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Baskets full of deplorables unmoved by massive advertising expenditures

The 2016 presidential election was, by almost any measure, unconventional and unique. The Democrats unfathomable decision to run Hillary Clinton, a woman whose deep and abiding unpopularity among many Americans goes back to the 1990s and HillaryCarean antipathy that resurfaced when ObamaCare became the focus of the Obama administration, will go down in history as a world-class blunder.

A new study of the usefulness and effectiveness of advertising in presidential campaigns addresses the unique nature of the 2016 presidential election and offers insight into the catastrophic failure of the Democrats generally and of Hillary in particular.

The Wesleyan Media Project reports:

The 2016 presidential campaign broke the mold when it comes to patterns of political advertising.

. . . . The article published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics (open access throughmid-April 2017)shows that the presidential race featured far less advertising than the previous cycle, a huge imbalance in the number of ads across candidates, and one candidate who almost ignored discussions of policy. . . . The authors share lessons about advertising in the 2016 campaign, and argue that its seeming lack of effectiveness may owe to the unusual nature of the presidential campaign with one nonconventional candidate and the other using an unconventional message strategy.

Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that:

1) Clintons unexpected losses came in states in which she failed to air ads until the last week.

2) Clintons message was devoid of policy discussions in a way not seen in the previous four presidential contests.

Other big lessons drawn in the paper include:

You can read the full study here.

What strikes me about this study is that it essentially supports the findings of the gender-reversed presidential debate experiment that Kemberlee blogged about. The general feeling among the left that Hillary was better than she was simply because she is a woman seeps into advertising outcomes as well.

Clintons focus not on policy or her fitness for the highest office in the land was subsumed by her barrage of attacks on Trump and on his basket of deplorables supporters. The negativity, however, was all but missed by her supporters, but it drowned out anything remotely positive about her potential presidency for everyone else.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

In fact, the study found that more than 60 percent of Clintons ads focused on personally attacking Trump and his fitness for the White House rather than the policy differences between the two candidates. Trump, on the other hand, focused more than 70 percent of his ads on the policy differences between him and his opponent, while only spending about 10 percent of advertising time on personally attacking Clinton.

To put that in perspective, each major presidential candidate of the previous four presidential elections going back to 2000 with the exception of Sen. John McCain in 2008 focused at least 60 percent of their advertising on drawing policy contrasts with their opponent.

Clinton outspent Trump in advertising by $116 million in June of 2016, and in the final weeks of the race, when Trumps team unleashed an ad blitz primarily in rustbelt states, outspent him by $2.1 million, and her national spots aired almost two and a half times as often as Trumps did.

None of it mattered, however. This studys authors suggest that the results were anomalous and dont indicate that a new trend in political advertising is warranted. Maybe. Yet the result seems to indicate instead that having a clear message that resonates with the people will carry one far further than an impressive war chest and massive outputs in advertising for a flawed candidate with no message.

Excerpt from:
Study: Hillary's Advertising Spending Couldn't Offset Lack of Resonating Message - legal Insurrection (blog)

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A new academic study analyzing the 2016 presidential election has determined that Hillary Clinton and her multitude of handlers ran a deplorably awful campaign that was probably the worst campaign for national office in the modern political era.

The study entitled Political Advertising in 2016: The Presidential Election as Outlier? suggests that the biggest reason Clinton lost was because she decided she did not need to advertise in several critically important states and that, when she did advertise, her ads failed to address substantive political issues.

The trio of political science researchers behind the study Erika Franklin Fowler, Michael M. Franz, and Travis N. Ridout observe that Clinton did not run a significant number of advertisements in three key states Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan until the very last, waning days of her 2016 campaign.

In Michigan and Wisconsin, for example, the Clinton campaign ran almost zero ads until just days before Election Day. Then, a few days just because the election, the number of ads Clinton ran in both Michigan and Wisconsin skyrocketed from virtually zero to over 6,000 and over 4,000 respectively.

