Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election (Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management) 3030865584, 9783030865580

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN POLITICAL MARKETING AND MANAGEMENT SERIES EDITOR: JENNIFER LEES-MARSHMENT

Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Edited by Jamie Gillies

Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management Series Editor Jennifer Lees-Marshment Faculty of Arts, Political Studies University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand

Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management (PalPMM) series publishes high quality and ground-breaking academic research on this growing area of government and political behaviour that attracts increasing attention from scholarship, teachers, the media and the public. It covers political marketing intelligence including polling, focus groups, role play, co-creation, segmentation, voter profiling, stakeholder insight; the political consumer; political management including crisis management, change management, issues management, reputation management, delivery management; political advising; political strategy such as positioning, targeting, market-orientation, political branding; political leadership in all its many different forms and arena; political organization including managing a political office, political HR, internal party marketing; political communication management such as public relations and e-marketing and ethics of political marketing and management. For more information email the series editor Jennifer Lees-Marshment on [email protected] and see https://leesmarshment. wordpress.com/pmm-book-series/. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14601

Jamie Gillies Editor

Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Editor Jamie Gillies Communications and Public Policy St. Thomas University Fredericton, NB, Canada

Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management ISBN 978-3-030-86558-0    ISBN 978-3-030-86559-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86559-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the memory of my Grandma, Betty Porter, who loved to talk about the spectacle of American politics.

Acknowledgments

The Palgrave Pivot series is an ideal home for this early published collection on the 2020 election. Inspired by recent rapidly assembled academic collections, especially those on the American (Gillies 2017), Canadian (Marland and Giasson 2015, 2020; Gillies et  al. 2020), and British (Jackson and Thorsen 2015; Lilleker and Pack 2016) elections of the 2010s, the increasing importance and impact of early research on elections matters greatly. While later volumes and more extensive research on the 2020 presidential election will employ more extensive empirical analysis of aspects of this campaign, each contributor in this book worked tirelessly to complete chapters in less than three months following the election and events following November. The research was then book-edited, series-­ edited, peer-edited, and publisher-edited in a compressed timeframe in order to produce this book and get it to market for early impact. I am extremely grateful, first and foremost, to Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management Series Editor Jennifer Lees-Marshment for her support and dedication to these projects. All at Palgrave, especially Ambra Finotello, Charanya Manoharan, Dhanalakshmi Muralidharan, and Karthika Devi, were so supportive and helpful. I am very thankful for the support and friendship of my colleagues Tom Bateman, Philip Lee, Patrick Malcolmson, Shaun Narine, Greg Payne, Vincent Raynauld, and André Turcotte. And I am always grateful for the administrative support of Lehanne Knowlton. These edited collections have also benefitted from the support of the annual regional conferences of both the New England Political Science Association and the Atlantic Provinces Political Science Association, where many chapters have been presented and vii

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discussed, and the American Behavioral Scientist Retrospective and Pizza & Politics Tuesdays at Emerson College where robust discussion of the election helped frame the book. It also would not be a presidential election without the support of my good friends Adam Becker and Liz Hebert who lived this campaign with me. And lastly, I am very thankful for all of the support of my partner and daughter for putting up with the political saturation of our household during each election season and my parents, who call regularly and say, “We were just watching Fareed Zakaria and did you see that…?” May the Joe Biden years be less chaotic!

References Gillies, Jamie. ed. 2017. Political Marketing in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. London: Palgrave Pivot. Gillies, Jamie, Vincent Raynauld, and André Turcotte. eds. 2020. Political Marketing in the 2019 Canadian Election. London: Palgrave Pivot. Jackson, Daniel, and Einar Thorsen. 2015. UK Election Analysis 2015: Media, Voters and the Campaign, Early Reflections from Leading UK Academics. Bournemouth: Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community. Lilleker, Darren, and Mark Pack. 2016. Political Marketing and the 2015 UK General Election. London: Palgrave Pivot. Marland, Alex, and Thierry Giasson, eds. 2015. Canadian Election Analysis 2015: Communication, Strategy, and Canadian Democracy. Vancouver: UBC Press/ Samara Press. ———, eds. 2020. Inside the Campaign: Managing Elections in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press.

Contents

1 Introduction: The Right Candidate at the Worst Time  1 Jamie Gillies 2 Playing Catch Up from a Basement in Delaware: How the Biden Campaign Marketed ‘Joe’  7 Jamie Gillies 3 Replicating the 2016 “Lightning in a Bottle” Political Moment: Biden, Trump, and Winning the U.S. Presidency 21 Vincent Raynauld and André Turcotte 4 The 2020 Campaign: Candidates in a New World 41 Neil Bendle and Purushottam Papatla 5 Trump’s Marketing Strategy and Communication in Government and the 2020 Election: Failing to Adjust to the White House and Governing 65 Edward Elder and Jennifer Lees-Marshment 6 Democracy and Disinformation: An Analysis of Trump’s 2020 Reelection Campaign 83 Brian Conley

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7 Donald Trump: The Brand, the Disjunctive Leader, and Brand Ethics105 Kenneth Cosgrove 8 Trump, Populism and the Pandemic125 Robert Busby 9 Conclusion: The 2020 Presidential Election and Aftermath Was One for the Ages143 Jamie Gillies Index149

Notes on Contributors

Neil Bendle  is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA. Robert Busby  is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of History and Politics, Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK. Brian  Conley  is Associate Professor and Program Director of Applied Politics and Global Policy in the Political Science and Legal Studies Department, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Kenneth Cosgrove  is Professor in the Political Science and Legal Studies Department, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Edward Elder  is a Professional Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. Jamie Gillies  is Associate Professor of Communications and Public Policy and Executive Director of the Frank McKenna Centre for Communications and Public Policy in the Department of Journalism and Communications, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Jennifer Lees-Marshment  is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand. Purushottam Papatla  is the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute Professor of Marketing and Co-Director of the Northwestern Mutual

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Data Science Institute in the Lubar School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. Vincent  Raynauld is an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts, USA and an affiliate professor at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada. André Turcotte  is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

Fig. 4.5

Fig. 4.6

Fig. 4.7

Predicted probabilities of democratic candidates winning nomination. (Source: Iowa Electronic Markets 2020 Democratic Nomination Data, accessed 08/21/2020) 44 US searches on Google Trends. (Source: Google Trends, Accessed 12/28/2020, 100 is Maximum Relative Interest) 48 Top terms mentioned in 538 live blog coverage 50 Top issues of voters from Twitter 2020 democratic primary. (Source: https://www.elecurator.org/insights/the-­2020-­ democratic-­nomination-­in-­the-­twitterverse, Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, accessed Feb 5, 2021) 53 Interest in the issues identified by Elecurator Over Time. (Source: https://www.elecurator.org/insights/the-­2020-­ democratic-­nomination-­in-­the-­twitterverse, Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, accessed Feb 5, 2021) 54 Voter sentiment toward candidates on racial relations by states’ political affiliations. (Source: https://www.elecurator.org/ insights/sentiment-­tracker-­dominant-­issues-­by-­candidate-­and-­ state-­grouping, Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, accessed Feb 5, 2021) 54 Elecurator’s forecasts of the Electoral College. (Source: https://www.elecurator.org/insights/forecast-­nov-­4, Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, accessed Feb 5, 2021)55

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List of Figures

Fig. 4.8

Fig. 4.9 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

Elecurator’s predictions of the January 2021 Georgia Senate Runoffs. (Source: https://www.elecurator.org/insights/ forecast-­of-­georgia-­senate-­runoffs-­our-­jan-­4-­2021-­update, Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute, accessed Feb 5, 2021)56 Interest In, Viewership of, Main Cable News Channels. (Sources: Google Trends, 12/29/2020 and ratings from Joyella (2020)) 57 A model of market-oriented strategy and communication in government67 ANTIFA media cloud (N = 52,058 stories, 3,456 media sources and 16,185 media links) 93 Socialism media cloud (N = 106,305 stories; 7,407 media sources and 19,379 media links) 97

List of Tables

Table 3.1 The coalition of voters assembled by the Trump campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election Table 3.2 The changing coalitions

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Right Candidate at the Worst Time Jamie Gillies

