In Election 2004, campaign Weblogs—or blogs—became a standard feature of campaign Web sites. Monitoring the adaptation of emergent technological tools into political communication assists future generations of scholars to understand the genesis of communication applications and explore future uses. Blogs are online diaries where information is electronically posted, updated frequently, and presented in reverse chronological order. Three concourses of research provide insight into blogging as a political communication function: the investigation of the blog as a social diary, the analysis of blogs as organizing tools, and blogs viewed as a form of civic, participatory journalism. The authors do not claim that blogging had a significant impact on the 2004 election outcome. However, they do argue that its effective use has been demonstrated and emerging applications of the tool pave the way for future campaign communication, one the authors suggest will become a standard part of campaign communication.
During the 2008 presidential election, communication technology permitted media outlets, such as YouTube, ABC, and CNN, to create an electronic gathering place for citizens—a digital agora—both as created online and through related news and mediated events. While the web and media channels served as mouthpieces or magnifiers for campaign messages in previous elections, they were transformed into participatory spaces during this election. The YouTube debates and CNN’s use of debate dial testing are examined as the authors demonstrate how such civic engagement resulted in increased feelings of citizen efficacy in the political process and changed the political media environment.
This essay reports the results of an analysis of undecided swing state voters during the six presidential debates of the 2008 and 2012 elections. Combining Real Time Response with a pretest-posttest design, the researchers identify the overall impact of the debates on undecided voters, both successful and unsuccessful message strategies, and changes in the overall perception of the candidates.
During the primary and general election, researchers Schill and Kirk collected focus group insights on how undecided voters came to make choices in the 2016 election. As consultants for CNN’s election coverage, the team researched voters from across the nation—in the early primary states to the conventions and general election. After a review of factors that influence vote choice, this article focuses on the dominant expressions of attitude (pain, loss, joy, nostalgia, pleasure, belonging, and anger) during 2016 election period and explains how voter attitudes toward those themes affected voter choice. Not only were these themes manifested in (un)civil discourse, they were often fueled by the campaigns. Importantly, these assessments come from the voters themselves and provide insights as to how the campaigns unfolded and how campaign messages attempted to influence voters.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.