President Donald Trump also advertised very little in Michigan and Wisconsin, but he advertised more than Clinton did in weeks leading up to the election.

Both Clinton and Trump chose to advertise far less in 2016 than either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney did in 2012.

A second reason Clinton lost, the researchers say, is because shealmost utterly failed to address actual, substantive policy issues in her campaign advertisements and instead mostly either criticized Trump orspoke about herself in glowing terms.

Clinton spent fully 65 percent of her advertising time either criticizing Trump in personal terms or yammering on about herself, according to the professors.

Only about 25 percent of Clintons ad messages were devoted to policy issues. (The remaining 10 percent of the time, Clinton managed to talk about some combination of policy issues and either herself or Trump.)

By way of comparison, the researchers say, Trump discussed policy issues over 70 percent of the time in his ads.

In past elections, presidential candidates tended to focus on policy issues in their advertising campaigns. Obama stuck to the issues confronting Americans about 75 percent of the time in his 2012 ads, for example. Romney stuck to the issues over 80 percent of the time. In his presidential election victories in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush discussed policy issues about 70 percent of the time and about 60 percent of the time in political ads, respectively, the researchers say.

Its much more difficult for advertising to have an impact in a media environment that is saturated with sensational media coverage of the campaign and of two already well-known candidates but that does not mean that all advertising fails to work, the Wesleyan Media Project said in a press release.

Message matters, and a message repeated endlessly does no good unless it resonates with a sufficient number of the right voters. Team Clintons message that Trump was unfit for the presidency may not have been enough.

Fowler, Franz, and Ridout are the directors of the Wesleyan Media Project.

The study was published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics.

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PROOF: Hillary Clinton Ran The MOST DEPLORABLE Presidential Campaign In Modern History - Daily Caller

Speaking to reporters Friday at theChristian Science Monitor breakfast,House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she would have retired if Hillary Clinton were elected president.

"It was really shocking that somebody like Donald Trump could be president of the United States," she said.

"That motivated me to stay. Again, I would of been gone by now if she (Clinton) had won."

After Trump won the election, Pelosi, 76, decided to continue to lead the Democrats in their fight against the new president's agenda.

Pelosi said she was especially motivated to remain in her post to protect ObamaCare.

In late November, she successfully beat back a challenge to her leadership by U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan (R-OH) to remain House minority leader.

Joe Piscopo Eyeing Potential Run for NJ Governor in 2017 Election

Pence on Health Care: 'The ObamaCare Nightmare Is About to End'

Dem Rep: Trump's 'Absurd' Wiretap Claims Part of His 'Ready, Shoot, Aim' Approach

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Pelosi Says She Would Have Retired if Clinton Were Elected President - Fox News Insider

Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.

Do you remember how you felt last October after you heard that FBI Director James Comey was reopening the FBIs investigation into Hillary Clintons possible illegal handling of classified communiqus while Secretary of State just 11 days before the presidential election?

That news, which left me with a sinking feeling that all but erased the confidence I had in Clintons prospects after the three presidential debates, was the moment that Donald Trump won the election, according to an analysis released this week by a data firm that tracks the psychological elements below patterns of consumer behavior, moods, and sentiment.

Many Americansand particularly those of us working in data-driven businesseswould like to see a credible, fact-based explanation for why the polls seemed to indicate a Clinton victory, but the election instead produced President Trump, wrote Brad Fay, an executive with Engagement Labs, in the Huffington Post. Fay notes that pollsters were not all wrong, as Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes. But I do believe it was possible to show that the possibility of a Trump victory was rising more rapidly in the final week than opinion pollsand related prediction modelsshowed.

Fay said his firms behavior-tracking model found what many voters and analysts have suspected, that Comeys October surprise was the tipping point that turned voter sentiment away from Clintonbecause people inclined to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt lost their enthusiasm, just as Comeys announcement buoyed Trump voters.