Abstract  The initial chapter will provide an overview of the 2020 campaign and the chapters in this edited collection. It will aim to frame the book in a comparative marketing and branding literature context with a unifying theme and explain why the 2020 presidential election is a focal point for the use of marketing and branding techniques. Keywords  Biden • Trump • Election • Branding • Marketing The marketing and branding story of the 2020 American presidential election may arguably be not how Joe Biden won but how Donald Trump lost. With money, digital influence, social media manipulation, and mainstream media saturation, as well as a national crisis in an election year, Trump as an incumbent president seeking re-election should have sailed to victory in 2020. Instead, the Biden campaign team outfoxed him in his J. Gillies (*) Communications and Public Policy, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gillies (ed.), Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86559-7_1

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own henhouse. This book attempts to unravel some of the narratives of what happened in 2020 and early 2021. Some of them are well known: Biden’s campaign did a much better job at voter outreach and conversion than the 2016 Clinton campaign, the salience of the management of the pandemic did matter to undecided and independent voters, and the Trump campaign’s digital advantage was squandered before the final months of campaign. But some of the themes have garnered less attention such as Biden’s religious voter outreach in swing states, their integration of get out the vote organizations and the campaign, or Trump’s undisciplined endgame strategy which gave Biden a strategic advantage. Joe Biden was the right candidate at the worst time for the United States, with a pandemic that had shattered the country’s economy and exposed glaring weaknesses with respect to government coordination as hundreds of thousands of people died. In contrast, Donald Trump’s skills did not lend themselves to this kind of public management, and for all his bluster of playing the strong man, he was unable to commandeer the massive resources of the federal government to effectively deal with a crisis. Analyzing the 2020 election result from a marketing and branding perspective and the subsequent aftermath of vote counting and Trump’s refusal to concede culminating in the January 6, 2021 insurrection and attack on the Capitol is challenging. There are still investigations on going and likely criminal cases to follow. But the narratives in this edited collection attempt to shed light on a unique and one-of-a-kind national election in the midst of a pandemic and how both teams used an arsenal of money, airtime, social media influence, and voter outreach strategies to get to 270 electoral college votes. Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election focuses on the changes to typical marketing and branding strategies that have come to pass since the 2016 election. This election was as much about a continuous strategy of targeting and maintaining voter enthusiasm as it was about swaying undecided voters in the electorate. That makes it different from the horserace and implications of targeting undecided voters who were central in 2016. Donald Trump had a base of support that proved unwavering. Likewise, the Democrats counted on the same proportion of the electorate to vote against Trump. The fight then was about maintaining and expanding those numbers and driving every possible vote to the polls. Like the 2016 election, it was also a harbinger for new and major branding and marketing strategies, especially in social media and direct appeals to voters. And again, like 2016, the 2020 election appeared to have

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campaigns that are unusual from a branding and marketing perspective, especially with insurgent candidates in the Democratic race, a Democratic Party presidential nominee who was a compromise candidate, and the Trump campaign’s outreach to voters early on through an aggressive social media strategy. Following on the 2016 election which saw a reality television star battle with the first female presidential candidate of a major party in the United States, the unconventional political trends continue—and take new forms—through a diverse and interesting cast of characters: not one but four viable female presidential candidates, the first openly gay candidate who was a legitimate contender, older and younger candidates representing different bases of an anti-Trump coalition, a Democratic socialist who again competed for the nomination, and a late entry from a media mogul billionaire. This phenomenon again holds new meaning and significance for the study of the personal branding and track record of every candidate. This book thus presents scholarly perspectives and research with practitioner-­relatable content on practices and discourses that will continue to develop our current understandings of political marketing theories. This phenomenon requires sustained investigation which this book provides. Additionally, the campaign has been widely described by political observers and pundits as ‘theater’ or ‘reality television’, with increasingly controversial statements made by the president as a new, normalized political narrative. The 2020 campaign will undoubtedly be discussed far into the future, with so many facets, including the post-election refusal to concede and subsequent insurrection. The second chapter by Jamie Gillies considers the broad outlines of the Biden marketing and advertising campaigns in 2020. It provides a bird’s eye view of the less exciting but more effective strategies the Biden team used, especially in the context of recognizing the mistakes of the Clinton campaign in 2016 and compensating for an increase in voter enthusiasm and turnout on Election Day. The Biden campaign’s closing strategy was unleashed about two months before Election Day, with a total saturation of airwaves, cable and network television, and digital ad buys that dwarfed Trump’s and targeted voter outreach and micro-targeting in swing states. Disciplined right to the end, the only place they came up short was in North Carolina. The third chapter, by Vincent Raynauld and André Turcotte, uses polling data from Emerson College Polling to consider the broader ground game of both campaigns, looking in particular at the major factors that

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really shaped the outcome of the 2020 campaign. The marketing and communication appeals employed by both campaigns are highlighted to address one of the central questions about the election, namely did Donald Trump’s base supporters fail to turn out on Election Day—which effectively led to Joe Biden’s electoral success—or did Donald Trump fail to secure and expand his reach in order to garner enough electoral support? The fourth chapter, by Neil Bendle and Purushottam Papatla, examines political marketing in the 2020 elections through various empirical datasets. Despite all the Democratic primary’s drama, the clear early favorite, Joe Biden, won. The importance of endorsements and momentum was illustrated along with the limits of money. Covid-19 took a central role while the merging of online and in-person campaigns were exemplified by the rise and fall of President Trump’s campaign manager. Previously unavailable data and techniques—for example, social media, Google search, sentiment, and text analysis—can now analyze candidates’ strengths, the public’s interests, and even the transmission of falsehoods. New sources of predictions, beyond traditional polling, can be used by political marketers to better manage their strategies. Of most importance is that the chapter shows that there were methods that showed the 2020 race as fairly predictable, despite challenging campaign dynamics. The Trump campaign branding and marketing is not only more interesting, it also exposed the down side of having total saturation of brand recognition. The bulk of the book considers Trump as an incumbent running for re-election and the Trump campaign strategies to get a second term. Lost in many of the narratives about the 2020 election is that from a branding and marketing standpoint, the Trump campaign should have won. But its strengths were also its greatest weaknesses. This is where marketing and branding analysis is really important because there are a series of valuable lessons for practitioners here. The fifth chapter, by Edward Elder and Jennifer Lees-Marshment, considers President Trump’s marketing strategy and his failure to offer a new direction for 2020 given the magnitude of the pandemic. As they argue, it would have been strategically wise for Trump to deliver on his promises, as well as stay in touch with—and offer a new product offering that appealed to—the U.S. public at large. Instead, Trump focused on culturally divisive elements and sought to pillory Democrats. The lack of communication discipline became evident as he continued to focus on personal grievances than crisis leadership qualities. This chapter highlights Trump’s actions and communication during his time in office and in the lead up to

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the 2020 presidential election against two political marketing theories: the Market-Orientated Party Strategy and Contemporary Governing Leaders’ Communication models. The sixth chapter, by Brian Conley, gets even more specific about Trump’s re-election campaign. Given that Donald Trump was unconventional as both a candidate and as president, it was only natural that he also upended governing norms on the scope of executive authority and the balance of power. That should have weakened his chances of re-election, but as Conley suggests, the impact of the disruption of norms on Trump, particularly among partisan Republican voters, was negligible. This circumstance raises questions not only about the political marketing strategies that Trump and his re-election campaign used to engineer his political resilience but also about the lasting impact his campaign may have on the practice of democratic governance in the United States. In particular, the chapter considers attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa, as well as the theme of socialism, as case studies in Trump’s resilience and market-oriented strategy. The seventh chapter, by Kenneth Cosgrove, builds on his unique research on brand loyalty and heritage. It offers a comparison of Trump’s 2020 and Jimmy Carter’s 1980 re-election campaigns’ strategic position similarities and how the differing electoral results show the power of the Trump brand with almost the entire base and party coalition supporting him. Carter, on the other hand, saw Democrats abandon him in droves in 1980. Cosgrove also analyzes the post-election refusal to concede as a case of bad ethics in marketing and considers the Trump brand in the context of the failed legal challenges and subsequent insurrection. The eighth chapter, by Robert Busby, addresses the challenges of advancing a populist-oriented campaign during the 2020 pandemic crisis and considers Trump’s refusal to pivot to crisis leadership in the midst of his re-election. The chapter also considers the contemporary nature of right-wing populism and whether the pandemic prevented the full harnessing of the kind of insurgency campaign Trump ran in 2016. He attempts to reconcile the handling of the pandemic by the political establishment in Washington with Trump’s anti-establishment populist identity. The election of Joe Biden in the 2020 campaign was both an entirely predictable and completely bizarre result. But it comes as no surprise that the energy created in the 2020 campaign, for better or worse, started and ended with Trump. It is why much of this book, despite Biden’s win, is still focused on the Trump campaign and that the more interesting marketing

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and branding narrative continued to be with Trump. While the Democrats and the Biden campaign’s vote targeting and early voting strategies are given their due, the fact that Trump came within a few thousand votes in three states of winning re-election is perhaps more relevant. The Trump presidency of 2016 to 2021 was both a dramatic failure of government and executive competence and at the same time an ingenious marketing and branding exercise that the Republican Party was only too willing to embrace. It had the elements of a classic ‘you break it, you bought it’ highrisk strategy. But Trump’s brand loyalty has remained surprisingly strong despite losing the general election. It remains to be seen how the Republicans, now a Trump-led party, navigate the next sets of election cycIes. For the Democrats, their organizational strengths in swing states and at the presidential level finally paid off during this cycle, in reclaiming the House in 2018 and then the White House and Senate in 2020 and 2021. But this may have been in spite of and not because of their party brand and marketing. The simplest explanation for Biden’s win may just be that he was the least political offensive and centrist candidate and who was also not named Trump. Both parties thus will have challenges in brand association and recent political legacies to overcome polarization and appeal more broadly to the shrinking group of voters that make up the center.

