (Baum, 2003, Kim & Vishak, 2008, Xenos &

Becker, 2009; Prior for an opposing view, 2005). Voters who might not consume hard news or read about politics are able to receive some information from comedy sketches, late-night television, or satirical programming such as South Park. If voters will not pay attention to politics except through entertaining means, is it not better to have a public that has at least some information? Even if that information comes from a Tom DeLay dance act.

Candidates of the past that prefer to pontificate than entertain, such as former Governor

Jeb Bush, are ridiculed as having “low-energy” when they don’t engage in enthusiastic and hard- charged dialogue. This need for attention and the shrinking soundbite have destroyed the ability for rational argument to take place. Formats in which rational argument should prosper, such as political debates, have become forums for punchlines, jabs, and theatrical rhetoric.

Our modern and expensive Democratic process is increasingly driven by digital fundraising dollars and rewards candidate willing to make extreme statements with larger number of donations and an enhanced voter database. Political ideas are becoming commodities purchased enthusiastically by supporters in the form of a t-shirt, hat, or through entering a contest for a chance to play basketball with President Obama.

With every passing day, the traditional media environment is eroded by personalized digital offerings. If a campaign wants to be effective in the future, it must employ an attention-

getting, entertaining, and ideologically congruent rhetorical style, or it risks losing an election to an opponent who will.

Future Study

During the 2016 election, Google would periodically release a list of the most searched terms associated with each candidate. Many of the most searched terms related to personality and style traits. The most common searches ranged from information about Donald Trump and Rand

Paul’s hair, to questions about the candidate’s spouses. At a macro-level, voters are more concerned with spending time researching Donald Trump’s hair online than his policies.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio brilliantly answered his most Googled questions in a

YouTube video (Marco Rubio Answers, 2015). Some of his most Googled questions included people’s curiosity about his nationality, height, spouse, and political party. The need for this video highlights another important reason campaigns operate continuously because voters could at any moment search for them online! An old political adage, “define or be defined” illustrates the need to perpetually put out videos, content, and press releases that define your candidacy.

Without the self-definition online, an information seeking voter could instead be driven to negative content that permanently harms their perception.

Search engines are trusted as a fact-finding and informational resource, but most users do not know that there is a paid component to the results. Search engines act as a pull-mechanism where voters are proactively seeking information rather than having it fed to them. The act of searching is providing a false sense of agency and masking the accuracy of information in the results. People are implicitly trusting results that appear first during search queries (Keane,

O’Brien, & Smyth, 2008) with some estimates that 90% of searchers do not venture past the first page (Chitika Survey, 2013).

There is an entire industry of marketing experts dedicated to manipulating online algorithms and perfecting search engine optimization to ensure that content seen on the first page

is reflective of their clients’ viewpoints. The disconnect between what voters believe search engine results represent, their trust in the results, and the actual content of the results, is vast.

Outside of search advertising, another concept that is ripe for additional study is the effect of “labeling theory” in the political space online. Labeling theory (Becker, 2008) has left sociology and entered the political realm. The idea behind naming Russia’s infamous “Pravda”

(Truth) newspaper has been repurposed inside of American politics both by media outlets and campaigns. A prime example in the partisan media is the outlet “Independent Review Journal”, a popular news website founded by a political campaign operative with deep ties to the Republican party. This outlet regularly takes money from Republican campaigns, works proactively to create viral and entertaining videos with conservative politicians, yet when articles from the site are shared on social media they appear to the uninformed alongside the moniker “Independent.” The

Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit organization with a focus on transparency related to money and politics, published an exposé referring to The Independent Review Journal and Blue Nation

Review as outlets that “blur the lines of media and politics (Watson, 2016).”

A campaign example of a repurposing of labeling theory was during the 2010 gubernatorial election of Florida Governor Rick Scott. During the campaign, the issue of

Medicare fraud while Rick Scott was the Chief Executive Officer of the Columbia/HCA hospital chain became the centerpiece attack on Scott’s character. Negative advertisements flooded the television airwaves and news stories about the incident were prevalent online. The Scott campaign set up a website at “TheTruthAboutRickScott.com” and directed anyone in Florida who searched online for additional information on the scandal to the website. The website was branded in an academic nature so as to appear as an unbiased source and became the centerpiece of the Scott campaign’s defense on the controversy. While campaign internal polling showed an

impact from the website and plan to counter the Medicare fraud attack, there is room for additional academic research on the effects of these types of strategies on voters’ intentions.

While social media offers researchers new areas of study using publicly available datasets from online platforms, they should be cautious about generalizing conclusions. Facebook is complex in its ability to target posts to unique groups of people on a page by age, location, gender, and additional demographics. Additionally, there is an increased usage of “dark posts” by campaigns. “Dark posts” are status updates/pieces of content that are shared through an advertising platform. These posts often will be promoted with advertising dollars and may could use micro-targeting to achieve message segmentation. Content across digital platforms can also be targeted by location, so researchers may need to set up dummy accounts in other locations or control for this in their research design. They can alternative also look in Facebook’s advertising archive but even this archive does not tell the full scope of an advertisement.

Holistic datasets are hard to come by and only when researchers have access to the root source of the data can the full comprehension of a digital strategy be understood. An experimental design was set up that asked college students to “like” the Facebook pages of

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. The study, published in Computers in Human Behavior

(2015), concluded that “liking” a candidate's Facebook is insufficient to increase engagement and efficacy. These sorts of studies are not uncommon and generalize based on little evidence and a lack of understanding about campaign tactics and strategy. When campaigns build audiences on Facebook, they target lists of identified voters from which to build up their page

“likes.” Once these voters have opted onto a candidate's Facebook page, they will receive information both organically and in the form of paid advertising only if the campaign believes they are a persuadable or important voter. Some campaigns will also harness data from

Facebook’s page likes to build profiles of supporters from which to send direct mail, phone calls, and even door knockers. While Pennington et. al do discuss some of the limitations of their research, their conclusions are too generalized, and their experiment would have benefitted from a deeper understanding of campaign tactics through elite interviews, as well as a full knowledge of the campaign’s Facebook data strategy. Without an understanding of how practitioners are using data on platforms to tailor messages or access to view commonly used dark posts, targeted content, and advertising, it is difficult to infer much about tactics from publicly available datasets.

