As Donald Trump takes office as the forty-fifth president of the United States, this course explores presidential elections in historical perspective, via five case studies. It tells the story of key campaigns in US history, and by doing so it investigates how politics changed over time—and how understanding the past sheds light on the current campaign. From the arrival of "dirty politics" to the impact of the "digital revolution," the course looks at the historical background to some of the key phenomena that shaped the controversy-laden campaign of 2016. The five elections that we'll investigate are among the most significant in American political history. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in a contest that encouraged politicians to reform the electoral college, the system by which presidents are still chosen. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 prompted the outbreak of the Civil War. It's an election that helps us to understand the development of political parties. In 1968, the Vietnam War was a dominant concern for Americans, and yet foreign policy played a secondary role in Richard Nixon's victory. Twelve years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won an election that initiated a new era of conservatism. Finally, we'll turn our attention to the election that took Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, to the White House in 2008. Many saw the Obama's success not only as revealing the impact of the digital revolution on campaign politics, but also as signaling a turn to progressivism. Image credits: Course logo - "Former President Truman holds a copy of the famous Chicago Daily Tribune paper declaring 'Dewey Defeats Truman'" Harry S. Truman Library & Museum (https://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/view.php?id=38592). Course banner - "US Flag Backlit" by Joshua Nathanson, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Flag_Backlit.jpg).
At the end of our course, we look back to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. This is explored through the testimony and perspectives of a practitioner who took part in the Obama campaign, of a journalist who traveled across America in fall 2008, and of a political scientist who has written about the election. Did Obama's victory signal a turn to progressivism, and how did digital technologies transform electoral politics?
different outlets, from radio, TV, and I was there representing online.
trying to 'take the temperature' in the run up to this election.
and in retrospect it also looks like an election of great significance.
that actually you could get better stories by being out 'on the ground'.
journalists sending them material and gathering reports.
comments about Republican voters "clinging" to guns and religion came from.
It didn't come from the press corps.
So we were aware that we needed to report this election differently.
It had a huge impact.
had been broken in this way.
to identify supporters and raise funds.
he was trying to get a Presidential nomination.
would have found the digital landscape very crude and basic.
because it tweeted several times a week!
This was a new innovation, Twitter had only existed for a year.
Facebook had never played a major part in campaigns before, and suddenly it did.
that it got them much better results per dollar, that those achieved by buying ads.
shared something like 14.5 million hours of content on YouTube.
on which campaigners, ordinary volunteers, could make contact with each other.
They could share canvasing data and it was used as a fundraising tool.
This all sounds very crude and basic now, but in 2008 it was revolutionary.
Yes it did, it did.
It meant that the campaign had to be grassroots.
I agree with this, this is why I'm going out and voting for him".
This had much greater salience.
and reaching out to the media, which is why they put so much effort in YouTube.
was unfiltered by what was going on around it.
they did have Facebook pages.
Matt Drudge was obviously a key voice for them.
understand this bottom up system of reaching out to people.
I think it was October 3rd that this was passed.
This was just over a month before the election.
was when he said the fundamentals of the American economy were solid.
we felt like we were on the precipice of something different.
is that the coalitions were changing.
Think about places like West Virginia and Kentucky Appalachian.
he won Arkansas, he won Kentucky, he won Tennessee.
I think I'm right in saying he won West Virginia and Kentucky.
These states were gone by 2008.
Hispanics; you could build a majority from that.
as they had done with all the winning candidates post JFK.
someone with the common touch necessarily.
he was born in Hawaii, but he was identified with Chicago.
very different coalition from the one they built last time they won.
realizing that their coalition was losing ground demographically.
The other thing to mention is Hispanic voters.
won something like 50% of Hispanic voters.
That wasn't the case in 2008.
Hispanics moving towards the Democratic column.
the present nominee of the Republican party has only accelerated that process.
candidacy was that he was the one best prepared.
He was the one best suited to pitch himself as a change candidate.
There was the historic nature of his candidacy.
who was within touching distance of becoming president.
He was a different type of Democrat.
certainly since the days of JFK.
He wasn't a Southern populist like Carter and Clinton.
he was this college professor from Chicago.
No it didn't, it didn't.
and Sarah Palin had been named as the Vice Presidential pick.
I think there was a period where she went ahead in the polls.
this bipartisan maverick at the top of the ticket.
But Sarah Palin spoke to them, and Sarah Palin energized the Republican base.
talking to two actual hockey moms, I found a couple of hockey moms.
They identified with her; they saw her as one of theirs.
They were convinced she was going to win.
was going to happen, this was too good to be true.
There was also the economic volatility.
When Lehmans collapsed in late September, it felt it could go either way.
but you didn't necessarily know how the cards might fall.
it charted all the 'game changes' that took place throughout the election.
the voters felt the same.
their guy was definitely going to win.
this is too good to be true.
And, it felt like that right up until the last couple of weeks.
I don't think it ever felt as secure as that.
the electoral map looks fairly similar to what it looked like in 2008.
has become a bit bluer.
Missouri has become a bit redder.
The Midwest, as a whole, has become a bit redder.
the Democrats in a few electoral cycles.
the Romney campaign, to give it credit, did try to catch up.
But they were playing catch up in 2012.
just hasn't put the same level of investment into that type of campaigning.
people liked Howard Dean in Silicon Valley.
means that no credible candidate can really afford to ditch this type of stuff.
We've also seen the Democrats are able to run a kind of base election.
to reach out to the soccer moms, that Bill Clinton did.
that would motivate them in their operational research.
they didn't go back to look for Appalachian white males.
but as recently as 1996, it was voting for the Democrats.
So all the way through it had been this historically blue state.
it feels like this is the party system we're still in.