References Gillies, Jamie. 2015. The Presidentialization of Executive Leadership in Canada. In In Canadian Election Analysis 2015: Communication, Strategy, and Canadian Democracy, ed. Alex Marland and Thierry Giasson. Vancouver: UBC Press/Samara Press. ———, ed. 2017. Political Marketing in the 2016 U.S.  Presidential Election. London: Palgrave Pivot. Gillies, Jamie, Vincent Raynauld, and André Turcotte, eds. 2020. Political Marketing in the 2019 Canadian Election. London: Palgrave Pivot. Jackson, Daniel, and Einar Thorsen. 2015. UK Election Analysis 2015: Media, Voters and the Campaign, Early Reflections from Leading UK Academics. Bournemouth: Centre for the Study of Journalism, Culture and Community. Lilleker, Darren, and Mark Pack. 2016. Political Marketing and the 2015 UK General Election. London: Palgrave Pivot. Marland, Alex, and Thierry Giasson, eds. 2015. Canadian Election Analysis 2015: Communication, Strategy, and Canadian Democracy. Vancouver: UBC Press/ Samara Press. ———, eds. 2020. Inside the Campaign: Managing Elections in Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press.

CHAPTER 2

Playing Catch Up from a Basement in Delaware: How the Biden Campaign Marketed ‘Joe’ Jamie Gillies

Abstract  Joe Biden pulled off one of the biggest political upsets in US politics following losses in early primary states to consolidation of the anti-­ Sanders wings of the party around his nomination. But the Biden campaign was hobbled as soon as it took the lead, given the COVID-19 pandemic and an inability to match Trump’s media attention and exposure. Coupled with a lack of online, social media, and vote targeting resources and infrastructure, Biden’s campaign appeared to be stuck through the spring of 2020. This chapter considers first Biden’s historic comeback win for the nomination and then the twin challenges of marketing and branding a nominee that does not fit the demographics of the party base. It then considers how the campaign had to play catch up, not just against Trump and a formidable data-driven voter targeting and turnout operation but the other, more innovative and technologically savvy J. Gillies (*) Communications and Public Policy, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gillies (ed.), Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86559-7_2

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Democratic campaigns. Furthermore, given the intersectionality of the Democratic coalition, Biden’s campaign has had to be acutely aware of race and gender dynamics. It even prompted Biden to commit to selecting a female vice presidential running mate. So this chapter looks at how the campaign marketed ‘Joe’ as a candidate that lacked all of the obvious marketing strengths (age, diversity, gender, new ideas) that many of his competitors championed to pull off the 2020 US presidential election. Keywords  Branding • Marketing • Democrats • Biden • Traditional

Introduction On June 27, 2019, in the first debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary season, Joe Biden went from presumed frontrunner to the second tier of candidates with one performance. Biden, on the whole, was a little rusty in the debate and with classic Biden mannerisms, stumbled over some words. It would have been seen as simply early steps and eventually would be ironed out if not for Kamala Harris going after Biden directly about his votes on school busing in the 1970s. Harris, a former prosecutor and the junior California Senator, spoke to a Democratic Party audience tired of old white men and called out Biden for supporting policies of and breaking bread with segregationists in the Senate. Harris catapulted to the top of the field and Biden was left defensive, looking tone deaf and out of touch with both the establishment and progressive wings of the party. Biden had been here before in his struggles for the presidency. The future of the party when he ran in 1988 only to be undone by a plagiarism scandal, the steady hand on the till candidate in the 2008 primary, only to be outgunned by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, Biden’s third attempt for the presidency in 2020 had got off to an inauspicious start. In the wake of both the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and #TimesUp social movements, in which the Democratic Party shifted to focus on both race and gender inequalities, as well and breaking down, discussing, and committing to addressing long-standing civil and human rights challenges, Joe Biden was not the poster boy for this party. Furthermore, the 2020 Democratic presidential field included two women of color; three progressive female candidates; black, Asian American, and Hispanic American candidates; and the first openly gay man with a viable shot at the nomination. Apart from two billionaire outsiders and a Democratic socialist from Vermont, Biden was the only white establishment male Democrat in the field.

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Flash forward eight months later, on February 29, 2020, and Joe Biden won the South Carolina Primary with almost 49% of the vote. This came after finishing a distant fourth in the Iowa Caucuses and fifth in New Hampshire Primary. No presidential candidate in the post-1972 primary era had ever got the nomination after running so dismally in the two first in the nation states. So how did Biden get the nomination? The standard narrative has been that Democratic primary voters, despite a fragile and contentious coalition of progressives and moderates, were unified around selecting a candidate who had the best chance of defeating Donald Trump. But it was more than that. Biden still had to overcome a huge fundraising gap after that first debate appearance in 2019 and he had to show he could win. A strategy of banking on one post-New Hampshire state to propel him to the nomination was also incredibly risky, given how many candidates had tried this before and failed. Further, Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who had participated in the debates but staked their campaigns on huge spending post-South Carolina, meant that Biden was in an odd position as the lone professional politician trying to play it down the middle, appealing to moderates whose goal was defeating Trump, and trying to win part of the progressive coalition, which had many different priorities. Surprisingly, it was the base of the Democratic Party’s activists, African American men and women, who rescued Biden’s candidacy (Harris 2020). This is where both the other candidates and the media uniquely underestimated Biden and where Biden’s tactics of working the phones and directly appealing to Democratic primary surrogates like Representative Jim Clyburn paid off in the South Carolina win. The rapport with this part of the base and the trust African American voters had in him after decades of Washington experience and eight years as Obama’s vice president gave Biden an advantage that none of the other candidates had. He also benefited from the lack of a clear frontrunner following New Hampshire, in which both Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders were neck and neck, and where presumptive 2019 frontrunners like Elizabeth Warren had failed to materialize in the first states. He also was able to capture the establishment lane because the other two candidates competing there, Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar, lacked national prominence and name recognition. If Iowa and New Hampshire had been blowouts, Biden may not have got the nomination. But because Sanders was unable to unite the field and the anti-Sanders candidates were unable to coalesce, the Biden campaign’s strategy to throw everything into South Carolina paid off.

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Biden’s campaign team are, in many ways, the unsung heroes of the 2020 election. Considered weak and underfunded in comparison to Trump’s digital-driven team and their planned early 2020 rollout of massive campaign events and fundraising, Biden’s team used jujitsu-style tactics and impressive strategizing prior to the post-convention part of the campaign to outmaneuver the Trump team. Hiring Jennifer O’Malley-­ Dillon in March 2020 following South Carolina, shuffling former campaign manager Greg Schultz to coordinate the Biden campaign with the party in battleground operations (Memoli 2020), and relying on seasoned Biden veterans like Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield in finding an effective presidential narrative following the primaries are some of the key reasons Biden won almost 82 million votes. It also benefited from some time to regroup following South Carolina and reposition its branding and marketing. In this chapter, the Joe Biden campaign’s messaging and political marketing and branding will be examined, with a focus on the post-South Carolina Primary campaign, the shift to the national campaign, and then the key pivots the communications and digital teams made as the campaign went head-to-head with Donald Trump in the Fall of 2020. It considers some of the key strategic marketing and branding shifts Biden’s team made, including religious and minority voter outreach and how, with a little luck and some strategic messaging shifts, they were able to avoid the mistakes of the Clinton campaign in 2016 and win in November.

