What the Democrats Need to Do to Win the 2020 US Presidential Election

11 min readMay 2, 2019

A new presidential race has started. Democratic candidates and some Republicans alike are gearing up to be the presidential nominees of their respective parties. With the recent public release of the Mueller report Democrats (and Trump) grappling with its implications, it seems that the stakes have never been higher for the presidential race — and perhaps they are for certain issues like climate change.

This is no normal election, but not because of the Mueller Report and/or Russian meddling. This will not be like the past elections; the playing field has changed.

I fear that the Democratic Party has not grasped how the public sphere has completely changed. Social media and the internet have radically changed how the public sphere is shaped and how civil society and political institutions interact. If Democrats try to campaign like all past elections where they have neglected the social media, they will lose the 2020 US Presidential Election.

They will need to know how social media has grown and how to disseminate their ide messages on these social networks — especially Facebook. I attempt to show them the new playing field and how to maneuver the new game in the following.

A Brief History of Social Media and Politics - Past Elections in the New Age of Social Networks

In the 2008 US Federal Election, both sparring candidates made use of social media, but one clearly had an edge over the other. John McCain had only half a million Facebook friends and a few thousand Twitter followers. Obama: had 4 times and 26 times more friends and followers respectively.[1] Although it didn’t determine the outcome of the election as the traditional campaigning was still predominant, it certainly didn’t hurt. We must remember that Facebook was still in its infancy, as was Twitter.

In 2012, it was Obama vs Romney and a year where Facebook had improved its advertising. Facebook introduced ad bidding and the use of 1st party and 3rd party data agencies — this would have great implications for further elections. By outspending Romney with ads and making use of user data with a voter outreach app, Obama effectively beat Romney on this front.[2] Traditional campaigning remained a pillar for running for office, but not for long. Things were about to change.

As Niall Ferguson writes in the Square & the Tower, Brexit set as a new precedent for political elections, and would also be a “dress rehearsal” for what was to come in the US Presidential Election of 2016. We like to think of Brexit as a failure of the political establishment to the wrath of populism, yet the fuel to the raging fires of nativism, xenophobia, nationalism and other populist sentiments in the UK were also the work of one man, Dominic Cummings, the “architect of the Vote Leave victory”.[3] He was tasked to get a yes for Leave with only 10 months and 10 million pounds to work with. How did he do it? Facebook Targeted Ads.

While David Cameroun used the conventional venues of political campaigning, Cummings relied on online advertising with a methodology more distinct and targeted. When speaking about his methods, Cummings said “we ran many different versions of ads, tested them, dropped the less effective and reinforced the most effective in a constant iteration process.”[4] And his 3rd party source for user data, Cambridge Analytica. The campaign coincided nicely with the Facebook’s growth of new users and user engagement which gave Facebook a mounting database of user information which propelled it by 2016 to become the pillar medium for political campaigns. As a result, the Brexit passed. Gone with the traditional methods of political campaigning, in with the social networks.

If only the lessons of the Brexit reached across the Atlantic that same year…

US Presidential Election 2016: Along Came Donald Trump

Just like Brexit, the US Presidential election was to be a contest between the establishment and the populists, and it too would rest of the use of social media. Viewed through the traditional campaigning, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton clearly should have won as they spent hundreds of the millions and were well connected elites to their respective parties and donors.[5] Trump did not. Had this been an election fought 10 years ago, Trump would have lost.

Just as Dominic Cummings had done a few months prior, Trump used social media and gained the upper hand on this front. He dwarfed Hillary’s Twitter and Facebook followers. Trump 32 per cent greater Twitter followers than Hillary and she had 8 million less followers on Facebook than Trump (who had 12 million followers).[6] It wasn’t just the number of followers Trump held an advantage; it was also engagement. Trump Twitter posts were retweeted 5,000 times more than Hillary’s on Twitter on average, giving him much more visibility and free press.[7] Trump also had a formidable ally on the web, Steve Bannon and his alt-right website Breithbart.

