The Hillary Fandom
Politics as fandom, and fandom as politics
Can a politician have a fandom? Politics are about issues and platforms and beliefs; wonks—including much of our media coverage—tend to believe that political races are first and foremost about policy. But elections, presidential ones in particular, are also about emotion: we often vote with our feels. When we talk about candidates, we invoke words that can be swapped with “fan”—the term “supporter,” for example, gets a lot of play in British sports as well as transatlantic politics. We talk about party members, about the loyal base, about groups of people united around a personality rather than a platform or a set of beliefs (though these things are intertwined).
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