The One Candidate That Could Beat Trump: The Biden Campaign Until South Carolina Joe Biden began his third try at the presidency following the disastrous response of Donald Trump to the Charlottesville protests in 2017. For Biden, it was the clarion call to go back into the arena after deciding not to run in 2016 following the death of his son Beau. Biden’s campaign slogan focused on fighting for ‘the soul of America’ and ‘unity.’ It was folksy retail politics and his campaign bus, with the No Malarkey Irish catchphrase, became indicative of a very traditional marketing and branding campaign. Like John McCain in 2008 and John Kasich in 2016, Biden focused on fundamental presidential healing values and authenticity. He also invoked Barack Obama in nearly every speech and appearance, reminding groups of voters that he was part of the last winning national

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Democratic ticket. Biden’s challenge in the early part of the primary season, in many respects, was presenting a vision that was forward looking rather than offering a reassuring past. The path to the nomination was much more complex for the Democratic Party in 2020. The last time the party had a presidential primary season with more than two viable top-tier candidates was 2004. Elections since then were relatively straightforward, with an incumbent president or one establishment versus one insurgent candidate, as was the case in 2016 with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. In 2004, when John Kerry won the nomination in a very crowded field, the party was trying to unify against George W. Bush. But the party was less complex then without the progressive wing as a sizable factor. Howard Dean, who had run as the anti-­ Iraq War candidate, represented that wing of the party, but it was really on the war issue that the progressives were focused. In 2020, following a successful 2018 House midterm campaign, progressive candidates had won key races and were becoming an outsized voice in the party. This made negotiations within both the House and Senate caucuses for leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer more difficult. But it also muddied the 2020 presidential field since there were a sizable number of primary voters who identified with the progressive wing of the party. These were not all Bernie Sanders supporters either. Elizabeth Warren also represented part of this wing. So the lanes in the primary were more jammed with candidates and that would prove a challenge for Biden who had staked out ground essentially to the right of the other elected candidates and to the left of Michael Bloomberg and other centrist Democratic governors like Steve Bullock and John Hickenlooper. Biden’s star started to tumble, however, as the debates prior to the Iowa Caucuses wore on. He often looked out of touch on social issues and somewhat off his game from his vice presidential years. His message remained the same and he would ultimately benefit from not changing course or altering the fundamental reasons he was in the race, but by December 2019, it did not look promising. The lack of traction was even more frustrating for the campaign because other 2019 top-tier candidates like Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke had already dropped out. Biden’s problem was that the moderate lane also had two Democratic Party rising stars, who carefully strategized about Iowa and New Hampshire. Political unknown Pete Buttigieg, the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, captured the attention of a lot of party operatives early on. His organizational ability, as a candidate without statewide or national name recognition, was

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remarkable, and he charmed Iowa voters with a campaign focused on middle class values and pocket book issues. Amy Klobuchar, Senator from Minnesota, was also effective at positioning herself as a voice of moderation in New Hampshire, where the support for Sanders and Warren was intense but not representative of the moderate wing. In the weeks leading up to Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden’s message just stopped resonating given the enthusiasm for Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Biden began to be seen as an also-ran, a fate that had hurt previous vice presidents and vice presidential nominees running subsequently for the Democratic nomination. Joe Lieberman and John Edwards had both experienced this. Biden refused to change branding and marketing messages as well, sticking to a traditional retail politics approach emphasizing his background and personal story even while his crowd numbers at town halls and speeches dwindled in Iowa and New Hampshire. After the vote counting debacle of the Iowa Caucuses was sorted out, Biden had finished a distant fourth, behind Buttigieg, Sanders, and Warren. He ran almost neck and neck with Klobuchar, who had not been seen as competitive at all. A week later, in New Hampshire, Biden dropped to fifth with less than 9% of the vote and finishing behind Klobuchar, who had moved up to third behind Sanders and Buttigieg. Biden’s hopes had dimmed considerably, given that Buttigieg and Klobuchar had proved to be effective foils to Sanders and Warren. The Nevada Caucuses were next and Biden’s team had not invested much in terms of a ground game, leaving Sanders with a big win. Biden did finish second but split the more moderate vote with Buttigieg. The Biden campaign had instead spent the bulk of their time since the New Hampshire Primary in South Carolina. Biden’s team also shifted the message. While unity and healing were part of it, Biden developed more cohesive campaign trail talking points, highlighting what he would do as president and contrasting himself with Sanders (Zucker 2020). After more than thirty years of presidential campaigning, Joe Biden finally found his footing and on February 26th, just days before the primary, Jim Clyburn, the most powerful Democrat in South Carolina politics, formally endorsed Biden. In his speech, Clyburn said, “I know Joe, we know Joe, but most importantly, Joe knows us!” The Clyburn endorsement solidified black South Carolina Primary voters behind Biden, and on primary night, Biden won over 49% of the vote. This was dramatically higher than every poll had suggested and all the other candidates under-performed. It was a remarkable turnabout for a candidate who did not win, place, or show in Iowa

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and New Hampshire. And even more remarkable, in a year of Democratic Party intersectionality and new coalitions of progressive voters, the party coalesced around an almost octogenarian in order to defeat Trump. After South Carolina, the bulk of the other candidates endorsed Biden within days of the victory, leaving Sanders, Warren, and Bloomberg as the only ones still challenging Biden. The March 3rd Super Tuesday contests proved to be mostly blowouts for Biden except in California and Colorado where Sanders had invested so much time and energy. It very likely would have become a two-person contest with Sanders amassing delegates and trying to get closer than he did in 2016. But the week following Super Tuesday, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States. It would change the trajectory of both the rest of the primary season and the presidential election. Sanders stayed in until early April before calling for unity within the party and endorsing Biden. Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer both ended their bids early and threw their money behind Biden as well. By the second week in April, Biden had the nomination sewn up.

Messaging and Marketing After the Primaries Sometimes the most effective branding and marketing is none at all, especially when the other candidate is making all of the mistakes and the best response is to get out of the way. In the bewildering weeks following the pandemic hitting American shores, the Biden campaign settled on one strategy: take Biden off the campaign trail and keep him at home in his basement in Delaware (Burns et  al. 2020a). In the history of modern American presidential elections, this may be the only time ever that one of the major candidates simply left the campaign trail and allowed the other candidate free rein to be out there on the hustings. Trump mocked Biden’s retreat to his basement in primetime during the president’s evening pandemic briefings. But Trump’s campaign badly mishandled both the pandemic response and how to campaign during it. A disciplined campaign team would have seen the optics of a president dealing with a rally around the flag national crisis as a massive gift in an election year. But the Trump campaign was not disciplined. This gave Biden’s team a wide berth to pick and choose their battles going forward. It allowed the president’s management problems, particularly on the pandemic, but also the uncertainty of the economy and markets, to take center stage. While Trump soaked up the negative polling, the Biden campaign regrouped around what would make the strongest national themes to market to voters. By the time of the

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horse race in September, Biden’s team had advertising, marketing, and fundraising advantages that would prove consequential in the last few weeks. Biden’s team benefited from self-inflicted wounds by the Trump team but also the lack of mistakes from Democrats. In particular, the Sanders coalition went silent after April and the unrest that had existed between the Clinton and Sanders teams was non-existent in 2020. That helped Biden’s team move away from primary mode quickly and concentrate on voter outreach with carefully selected surrogates. If there was a moment in which the Democratic campaign saw considerably more hope, given that the president was in wartime mode with a pandemic, it was the botched Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20. Prior to this event, with the Biden campaign’s go-silent approach amid the first wave of the pandemic and Trump’s media saturation of nightly Covid-19 briefings, the Trump campaign had a tremendous advantage. An incumbent president with a national crisis in an election year is just about unbeatable in modern campaign history. But Tulsa exposed just how unprepared the Trump campaign was for the fast-moving changes in the 2020 election year. The Tulsa rally did not go well, with thousands of empty seats and the campaign undone by Tik Tok users and K-Pop fans saturating the campaign for tickets as a form of protest (Lorenz et  al. 2020). This was designed to be Trump’s re-launch of his campaign and yet it showed a lack of organization and imagination. It also showcased the dangerous beginnings of politicizing wearing masks during a pandemic. While it became a new front in culture wars, it was not a winning strategy. Behind the scenes, the Trump campaign also had a marketing problem from a financial standpoint. In the first half of 2020, the Trump campaign, under the leadership of Brad Parscale, squandered hundreds of millions of dollars in digital and broadcast advertising buys. Since the public was focused on the pandemic, the ads did not move the needle at all and the huge Trump war chest was drained while Biden’s campaign went far more strategic. The assumption within the Trump campaign must have been that they could not lose against a Biden campaign that had taken their candidate off the playing field. But Biden’s team had undergone a major shakeup and brought in O’Malley-Dillon to manage a national campaign that could no longer rely on rallies and traditional retail politicking. Between June and September, the Biden campaign shifted dramatically in terms of strategy and positioning. It set fundraising records in all parts of the Democratic and anti-Trump coalitions, with Wall Street and Fortune 500 companies