Yet the truly decisive factor was with Facebook and both candidates’ usage of the platform. When Facebook offered for free to both political candidates to “embed” Facebook employees within their campaigns to help them with their efforts on Facebook, reportedly Hillary said no, and Trump said yes and went about spending about 200 million on targeted Facebook Ads.[8] Trump’s digital content creator at the time, Theresa Hong, said “Without Facebook we wouldn’t of won.” [9] This statement couldn’t be truer.

By that time, Facebook had grown into a behemoth, with innovations allowing it to capture people’s data, and ultimately their attention. After the 2012 campaigns, Facebook had developed numerous advertising tools that skyrocketed its ad revenue. Facebook had developed look-alike audiences and dark posts, allowing businesses to create ads targeting people with similar characteristics and single out a specific segment in their existing audience respectively. In addition, Facebook doesn’t only rely on new users, it allows anyone to install what is called a Facebook ‘Pixel’ (code) on any website which tracks users on those sites which can eventually target those users when they sign up or use Facebook. For a marketer, this is heaven, for politics, it can be hell.

However, there is a central conundrum to both the outcomes of the Brexit and the US Presidential Election; although social media was mostly used by younger voters in urban areas, it was the elderly rural voters that decided the outcome of both political campaigns. An electoral map shows Hillary won the periphery states (West Coast and East Coast) where the young urban social media users live and Trump voters were all the voters in-between — in the US landmass referred as Trumpland.[10] The UK also experienced similar geographical voter distribution with the Leave vote decided by the English and Welsh ‘shires’, not the tech-savvy city youth.[11]

How could this be?

Niall Ferguson gives part of the answer. It was the dissemination of memes and other viral content by Cummings and the Trump campaign that extended beyond the social networks into the real social networks: meeting friends in bars, pubs, work or wherever real face-to-face interactions occur.[12] Yet it doesn’t quite capture the full story. There is an overlooked driving force behind this conundrum: word of mouth.

We think all marketing efforts online produce direct sales by influencing people to buy or in political campaigns, vote. They don’t — well not all the time. Word of mouth does. Jonah Berger, marketing professor at Wharton, found that contrary to belief, social media networks only generate 7% of all word of mouth.[13] The rest? Just as Niall as pointed out, happens in bars and pubs or anywhere where face-to-face interactions occur.[14] The reality is word of mouth is the most effective marketing tool ever as you hear about products or ideas from trusted sources (friends, family). Whatever marketing firms like to admit it or not, their job is to hope they get word of mouth spreading from their products and services. If they don’t, they’ve failed. Same goes for presidential campaigns. If you can’t get people talking about you in in ‘real’ life, you have lost.

Yet, it would be false to claim that Hillary did not generate to a certain extent word of mouth from her online content, so why was Trump’s word of mouth more powerful in deciding the outcome of the election? Why did Trump go ‘viral’ on and off line and Hillary to a much lesser extent?

Two forces are to explain. Virality of content online is driven by the extent of the network — a bigger network is likelier to spread ideas more — and the components behind generating word of mouth. In Contagious, Jonah Berger outlines the 6 components for word of mouth in his acronym summarized as STEPPS[15]:

- Social Currency

- Triggers

- Emotions

- Public

- Practical Value

- Stories

With respects to politics, the crucial component is evoking emotion, but it’s not just any emotional sensation that will result in word of mouth. As Jonah mentions, it’s emotions of high arousal, the emotions that will trigger “activation and readiness to action”. [16] Knowingly — or most likely unknowingly — Trump understood this very well. The reason his content generated much more word of mouth is not only because of his larger online network, but also because his content evoked high arousal emotions, those of outrage and anger not only from his actions, but of those of his political rival. The memes and continual bashing of Hillary Clinton on social media completely shattered the notion of political correctness and made people angry (and perhaps some amused), all high negative emotions which was substantial fuel to generate word of mouth beyond the social media networks. The youth got angered or amused on social platforms and spoke about it, the elderly heard them and went out to the ballots to do something about it.

The lessons of the democratic political blunders to be pulled from are many.

Democrats and the 2020 US Presidential Election

The use of Facebook was a decisive factor in the outcome of the election. The Mueller probe into Russian meddling during the election campaign tried to determine conclusive evidence of collusion with the Trump campaign, but the reality is that there was no need for collusion. Russia’s IRA program since 2014 has been systematically creating Facebook and Twitter campaigns of disinformation posing a direct threat to the US democracy.[17] And here’s the thing: anybody can do what they did. For as long as Facebook remains largely unregulated, anybody in any country can create Facebook pages and ads attacking Democrat and Republican candidates alike. You, as much as the Russians, have the power to influence the outcome of the next US election.