As research in political communication progresses, I want to offer some potential questions that could be answered:

1) What role(s) do engagement driven metrics play in contemporary campaigns?

2) Is there any difference between the way Republican and Democrat campaigns use

engagement-driven metrics when crafting their digital strategies?

3) How have engagement-driven metrics changed how political campaigns target

audiences?

4) How have engagement-driven metrics shifted the informational environment in

contemporary campaigns?

Conclusion

If an opposing candidate talks too long in a debate? Interrupt them with a shout of “low- energy!” If an opponent brings up a policy difference, change the narrative by calling her “horse- face!” Video clips of memorable nicknames, punchlines, and bombastic speech dominate cable news because they fit neatly into daily segments of outrage from the class of talking heads.

Outrage means more eyeballs and thus more advertising dollars. Rinse and repeat.

A rise in personalized news and social media has fragmented voters’ attention and created a problem for campaigns looking to grow databases and raise money online. In their efforts to successfully navigate this new environment, campaigns have desperately begun out- shouting each other. Attention has become the most precious commodity for politicians, as they look to score earned media and clamor for low-dollar fundraising dollars. Skilled political practitioners craft public appearances and write speeches with a focus on how they will generate the most attention.

Political organizations exist for the purpose of achieving a political goal. These organizations are made up of rationally minded actors looking to further their own self-interests of career advancement. As an organization, successful political campaigns will use whatever legal means they can to achieve success. Their focus is not voter efficacy or upholding the virtuous ideals of Locke and Rousseau. Campaigns exist to win using the most effective methods at their disposal.

I recognize my own role in this process as a campaign operative focused on the digital space. Work that my colleagues and I produce online is affecting voter perceptions of candidates and of one another. Can the genie ever be returned to the bottle? As a believer in the invisible hand, there is certainly no economic incentive for political campaigns to change their behavior.

In fact, every incentive: press attention, online fundraising, website signups, video views, larger reach, etc. is all stimulated by attention-generating rhetoric.

The concepts of selective exposure, visibility, and the attention economy are inseparable.

All three are in an unhealthy and incredibly dependent relationship with one another. They are unable to break free from the effects they have on one another. We must come to terms that these phenomena are ingrained within every online media outlet. Despite our best wishes, there is no quick or simple answer to fix the circular relationship between the need for campaigns to produce partisan content in order to achieve increased visibility online.

Even if social networks changed the way they deliver content organically, away from encouraging engagement, campaigns will still be able to overcome the change with enhanced spending. Could new campaign finance laws change the current paradigm? Perhaps. But court cases such as Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United are settled law and there seems little likelihood of change. Additionally, countries such as France and Israel currently limit campaign spending and electioneering but are not eliciting better luck with the phenomena of politicians willing to do anything for attention. Viral online content does not stop being shared at country borders. “Social” media is by definition about engagement and sharing. It will cease to be

“social” if the notion of engagement is removed from platforms.

I spent two months in Egypt training political activists who sought to bring Democracy during the reign of President Hosni Mubarak. While in-country, I heard countless stories of protests organized through Facebook. One memorable activist shared a story that he was only alive today because of information he received on Twitter about locations at which police were killing protestors. Sadly though, since Mubarak was deposed, Coptic Christians have seen a rise in violence from Muslim extremists and digital platforms have become a means for extremist

recruitment (Sanchez, 2014). The same platforms that helped organize freedom for Egypt are now used to organize terror. This Jekyll and Hyde dynamic from digital media is prevalent across the world. Social media is being weaponized by organizations within Democracies seeking to insight strife and drive wedges between segments of the electorate.

The 2020 election looms ahead, and Texas Congressman Beto O’Rourke recently kicked off his prospects by live streaming his dental cleaning on Instagram (Rosenberg, 2018).

O’Rourke’s stunt was subsequently rewarded with countless news stories, cable news broadcasts, and thousands of viewers who watched the dental visit live. His campaign went on to raise more than six million dollars on the day of his official announcement. Until attention-getting content stops eliciting tangible benefits for political campaigns, it will continue to thrive.

The way in which political communications research approaches campaign effects within our sophisticated modern media environment requires a deeper understanding of how practitioners strategize daily. Practitioners understand that a YouTube video with no views, a

Facebook post with no reach, and a speech with no audience all fail at persuasion. Without visibility, even the most well-funded and poll-tested campaign cannot persuade. Content that is entertaining, unique, and shareable will ultimately achieve higher visibility and have a larger impact on political communications.

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VITA

Vincent Robert Harris was born in Arlington, Virginia. After completing his work at Chantilly

High School, Chantilly, Virginia, in 2006, Vincent followed in his grandparents’ footsteps by attending Baylor University. Vincent completed a Bachelors of Arts degree in Religion at Baylor

University in Waco, Texas, in 2009. During the following years, Vincent started a digital marketing and consulting agency headquartered in Austin, Texas. His company has worked for political leaders across the world including Governor Mike Huckabee, Governor Rick Scott,

Senator Rand Paul, Senator Ted Cruz, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Vincent is married to his amazing wife, Chelsea Harris. “But by the grace of God I am what I am.”

Address: [email protected]

This manuscript was typed by the author.