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backing Biden by enormous margins. But in the branding and marketing strategy, it largely caught up and passed the Trump campaign’s digital efforts, with huge resources devoted to both matching Trump dollar for dollar and being nimble with respect to how digital ads can be effective (Roose 2020a). If there was a major difference between Clinton 2016 and Biden 2020, it was with respect to handling the digital marketing landscape. Where the Clinton team underestimated the Trump threat of online political marketing, the Biden team knew that social media mattered to turning out voters. While the full stories of early voting and the attempts to suppress it are still being written, the pandemic was a great way to do voter outreach and frame the message of getting each voice heard. Historically, mail-in voting and early voting usually benefited Republicans, with Democrats voting heavily on Election Day. But Democrats wisely used the rules and flipped the script. Democrats also benefited from increased unemployment numbers in many states and more flexible work hours because without work or the structure of a regular work week during the pandemic, voters had the time to stand in lines prior to Election Day to register and vote. This is where the Biden team’s voter outreach and group outreach was so successful. How Biden’s team parlayed this into success in November is the pivotal marketing story. It was a combination of traditional messaging and non-­ traditional marketing where broadcast ad-buys mattered but so did digital micro-targeting (Roose 2020b). The strategy can best be described as total saturation. In late summer 2020, Biden’s team went after Trump in a two-prong strategy. The first prong was that they went positive on social media, focusing on Biden’s traditional themes of unity and healing, emphasizing his character. Ironically, Biden’s sense of decency became central to this branding effort, and it became an effective way of counterbalancing Trump’s mercurial and caustic personality and lack of empathy. This is where the pandemic response was highlighted. Biden’s team pushed competence and steadiness in digital advertising and those were comforting messages to many voters. The second prong was outspending the Trump campaign in every swing state by buying swaths of broadcast air time and reinforcing the message on major networks, cable news and during primetime. This is where Clinton’s team had spent millions and failed. But Biden’s ads were designed not to sway but to reinforce positive feelings toward Biden and negative feelings toward Trump. The party branding was not central.

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Instead it was a character contrast and Biden’s team went hard negative on Trump in many of these ads. In saving resources until the final stretch, the marketing strategy was reminiscent of a blitz in the final six weeks of the campaign. There was also a significant pivot in terms of advertising focus. Biden’s original primary advertising stressed duty to country and stability. But the campaign shifted to a series of ads that played to Biden’s character and to specific policy areas in the initial shakeup around the South Carolina Primary. After the primary campaign, the ads returned to Biden’s core message but this time invoked the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2019 and 2020, the economic crisis faced primarily by women and lower middle class employees let go during the first wave of the pandemic, as well as climate change. By universalizing Biden’s basic decency and using the main challenges as uniquely American issues that could be overcome by working together, Trump’s resentment-focused message seemed out of touch, particularly in going after undecided voters. But the Biden team also understood that Trump’s message was likely to resonate with more Americans this time around and was energizing a base that the president had been trying to expand. That strategy of running up the numbers in small rural counties in swing states hurt Clinton. There could be no underestimation with respect to this occurring again, with even bigger margins, as traditional non-voters came out for Trump.

The Pivots: First Debate, COVID in the White House, Message Saturation Coming into September 2020, polls showed that Trump’s handling of the pandemic had dragged him down to levels where he was now a beatable incumbent. Trump had soaked up negatives since March 2020 that showed him with a lower approval rating by the end of summer than any incumbent since George H.W.  Bush. Despite models and theories that showed negative partisanship and voter identification dominating voter choice, there were still millions of swing voters that made salient issues like management of the pandemic matter. Trump certainly had time to right the ship but Biden’s campaign had corrected the issues in challenging Trump on marketing and advertising. Biden’s strategy might have been enough but the dynamics of the horse race changed with the first presidential debate, where Trump’s fortunes started to go downhill. If the

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Tulsa rally had demonstrated the weakness of an undisciplined campaign, and the pandemic response had made government competence salient, the bombastic and unhinged performance in the first debate on September 29 was an opening for Biden to bring back temperament as a key campaign issue. But even before that post-debate pivot, Trump then tested positive for the coronavirus and lost over a week on the campaign trail. Without these events, we do not know how close this election could have been. That week upset the endgame for the election because Biden’s team recognized that they could massively expand the advertising map and force Trump to spend money in places they did not want. Michael Bloomberg spent millions in Texas, Ohio, and Florida on behalf of Biden, as did Biden-aligned groups like the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, forcing Trump to campaign like they were swing states. Instead of a focused campaign on Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, where Trump could reinforce the MAGA themes, the last month of the campaign became a series of whack-a-mole rallies all over the country, spending valuable time in states like Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Virginia, and Florida. In fact, Trump only spent three full days in Pennsylvania during the last month when everyone understood that it was the battleground of battleground states. With Trump doing upwards of five rallies a day that became events that spread the coronavirus, Biden strategically did small drive-in rallies with people social distancing in just five swing states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina. A few events were held in Ohio as well, but strategically next to the western Pennsylvania media market. The point of these rallies was coverage in  local media markets and on social media. Unlike the spectacle of Trump’s rallies, they were seen as safe media and photo ops to imply the campaign was laser focused and cared about these particular states. John Anzalone, Biden’s lead poster, helped ground the campaign in getting to 270 electoral votes rather than trying to massively expand the map (Burns et  al. 2020b). Anzalone and others found that the Biden brand was stronger than the Democratic brand, and the Trump brand was stronger than the Republican brand, so by the end of the campaign almost all of the advertising, targeted and broadcast, was juxtaposition between Biden and Trump. In terms of voter mobilization, Biden’s campaign flipped Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. Latinx messaging in Arizona and Nevada in particular built on voter organization efforts over a series of

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election cycles. The Biden campaign integrated efforts there remarkably well. African American voter turnout skyrocketed in Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin as well with surrogates like Symone Sanders coordinating inside the campaign with voter mobilization groups. Building on Stacey Abrams’ successful voter mobilization project in Georgia during the 2018 midterm cycle, Biden’s team again worked with state-level surrogates to increase vote numbers. But if there was a microcosm of the success of the Biden marketing strategy integrated with the get out the vote efforts, it was in Pennsylvania. This was a state that required both advertising saturation and digital marketing as well as retail politics. Pennsylvania was heart breaking for Democrats in 2016. It is a state that requires two different campaigns with Philadelphia and the eastern suburbs, where much of the population lives, as very much distinct from the western half of the state. Biden, who hails from Scranton, had a native son opportunity here to cut into Trump’s margins in smaller counties. The campaign did this by relying both on the marketing of Biden’s everyman appeal but also in courting the sizable Catholic population, reinforcing Biden’s inherent Catholic decency. In every county in the state except Philadelphia County, Biden increased his margins over Clinton. Allegheny County and the communities in and around Pittsburgh in particular embraced Biden. The outreach and voter micro-targeting paid off dramatically. The Pittsburgh market is perhaps the best example of the Biden team’s multi-faceted approach, combining network and cable advertising saturation, a digital game that outpaced the Trump team, integration with the larger Democratic campaign for phone banking, door to door and digital vote targeting, and retail politics with both Biden and surrogates focusing on that part of the state. In Allegheny County, Biden won by more than 145,000 votes, the largest spread for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 (Morrison 2020). Biden only won the state by a little over 80,000 votes but the 4% vote swing in Allegheny from 2016 to 2020, including 66,000 more votes than Clinton received, offset the higher turnout statewide and helped Biden secure Pennsylvania.