For the unlikelihood that Facebook and other social media will be regulated in time for the next election, democrats will have to acknowledge and contend with this new reality, the new public sphere. So far, it seems the Democrats have understood the power Zuckerberg holds as he has been called to Congress a few times and he is set to return, and they have grasped that regulations of the platforms will not happen soon — at least not before the election. A recent article does detail that democrats are spending on Facebook ads — also a good sign that they have learned from past election.[18] Great, but not quite enough.

If Democrats are to have any hope of winning the 2020 Presidential election, they will have to do two things:

- Create a series of highly targeted Facebook Ads

- Create emotionally arousing content in these ads and content at large

The decisive factor that gave Trump the win in 2016 was manipulating the rise of populism through social media, but who are we referring to when we speak of populists? As Niall Ferguson points out in his latest 10th Anniversary rendition of the Ascent of Money, populists in the US emerged as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, and were thus those that lost the most during the crisis, the precarious middle class.[19] Those with homes and white-collar jobs in the so-called Rust Belt, with states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Illinois. They went mostly red in 2016. And it should also be noted that these people, more right leaning peoples, embraced more ideas of immigration restriction and trade protectionism than more left-wing policies.[20] They are not socialist embracing individuals.

Thus, key points are to be distilled for the Democrats’ online strategy. They will need not to be too leftist (with their candidates) and must target the Rust Belt and the swing states at all cost. Paid targeted Facebook Ads will allow them to nearly single out voters in the described areas and the described issues, and they won’t need third party data companies to provide them with further interest. The fact of the matter is that Facebook has continued to grow since 2016 and has accumulated so much user data (as you keep posting and communicating on it) that third-party data providers are in my opinion now obsolete. With Facebook Ads, Democrats will be able to plug in geographic areas (rust belt), the median incomes (middle class annual salaries), and all the related interests of undecided voters and even decided Trump supporter — if they can convince the latter of switching political camps. Facebook Ads will allow Democrats to plug such interests undecided voters, Healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, immigration or any other topic the Democrats may choose to focus on during the 2020 US Presidential Election. Then, depending on the success of the ads, they could be able to capture more influence by running the same ads with look-alike audiences, or if a specific electorate needs to be targeted like the Hispanic vote for instance, running dark posts could be directed at such ends.

With the slew of Democratic candidates that have entered the 2020 race, all politically correct individuals won’t cut it; only individuals able to stir up the electorate with high arousal emotions (positive or negative) will have chances of winning. Recent article in the NY Times states Democratic electorate is misrepresented on social media, pointing out that the emotionally-arousing socialists online are not reflective of the larger moderate base less active online. As we have seen, this article fails to grasp the power of word of mouth, that it is the most ardent electorate online which get imbued by high arousal on social media and spreads their contagious emotional sentiments to the moderates in the real social networks, bars, households and anything in-between. True, moderates will be much less receptive to the socialist faction growing in the party, but high emotional arousal compelling voters to cast their ballots doesn’t have to be from this false ultimatum between socialism and centrism. Attacks on Trump will have to be coordinated, regardless where Democrats end up positioning themselves on the political spectrum.

Trump seems to know all too well that like 2016, he must stir up emotions. According to Bully Pulpit Interactive, a Washington DC based communications agency, drawing on Facebook’s API archive found that Trump is currently using nativist language in more than half of his Facebook Ads while the Democrats have yet to address immigration.[21] Will Democrats be able to match and surpass Trump? Although candidates like Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg would make great presidential figures, in this new public sphere they might fail to invoke the emotions required of the electorate to get them to vote. With Biden in the race, he may prove to be the vociferous candidate the Democrats need.

The strategy and tactics I have presented in this article seem manipulative (btw most of all businesses run Facebook ads), but the question is not the moral and legal implications of social media with respects to politics, but rather purely political. Can the Democrats afford to lose the 2020 US Presidential Election?