An Unprecedented Election

Written by leading scholars of political communication, this book provides a comprehensive accounting of the campaign communication that characterized the unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign. The political events leading up to election day on November 8, 2016, involved unprecedented events in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be nominated by a major party, and she was favored to win the highest seat in the nation. Donald Trump, arguably one of the most unconventional and most-unlikely-to-succeed candidates in U.S. history, became the leading candidate against Clinton. Then, an even more surprising thing happened: Trump won, an outcome unexpected by all experts and statistical models. An Unprecedented Election: Media, Communication, and the Electorate in the 2016 Campaign presents proprietary research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication and documents the most significant-and in some cases, the most shocking-features of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The information presented in this book is derived from national surveys, experiments, and textual analysis and helps readers grasp the truly unique characteristics of this campaign that make it unlike any other in U.S. history. The chapters explain the underlying dynamics of this astonishing election by assessing the important role of both traditional and social media, the evolving (and potentially diminishing) influence of televised campaign advertisements, the various implications of three historic presidential debates, and the contextual significance of convention addresses. Readers will come away with an appreciation of the content and effects of the campaign communication and media coverage as well as the unique attributes of the electorate that ultimately selected Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.

Tells the story of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in photos and essays by CNN contributors.

This book explains the 2016 presidential election through a strategic focus. In the primaries both parties faced challenges from insurgent outsiders riding waves of populist fervor in the electorate, but only the Democrats were able to steer the nomination into the hands of their establishment favorite. Why weren’t Republican elites able to stop Donald Trump from hijacking their party’s nomination? Why did Hillary Clinton come up short on Election Day despite the fact that nearly everyone expected her to win after her opponent ran a haphazard campaign plagued by scandal after scandal? The research presented here argues that the Clinton campaign conducted the nearly perfect execution of the wrong electoral strategy, costing her the Electoral College and her chance to become America’s first female president.

This book goes beyond examining Donald Trump as a unique and controversial President to place his election in a historical and systematic perspective. It offers an analysis of the 2016 presidential nominations and election, the economic and demographic foundations of the election of Mr. Trump, the realignment of the party system, ideological polarization in American politics, the realities of a postindustrial society locked in a global economy, and the outlook for American democracy in the twenty-first century.

Written by leading scholars of political communication, this book provides a comprehensive accounting of the campaign communication that characterized the unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign. The political events leading up to election day on November 8, 2016, involved unprecedented events in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be nominated by a major party, and she was favored to win the highest seat in the nation. Donald Trump, arguably one of the most unconventional and most-unlikely-to-succeed candidates in U.S. history, became the leading candidate against Clinton. Then, an even more surprising thing happened: Trump won, an outcome unexpected by all experts and statistical models. An Unprecedented Election: Media, Communication, and the Electorate in the 2016 Campaign presents proprietary research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication and documents the most significant-and in some cases, the most shocking-features of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The information presented in this book is derived from national surveys, experiments, and textual analysis and helps readers grasp the truly unique characteristics of this campaign that make it unlike any other in U.S. history. The chapters explain the underlying dynamics of this astonishing election by assessing the important role of both traditional and social media, the evolving (and potentially diminishing) influence of televised campaign advertisements, the various implications of three historic presidential debates, and the contextual significance of convention addresses. Readers will come away with an appreciation of the content and effects of the campaign communication and media coverage as well as the unique attributes of the electorate that ultimately selected Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.

This collection offers an in-depth look at municipal voting behaviour during local elections in eight of Canada's largest cities.

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.