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Conclusion: Post-election and Transition to the White House Following the networks calling the election for the Biden/Harris ticket, the Trump campaign insisted that fraud and illegal vote counting had been the reason he lost. Despite no evidence that any fraud had occurred, Trump continued to push this false narrative from November through early January. The culmination of this rhetoric led directly to the January 6th insurrection and the storming of the Capitol. Biden’s team smartly stayed out of the fray from November until confirmation of the election results. In setting up the contrast, Biden floated above the raucousness, showing how he would lead as president. No pugnacious defensiveness or even calls for Trump to back down. Biden simply marketed himself as the winner and worked behind the scenes with House and Senate Democrats to complete the process. Biden also stayed relatively quiet on the important Georgia Senate races that were occurring in January and that would ultimately hand the Democrats control of the Senate. He also refused to become central in the maelstrom of Trump’s second impeachment trial. Despite real possibilities that Trump was going to get a favorable judge on a vote count lawsuit, Trump’s strategy was so chaotic and led by an undisciplined group of lawyers that it became clear even prior to January 6th that this was more about raising money than about overturning an election. Joe Biden ran a great campaign and pulled off a feat unseen since Bill Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992 in knocking off an incumbent president. Credit has to go to a team of marketing and branding experts and digital strategists in understanding a fast-changing campaign landscape that contained the equivalent of three campaigns in one: a primary long-shot campaign after a series of early mistakes, a pandemic strategy of staying out of the spotlight and essentially giving the incumbent all of the oxygen for six months, and then a blitz campaign that internalized self-inflicted wounds by the Trump team that integrated get out the vote operations, advertising that dwarfed the incumbent, and strategic swing-­ state decisions that proved consequential.

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References Burns, Alexander, Shane Goldmacher, and Katie Glueck. 2020a. A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign. New York Times, April 25. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/25/us/politics/joe-­b iden-­ coronavirus-­quarantine.html. Burns, Alexander, Jonathan Martin, and Katie Glueck. 2020b. How Joe Biden Won the Presidency. New York Times, November 7. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/11/07/us/politics/joe-­biden-­president.html. Harris, Adam. 2020. What Biden Owes Black Voters. The Atlantic, November 11. h t t p s : / / w w w. t h e a t l a n t i c . c o m / p o l i t i c s / a r c h i v e / 2 0 2 0 / 1 1 / black-­voters-­saved-­joe-­bidens-­campaign/617055/. Lorenz, Taylor, Kellen Browning, and Sheera Frenkel. 2020. TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally. New York Times, June 21. https:// www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/style/tiktok-­trump-­rally-­tulsa.html. Memoli, Mike. 2020. Biden’s Former Campaign Manager Shifts to General-­ election role. NBC News Meet the Press Blog, April 16. https://www.nbcnews. com/politics/meet-­the-­press/blog/meet-­press-­blog-­latest-­news-­analysis-­ data-­driving-­political-­discussion-­n988541/ncrd1185721#blogHeader. Morrison, Oliver. 2020. How Allegheny County Delivered Pennsylvania to Biden. PublicSource Pittsburgh, November 12. https://www.publicsource.org/ biden-­trump-­allegheny-­county-­pittsburgh-­vote-­breakdown/. Roose, Kevin. 2020a. Biden Is Losing the Internet. Does That Matter? New York Times, April 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/technology/joe-­ biden-­internet.html. ———. 2020b. How Joe Biden’s Digital Team Tamed the MAGA Internet. New York Times, December 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/technology/joe-­biden-­internet-­election.html. Zucker, Anthony. 2020. South Carolina Primary: Is This Joe Biden’s Big Comeback? BBC News, February 28. https://www.bbc.com/news/ world-­us-­canada-­51668258.

CHAPTER 3

Replicating the 2016 “Lightning in a Bottle” Political Moment: Biden, Trump, and Winning the U.S. Presidency Vincent Raynauld and André Turcotte

Abstract  Building on research from Emerson College which focused on hyper-decentralization and fragmentation of the public (leading to boutique populist grassroots political marketing), this chapter flips this idea around and shows that the 2020 U.S. election cycle, like 2016, has led many candidates to engage in hyper-narrowcasting (messages and publics), especially with the popularization of use of social media and with the hyper-fragmentation of the mediascape (which can have direct effects on dynamics of mobilization). This chapter considers two national studies

V. Raynauld (*) Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] A. Turcotte Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 J. Gillies (ed.), Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, Palgrave Studies in Political Marketing and Management, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86559-7_3

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conducted before the election and builds on the political communication and marketing appeals used by the Trump campaign to connect with and mobilize specific segments of the electorate during the 2016 election. It then looks at whether the Trump campaign failed to secure and expand voter outreach or failed to turn voters out or both. Keywords  Trump • Polling • Voter mobilization • Outreach • Fragmentation

Overview In the final weeks of the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle, several national polls indicated that the Republican presidential candidate—and sitting president—Donald J. Trump faced an uphill battle in his quest to win re-election. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted between October 20 and October 22, 2020, showed him trailing his Democratic presidential challenger, former vice president Joseph R. Biden, by 10 percentage points in voting intentions nationally (40% to 50%).1 An Economist/YouGov national poll of 1500 registered voters conducted between October 31 and November 2, 2020, also found Biden ahead of Trump by nine percentage points (49% to 40%).2 A smaller number of polling organizations predicted a much closer race, with some forecasting a narrow Trump victory. For instance, a Rasmussen Reports/Pulse Opinion Research poll conducted between October 25 and October 27, 2020, showed Biden leading Trump by only one percentage point nationally (48% to 47%).3 Another national poll conducted by Spry Strategies between October 20 and October 23, 2020, found that the Republican presidential contender had a one percentage point edge over Biden (47% to 46%).4 This situation mirrored the final moments of the 2016 U.S. presidential contest. Indeed, most national polls showed Trump trailing his Democratic 1  https://e.infogram.com/7803c640-a1aa-406a-a7c4-bf9efee425d3?parent_url= https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mitchellrepublic.com%2Fnews%2Fgovernment-and-­p olitics% 2F6731229-Oct.-20-22-polling-shows-Biden-gains-in-most-­areas&src=embed#async_ embed, website accessed on February 12, 2021. 2  https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/jsojry0vph/econTabReport.pdf, website accessed on February 12, 2021. 3  https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections/election_2020/white_house_watch_nov02, website accessed on February 12, 2021. 4  https://d7330092-c899-4a57-99e1-9e693f9be711.filesusr.com/ugd/68c3dc_ c2bdd359266744cfb25ab11cc106e6f8.pdf, website accessed on February 12, 2021.

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opponent—former state secretary and U.S. senator Hillary Clinton—“by an average margin somewhere between 2.3 and 3.6 percentage points over the last few days of the campaign” (Jacobson 2017: 9; see also, Kennedy et al. 2018; Wright and Wright 2018). Much like the 2016 presidential race, Trump launched intensive, multifaceted outreach and engagement efforts in the last weeks of the 2020 campaign to connect with and rally his supporters ahead of Election Day. He prioritized two facets of his campaign strategy (Jacobson 2017). On the one hand, he turned to social media platforms—especially Twitter—to share frequently populist, “attention-grabbing,” and/or provocative posts. They enabled him to promote his candidacy and his policy positions; capture and shape strategically the election news coverage and, by extension, the public political agenda; criticize, attack, and—in some cases—“troll” his opponents; as well as mobilize his base of support that he built and expanded during the 2016 U.S. presidential election and that he groomed throughout his four years in the White House (see Schill and Hendricks 2017; see also, Jacobson 2017; Lee and Xu 2018; Wells et al. 2020; Karpf 2017; Flores-Saviaga et al. 2018). In many ways, this approach is similar to the one leveraged by many European populist political parties and candidates. It enables them to gain visibility at the expense of their opponents, to ensure the wider circulation of their appeals, and to legitimize—and to some extent normalize—their political and policy views (Wells et al. 2020; see also, Mudde 2007). On the other hand, Trump maintained an aggressive in-person campaigning schedule during the last stretch of the 2020 electoral race. He held a large number of rallies and other campaign events daily in competitive states (Montgomery 2020; see also, Jérôme et al. 2021). Much like in 2016, Trump banked on stump speeches emphasizing “simple, pompous and repetitive language” frequently expanding on and complementing his appeals on social media (Wang and Liu 2018: 299). On top of garnering significant—and frequently live—coverage from mainstream (e.g., CNN,5 Fox News,6 MSNBC7) as well more peripheral (e.g., Right Side Broadcasting Network,8 One America News Network,9 Newsmax TV10)  https://cnn.com/.  https://foxnews.com/. 7  https://msnbc.com/. 8  https://www.rsbnetwork.com/. 9  https://www.oann.com/. 10  https://www.newsmaxtv.com/. 5 6

