“An overrated clown.” When stepping into the voting booth, are these words at the forefront of every voter’s mind? While they may not be the exact thought, these and other similar words seen on social media have more of an influence on young voters than ever before.
Millennials are commonly known to be a more technology-based generation. This technology use, including the popular use of social media, has now begun to change the way non-millennials direct their campaign media towards millennials. This is why, for example, a tweet from candidate Donald Trump can potentially completely sway a young voter’s mind.
Social and digital media first made its major appearance within politics in Democrat Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, though was not used by a successful candidate until the next election when Barack Obama entered office in 2008.
“A lot of the people who worked on the Dean campaign, in 2008 worked on the Obama campaign,” Dr. Felicity Duncan, assistant professor of digital media and communication, said. “That was, I would say, the campaign where we really saw a significant investment of resources go into social media and digital communications more generally.”
Obama’s 2012 campaigning strategies are seen to be the most successful use of social media thus far. Using similar ideas to that of the Howard Dean campaign, he changed the strategies for fundraising by drawing a larger crowd through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and is recognized for such as the “first social media president.”
“It was very simple, frankly. If you have a candidate which none of the major donors wants to give a penny and the only way to communicate is to buy expensive TV ads, you’re kind of in deep trouble unless you can figure out another way to do it,” Joe Trippi, presidential campaign manager of Howard Dean, said in a phone interview.
“I’d always sort of had this feeling that if you could connect up enough people on the internet that they could out-maneuver and out-fundraise the big donor people in the party,” Trippi said. “Social media is powerful and it has changed a lot of things.”
Since Obama’s success, more recent candidates have taken to using Facebook and Twitter, as well as other social networking sites, to reach out to a larger and often younger audience. This change has made the current 2016 presidential election the most active overall on social media.
“I think that when politicians are campaigning it depends on their audience on how they want to portray their message,” Jack Sanders, freshman secondary education major, said. “So, if they want to reach a younger audience they use social media and if they are going for an older audience crowd, probably the news or TV ads.”
A study from Pew Research Center confirms that most younger audiences get their information about presidential candidates through social media, stating that over 60 percent of millennials get their political news from Facebook, as compared to less than 40 percent from the baby boomer generation.
“In this generation more people tend to check social media to get their news,” Samantha Murray, junior history and English double major, said. “In this age of technology, it’s more likely to see someone post about a candidate on Facebook, and get an opinion that way, than it is to read about him or her in a newspaper.”
“Establishing a strong, positive, engaging social media presence for political candidates is vital now, just as it is in other industries such as business and entertainment,” Laura Hancq, (Cabrini ‘13) legislative aide for Assemblyman Troy Singleton, said in an email. “It’s not enough to just use social media at election time, but you want to constantly be using it to advertise yourself in a positive light throughout the year to stay in people’s brains.”
Senior psychology major Brianna Ridgely said, “My parents don’t hear the information from other people’s status updates like I do.”
Ridgely is referring to the fact that views on social media are more diverse and less grounded in reporting than are standard journalism stories, which usually present a more complete picture. She also points out the inability of social media to reach some of the older voting audiences.
Associate professor of history and political science Dr. Courtney Smith said, “There is going to be a definite divide in how people, say, over the age of 50 or 60 digest and get information from the candidates than people in their twenties and thirties.”
Trippi believes that just as the generation that grew up with TV has grown old, millennials are going to go through their lives with social media as the norm. “If you’re 18-30, the remote was always a pain in the ass and, not only that, those channels are limiting and you’re much more focused on your mobile device and are getting the bulk of your information not from television, but through social media.”
While many millennials recognize the technology change between generations, some still prefer not to use social media as their main source of information. “My parents have always told me to check any story before you form your own opinion. For me personally, I think I learn about a candidate or political issue the same way my parents do, reading and checking facts,” Murray said. “I’ll typically read up on an issue or topic regarding politics before I check social media.”
Even so, social media use is growing at a steady pace with no definitive way of telling where it will stop. With Facebook use almost doubling between the baby boomer generation and millennial generation, the question is raised whether social media will completely replace other forms of popular media.
“In the not too distant future, probably maybe even by the next presidential election, you won’t be able to tell the difference,” Trippi said. “Sooner or later it will blur and you won’t be able to ask the question, ‘what’s more important, social media or media?’ It will be the same thing and we’ll just be consuming it all differently.”
“I think that they just kind of converge more and more,” Duncan said. “We’ll always need news so whether we’re consuming the New York Times in paper form, on their website, on their Facebook, through Apple News, through video; any way we’re consuming it, the heart of it is the information and it gets just sort of delivered in whatever way works.”