We are using a survey to measure behavior rather than opinion data, Fay explained. Although it is not our main line of business, every four years since 2008, we have added a few special questions to pick up the daily conversation about presidential candidates during the General Election campaign. Only after Election Day last year did we go back to see what the data showed, and it was startling. The first thing to know is that people were talking very negatively about both Trump and Clinton, in contrast to the mostly positive conversations we see for products and brands.

While both candidates were always firmly in negative territory, Clinton nevertheless enjoyed a persistent lead over Trump that opened up after the first debate, he said. Both candidates experienced significant drops in the immediate aftermath of the infamous audio recording of Billy Bush and Donald Trump [boasting of sexual assaults], although Clinton still had the advantage.

But then came Comeys unprecedented interference in the election, which registered on a much deeper level than the political polls were probing, Fay said.

Immediately afterward, there was a 17-point drop in net sentiment for Clinton, and an 11-point rise for Trump, enough for the two candidates to switch places in the rankings, with Clinton in more negative territory than Trump, he said. At a time when opinion polling showed perhaps a 2-point decline in the margin for Clinton, this conversation data suggests a 28-point change in the word of mouth standings. The change in word of mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.

Based on this finding, it is our conclusion that the Comey letter, 11 days before the election, was the precipitating event behind Clintons loss, despite the letter being effectively retracted less than a week later, Fay continued. In such a close election, there may have been dozens of factors whose absence would have reversed the outcome, such as the influence campaign of the Russian government as detailed by U.S. intelligence services. But the sudden change in the political conversation after the Comey letter suggests it was the single, most indispensable factor in the surprise election result.

His analysis noted that traditional polling does not take into account how people often react en masse: behavior predicts behavior, the invisible offline conversation matters, and humans are a herding species.

Its not that traditional political polls arent to be trusted, but rather that they expect people to act more rationally than is the case in reality; in other words, they put too much stock in believing what those polled say and too little stock in tracing what those polled may do.

Political consultants and commercial marketers alike have relied on a model that presumes voters and consumers act according to rational, individual choices that they can express and explain, Fay said. What we are learning is that emotion and peer influence play much bigger roles in influencing behavior than previously understood.

Fays takeaway is not just that the FBI directors interference single-handedly tipped the election away from Clinton and to Trump, but also that if you experienced that announcement as a gut-punch moment, you werent alone and your political instincts were correct.

Editors note: Mother Jones Kevin Drum wrote a more condensed report on this analysis on March 8.

Steven Rosenfeld covers national political issues for AlterNet, including Americas democracy and voting rights.

IMAGE:FBI Director James Comey testifies before a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on the Oversight of the State Department in Washington U.S. July 7, 2016. REUTERS/Gary Cameron

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How James Comey's 'October Surprise' Doomed Hillary Clinton's Candidacy - The National Memo (blog)

A new study by the Wesleyan Media Project has found that the 2016 presidential campaign run by Hillary Clinton is without a doubt one of the worst-run political operationsin years.

Interestingly, the directors of the study disputethe argument that advertising doesnt matter in elections. Clintons failure to advertise in certain key states, they argue, wasthe biggest reason for her defeat byDonald Trump.

The study also backs the view thatClintons focus on identity politics and emphasis on condemning her oppositioncontributed to a campaign message devoid of substance with no clear message on policy.

Published inThe Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics, the studyfoundthat one candidate in particular, Hillary Clinton, almost ignored discussions of policy. The study states the lack of advertising effectiveness may owe to the unusual nature of the presidential campaign with one nonconventional candidate and the other using an unconventional message strategy.

Clinton, who was widely predicted to win by the mainstream media, sufferedunexpected losses in states where she failed to air ads until the final week before the polls. In contrast, Trump advertised in these states (Wisconsin and Michigan) forweeks before he won.

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Study: Hillary Clinton ran one of the worst campaigns in years - Fox News