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news organizations, they helped him to tease political grandiosity, happiness, and pride if he was re-elected as president and fuel public anger toward established political and media elites (e.g., political parties, elected officials, mainstream news organizations, civil servants) (Schrock et  al. 2017; Ahmadian et  al. 2017). It also offered a strategic contrast to the Biden campaign with its much more modest, policy-driven campaign events—the format being adapted to the COVID-19 health emergency— and allowed Trump to reinforce the narrative that Biden no longer had the acuity and stamina to be president. Much like throughout his presidency, many of his campaign speeches were paranoid in nature. Trump frequently sowed doubt in formal political institutions and electoral processes by mentioning that “malign forces […] [were] working behind the scenes to subvert” the will of his supporters and the country at large (Hart 2020: 348). This enabled him to tap into and reinforce pre-existing perceptions of political elites (Hart 2020). Despite Trump’s push in the final weeks of the race, he was defeated by Biden whose victory was called by CNN at 11:24 am on November 7, 2020 (Izadi 2020). Over the following weeks, the Trump campaign and its allies deployed robust public communication and legal initiatives to challenge the election results in several key states (Von Voris et al. 2020). Despite these efforts, the election results were certified by the U.S. Congress shortly after 3:40 am on January 7, 2021 (Quinn et al. 2021). Several elements must be considered when contextualizing Trump’s electoral loss. On the one hand, his ability to garner more than 74 million votes—the most any candidate received during a presidential election in U.S. history, expect for Joe Biden who received more than 81 million votes—showed the potency of his political appeals and the depth and scope of his base of support (Lewis 2020). On the other hand, the last year of his presidency was plagued by crises that altered many voters’ perception and evaluation of his performance at the helm of the U.S. government11 (e.g., Pew Research Center 2020; Washington Post/Schar School of Policy and Government and George Mason University 2020). 11  Among them include his perceived mishandling of important events, including the nationwide protests during the summer months of 2020 following the death of George Floyd, the COVID-19 pandemic that uphanded most Americans’ daily lives, and the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 health emergency (Pew Research Center 2020; Washington Post/Schar School of Policy and Government and George Mason University 2020).

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Building on an analysis of polling data collected by Emerson College Polling—Emerson College’s student-run polling organization—throughout the 2020 U.S. presidential election cycle, this chapter drills down into the factors that shaped the outcome of the 2020 campaign. The data analysis relies on two specific national studies: one conducted in September 2020 and a subsequent conducted in October 2020.12 It also builds and expands on previous work that took a deep dive into the political communication and marketing appeals used by the Trump campaign to connect with and mobilize specific segments of the electorate during the 2016 U.S. presidential election (Raynauld and Turcotte 2018). This chapter asks a specific question: Did Donald Trump supporters fail to turn out on Election Day—which effectively led to Joe Biden’s electoral success—or did Donald Trump fail to secure and expand his reach in order to garner enough electoral support? In more direct political terms, what happened to the Trump base during the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign?

Contextualizing Contemporary Political Appeal Over the last decades, the ways in which and to what degree members of the public in the United States—and in several other national contexts— are exposed to, understand, evaluate, and take part in politics in the United States have undergone important transformations due to different dynamics. Among them include the evolution of the vision and exercise of political and civic engagement or, more broadly, citizenship. Specifically, more “legacy” citizenship norms—also known as “informed” or “dutiful” citizenship (Bennett 2008; Bennett et al. 2009, 2011)—have progressively lost their traction, especially among younger segments of the population (Kligler-Vilenchik 2017: 1888; see also, Copeland and Feezell 2017; Kunst et al. 2021; Ohme 2019).13 At the same time, more “alternative” norms of citizenship, which are rooted in individuation, self-­determination and expression, focus on communities of interest, and self-expression, 12  See https://emerson.edu/academics/academic-departments/communication-studies/ emerson-college-polling for data and methodological details. 13  These norms include, but are not limited to: (1) “primarily one-way consumption of managed civic information” from generally offline-based, media and political institutions (e.g., mainstream journalistic organizations, formal political entities, traditional opinion leaders); (2) respect of established and broadly accepted social rules and regulations; (3) political and civic action through more formal—or institutionalized—channels of engagement (Bennett et al. 2011: 840; Kunst et al. 2021).

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have gained in popularity and caused shifts in political attitudes and modes of political engagement among the public (Kligler-Vilenchik 2017; Gotlieb and Sarge 2021; Hooghe and Oser 2015). In many ways, the practice of citizenship is becoming more individualized and personal in nature and no longer associated with broadly accepted norms and standards, a phenomenon referred to by some scholars as “DIY citizenship” (see, e.g., Ratto and Boler 2014; Thorson 2015). Kligler-Vilenchik (2017) echoes that point. She notes that a “lack of widely shared civic orientations to public life, besides, perhaps, the sense that citizenship is a choice, an option one can choose to engage in or not” (Kligler-Vilenchik 2017: 1898). Also of interest is the growth and diversification of the digital mediascape—including the social media environment—which have helped level the playing field and decentralize media power. For example, social media’s structural and functional properties have given many individuals and organizations on the edges of the political arena more opportunities to make their voice heard and bring attention to their varied preferences, interests, and goals. More importantly, they have enabled them to contribute to and shape the public narrative. In doing so, they have boosted the volume and the diversity of news content, opinion, and commentary available to local, regional, and national audiences (Shah et al. 2017; Van Aelst et  al. 2017). This has also led many political content producers, from journalistic organizations to political parties, candidates during elections, interest groups, and individual citizens to shift “from serving mass audiences to niche audiences (Stroud 2011), with their content morphing away from inclusive, consensus-oriented messages to exclusive, conflict-­ oriented [and sometimes extreme or polarizing political] messages (Mutz 2015)” (Shah et al. 2017: 494; Gallacher et al. 2021). The aforementioned dynamics—which can be viewed as complementing and fueling each other—have contributed to the fragmentation of politics. According to Bright (2018: 18), political fragmentation “occurs in such a network when, during discussions about politics, participants in the network begin to converse more with others who are ideologically similar than they do with others who are ideologically different.” Karlsen (2011: 146) argues that the fragmentation of political communication points to specific, complementary trends: “New technology providing incentives to tailor campaign communication to specific voter categories, and the audience fragment due to increasing number of media outlets.” In the context of this chapter, political fragmentation is considered from a more holistic perspective: it is defined as the “progressive breakdown of

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broadly shared awareness, perception, and understanding of politics, which is acquired through common political knowledge, concerns, and goals, as well as the emergence of individual-based and ever-evolving micro-political realities—or enclaves—shaped by highly specific and wideranging interests and objectives” (Raynauld and Turcotte 2018: 14). Political fragmentation has played a major role in reshaping how candidates and other political entities design their messaging as well as voter engagement and mobilization appeals during elections in recent years. For example, Raynauld and Turcotte (2018) found that during the 2016 Republican presidential nomination race, Republican contenders adopted voter outreach and engagement tactics that had proven successful in past electoral cycles: highly professionalized modes of political communication, mobilization, and organizing emphasizing voter segmentation. Their messaging—which led many of them to achieve relative electoral success— targeted specific sections of the electorate with narrow preference and interests (Raynauld and Turcotte 2018). Such an approach relies on dynamics referred to by several authors as “factional politics” (Cohen et al. 2016; Grossmann and Hopkins 2016). In many respects, it can be argued that this “factionalization” of political communication, mobilization, and organizing has contributed to the social and political polarization of U.S. politics. Polarization can be viewed as the process through which the wide array of preferences and viewpoints “in a society increasingly align along a single dimension, cross-cutting differences become instead reinforcing, and people increasingly perceive and describe politics and society in terms of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’” (McCoy et  al. 2018: 18). Recent studies have indeed shown there is “increasingly stark disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on an increasingly stark disagreement between Democrats and Republicans on the economy, racial justice, climate change, law enforcement, international engagement and a long list of other issues” (Dimock and Wike 2020). Other studies also point that political fragmentation and polarization likely played a role in shaping the ways in which the candidates engaged with voters and, by extension, the outcome of the 2020 U.S. elections (see, e.g., Deane and Gramlich 2020).

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Identity-Based Versus Issue-Based Positioning This chapter zeroes in on patterns of political positioning in a fragmented political environment. In an era where political and civic engagement is increasingly personal, individualized, and to a certain degree volatile, as well as where voters’ preferences, interests, and objectives (e.g., ideology, issues, political credibility) are becoming narrower, more specific, and, in some cases, ephemeral, strategic positioning is increasingly at the core of candidates’ voter outreach and engagement efforts (Walgrave et al. 2012). As noted by Cwalina and Falkowski (2015: 158), this political environment is making the development of political appeals likely to connect with “all voters of every persuasion” ever more challenging. Positioning can be viewed as “the vehicle that allows candidates to convey their image to voters in the best light possible” (Newman and Perloff 2004: 22). It can be done by spotlighting aspects of their personal or professional identity, including leadership traits, perceived authenticity, or emotional stimuli (“affective” political positioning); views and positions on political or policy issues (“cognitive” political positioning); or their actions or those of their allies, often in the context of unexpected events (“conative” political positioning) (Newman and Perloff 2004; Baines et al. 2014). In other words, positioning is done through candidates’ uses of wide-ranging media resources to roll out, strengthen, and adjust an overall theme, or “the single, central, idea that the campaign communicates to voters to sum up the candidate’s connection with the voters and their concerns and the contrast between your candidate and the opponent” (Bradshaw 1995: 43). Candidates’ approach to positioning takes into account two forces in constant flux: (1) voters’ needs and expectations, which are likely to evolve, in and out of elections; and (2) political competitors’ messaging and policy offerings, which are likely to be adapted to the political environment (e.g., current events, political developments). In sum, positioning boils down to developing associations, whether they are negative, neutral, positive, that “must be shared with other rival candidates as well as with a prototypical ideal candidate, understood as a model and standard of comparison” by voters. Of particular interest for this chapter are two dynamics that have shaped candidates’ positioning in recent electoral campaigns in the United States and internationally: individual-level “issue ownership” and “identity ownership” (see, e.g., Dennison and Goodwin 2015; Thesen et  al. 2017; Kreiss et al. 2020; Bene 2021). First, “issue ownership” can be viewed as

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the process by which political candidates convince voters that they are more attentive, credible, sincere, and committed to action when it comes to specific political or policy issues than their political opponents (Banda 2016; Seeberg 2017; Lachat 2014). There are two subcomponents to issue ownership: (1) “associative issue ownership,” which refers to the perceived association between a political candidate—which includes her/ his political party—and a political policy issue; and (2) “competence ownership,” which points to the reputation of a political candidate—which includes her/his political party—at being able to deal with a political or policy matter (Lachat 2014; Walgrave et al. 2012). From a strict political communication and marketing perspective, these two subcomponents, which can be aligned or non-aligned, can play an important role in how candidates are perceived by the public—whether positively, neutrally, or negatively—and the level of support they are likely to receive on Election Day (Lachat 2014; Stubager 2018). “Identity ownership” can be characterized as how candidates “construct and perform prototypical group identities around partisan affiliations, racial and ethnic identities, genders, religious affiliations, and personal values and tastes” (Kreiss et al. 2020). In many ways, “identity ownership” is highly performative in nature as it enables politicians to own certain identity—or personality—traits and, by extension, become the representatives of those markers for some slices of the electorate (in-group markings). Conversely, they also frame themselves as opponents of politicians embodying opposing identity makers, or “out-group markings” (Kreiss et al. 2020: 2). To some degree, owning specific identity traits can have an impact on issue ownership, as “when candidates tie issues to their personal lives, it can make policy seem personal, which may allow the public to more easily identify with issues and candidates” (McGregor 2018: 1142). This approach is particularly well suited for the contemporary political communication environment. Populist political appeals, which have gained traction in many national contexts, are identity-driven in nature. Indeed, they are based on a charismatic leader whose message emphasizes a struggle between the ordinary people and “corrupt elites,” as well as “prime[s] aspects of social identity, define[s] in-groups (the good people), and construct[s] out-groups (problematic minorities, self-­ serving elites, scapegoats presented as threats)” (De Vreese et al. 2018: 428). Furthermore, social media politicking relies heavily on personal identity traits, as the social mediascape can be viewed as a site “of ongoing

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personal identity construction,” impacting the ways in which politics is presented to, understood, and evaluated by members of the public (McGregor 2018: 1140).

Findings Before turning to the analysis of the Emerson College Polling data, it is important to review the context of the Trump victory in 2016. Despite securing enough electoral college votes to win the White House on November 9, 2016, his campaign was plagued by controversies and provocations. However, as suggested by Raynauld and Turcotte (2018), his electoral success was not a fluke. The outcome of this presidential contest was the result of a series of factors, including Trump’s ability to implement a broader populist strategy that was more than factional in nature. Specifically, the genesis of the 2016 Trump victory was the early decision made by many Republican primary contenders to exploit the highly fragmented nature of the electorate and mobilized clusters—or factions—of voters with narrow preferences and goals through highly strategic voter outreach and engagement (see Cohen et al. 2016). This allowed Trump to adopt a modified catch-all approach, which rested heavily on the appeal of his personal and professional identity that was infused in his “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) campaign slogan (Coe and Griffin 2020; Knowles and Tropp 2018; Kreiss et al. 2017), to first win the nomination and then carry him to the White House (Raynauld and Turcotte 2018). Building on the work of several scholars (Raynauld and Turcotte 2018; Coe and Griffin 2020; Knowles and Tropp 2018), it can be argued that Trump was able to build a MAGA identity that appealed to a large swath of the U.S. electorate. Moreover, he was able to frame it as opposed to media and political elites as well as other groups within U.S. society. Raynauld and Turcotte (2018) point out that Trump’s victory was sufficient to at least raise fundamental questions regarding the relevance of the factional electoral appeal argument in its current form. As early as with the 2016 New Hampshire Primary, Trump laid the foundations for his electoral success. He tapped into a climate of political dissatisfaction, and to some degree polarization, with his promise to “drain the swamp” compounded with leveraging deep levels of mistrust for the media and elites in general. He then assembled a relatively wide coalition of voters (see Table 3.1).

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Table 3.1  The coalition of voters assembled by the Trump campaign during the 2016 U.S. presidential election 2016 Trump coalition •  •  •  •  •  •  • 

White men Middle-income earners Independent voters between the ages of 35 and 54 Older voters Frequent social media users Americans relying primarily on the Internet as their main source of news Atheist and social conservatives

Adapted from Raynauld and Turcotte (2018)

What was largely unnoticed in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign was how early Trump secured the support of those voters and his ability to keep their support until Election Day. The analysis offered in this chapter focuses on finding out what happened to those voters in 2020. The first data point to consider in answering this question is to look at vote retention. Much was said about how dedicated Trump followers were in 2016 due to a wide range of reasons, including his calls for anti-elitism and his MAGA identity appeals rooted into opposing certain groups against others, such as through “marginalized identity invocation[s]” (Coe and Griffin 2020: 9; Pettigrew 2017). However, the data considered for this study shows a more nuanced story. There is no denying that Trump’ use of a similar campaigning blueprint during the 2020 elections helped him retain a significant portion of his 2016 voters. Specifically, 88% of 2016 Trump voters also supported him in 2020. Only 8% of 2016 Trump voters switched to the Democratic contender, Joe Biden. However, Biden was even more efficient in securing the support of Hillary Clinton supporters. Fully 9-in-10 (90%) 2016 Clinton voters transferred their support to Biden (see Table 3.2). He only lost 6% of 2016 Hillary voters to Trump. Furthermore, while Trump was efficient in attracting Independent voters in 2016, half of voters who supported third-party candidates in 2016 migrated to Biden in 2020 compared to 21% for Trump. Moreover, among those self-identifying as Independent, 45% supported Biden compared to 38% for Trump. Biden was also very effective in attracting Floating voters in 2020. Some 46% of Americans who did not vote in 2016 re-entered the active electorate in 2020 and supported Biden while 36% voted for Trump. At first glance, it can be argued that the Democratic

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Table 3.2  The changing coalitions 2020 Biden coalition

2020 Trump coalition 2016 Trump coalition

•  Independent voters; •  Floating voters • 2016 Third-­Party voters •  Hillary voters • Hispanics • Blacks • Asians •  Middle-aged voters • College and university •  Urban and suburban • Women

•  White men • Young voters (18–24 years old) • Older voters (65 and older) •  Low educated • Rural

•  White men •  Middle-income earners • Independent voters between the ages of 35 and 54 •  Older voters •  Frequent social media users • Americans relying primarily on the Internet as their main source of news •  Atheist and social conservatives

Please note that the categories of voters are listed in no particular order

*

Source: The analysis for 2020 is based on a series of surveys conducted by Emerson College. Methodological details for the Emerson College Study can be reviewed at www.theecps.org. Analysis is restricted to main candidates and identify statistically significant levels (p