Donald Trump and the new style of leadership taking over US politics
How Trump and his campaign's mastery of internet-based communication technologies has changed politics, candidates and campaigns
[DemocracySOS has been on a bit of a hiatus since the presidential election, stepping back from the fray to contemplate the new political moment. Below is Part II of my ongoing commentary about “What happened on November 5?” In Part I, “Why Kamala Harris lost (a winnable election?),” I used several charts showing which demographics gravitated to Donald Trump and over which issues, which dramatically highlighted the four factors that caused Harris to lose: 1) high prices (and not inflation), 2) a puzzling inattention by the Biden-Harris administration to immigration/the border, 3) the Biden-Harris administration’s horrific Israel-Gaza policy, and 4) Harris’s severe shortcomings as a candidate which have been clearly evident since she ran for attorney general in California in 2010. I closed that article by writing, “What lesson should the Democrats learn from all this? That’s the $69,000 question, going forward. The answer is not so clear. I will offer some thoughts on this in a future article.” Below is Part II, with some of the answer to that question. And in case you don’t know, DemocracySOS is a reader-supported publication. Here is a link to our $5 per month subscription page. Thanks for throwing a few coins into the hat].
In the aftermath of the Kamala Harris defeat, and the Democrats loss of the Senate and House, it is critically important that liberals and progressives think hard about what kinds of candidates can win going forward. This is a question more of style than substance, of image more than policy.
This discussion is a delicate matter, touching on issues of gender, race and culture. And it needs to carefully consider the impact that the ever-evolving, internet-based campaign technologies emanating from the FacebookYouTubeTikTokX multiverse are having on elections.
It is apparently the case that a critical number of Americans -- especially those Indecisives known as swing voters – prefer casting their presidential votes for candidates who display the qualities of a strong, even authoritarian-style leader that voters tend to gravitate to in confusing, topsy-turvy times. Previously I have written about Trump Democrats, and how these former Democrats were drawn to a local style of patriarchal boss-ism, and whose loyalties then transferred to Trump at the national level. A sizable number of voters – especially the swing voters who decide close contests – are willing to overlook a lot of rhetorical excesses, sneering insults, race-baiting, demagoguery and even violent threats made against opponents if the candidate projects a comforting sense of strong leadership.
Successful Democratic candidates will apparently need to project a strong, reassuring and moderate presence via a riveting mass media profile that burns through the everyday fog of high prices, incessant economic worry, culture wars and partisan polarization. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, he has become a larger-than-life figure, looming over the national landscape. His outrageousness punctures through the national miasma in ways that people who don't have time to pay attention to politics take notice of. He’s like a 15 car highway wreck, the everyday rubber neckers can’t not look. “Did you hear what he said this time?”
As a former reality TV star, Trump knows how to work the media-scape like an entertainer, emitting a steady stream of tantalizing sensation as click-bait to the ever-hungry social media algorithms. Indeed, his rallies share qualities with Grateful Dead concerts, entertaining the adoring Trumpheads with his dark, bitter humor that makes fun of the other side and sugarcoats his brand of white male nationalist nostalgia. A lot of Americans are buying what he is selling.
When he pumped his fist, his ear bleeding from a burst of assassin bullets that nearly exploded his head, and implored his followers to “Fight!”, Trump created an iconic image that will live in infamy. He projects a wild, unpredictable kind of strength that is idolized by some and repulses others, and by appearances is a man of action, an “American Bad Ass” in the words of right-wing rock ‘n roller Kid Rock. Two days before his election, at one of his last rallies, Trump pretended to give oral sex to his microphone (you have got to see the short video to believe it) while the audience tittered uncomfortably at first, and then roared its approval. He has no shame and is unafraid to be disgusting, taunting, shocking, racist, sexist and rebellious against norms and standards.
There is no other compelling figure like him on the US political landscape today, a dark avatar who is the head of his own very motivated political movement. He has rewritten the scripts for what a leader is and does. And in ways that are barely comprehensible, he has fashioned a new model for how to win elections. Already there are many imitators and Mini-Me’s, including the Vice President-elect J.D. Vance (who used to call Trump a reprehensible idiot and compared him to Hitler) and Secretary of State nominee Marco Rubio, (who Trump once mocked as “Little Mario” while Rubio used to call Trump a “con artist” and “dangerous”). In 2020, a younger Joe Biden cultivated his own “strong leader” profile, emphasizing his moderate, Catholic, working class roots, a white guy from Scranton, Pennsylvania who more Democratic primary voters considered a safer choice than either an African-American woman candidate, Kamala Harris, or a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders.
Women candidates struggle to win over women voters
To beat Trump, the strategists behind Kamala Harris bet the barn that they could rally women voters against this aging patriarchal bull moose, that they could rally the country to “turn the page” by putting forward a candidate who was the exact opposite -- a black woman trying to project competence but with little bluster, not dark and dour but with Harris’s joyous laughter, accompanied by her running mate Tim Walz’s “thrilled to be here” giggle, and that frequent professorial tut tut wagging of Harris’s finger.
But that strategy has never really worked. In 1984, Democratic presidential candidate Walter Mondale selected a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, as his vice presidential pick in an effort to curry support from female voters. Instead, women gave GOP candidate Ronald Reagan 58% support. According to the New York Times, many white women who voted for Reagan indicated they saw him as a strong leader who could deliver a strong America. Reagan won 49 states en route to amassing 525 electoral votes to Mondale’s 13—one of the largest landslides in US history.
Forty years later, some women voters in this year’s presidential election still said they were uncomfortable with a woman being president. “I’m a woman and it probably goes against the grain, but I think we need a man to deal with foreign countries,” said Lynn Lewis, 60, of Old Fort, North Carolina. Lewis said she fears foreign leaders might think they could push around a female president. “There are certain things that men need to lead,” she said. Harris won the women’s vote overall, 53-45, but that was a much smaller margin than Joe Biden vs Trump, 57-42. And among white women, Trump outpolled Harris, 53-46.
This is more about culture, and not exclusively about politics or policy. The World Values Survey is a decades-long global research project involving a worldwide network of social scientists who have conducted national surveys in almost 100 countries covering 85% of the global population. The surveys explore people's values and beliefs, how they change over time, and what social and political impact they have.
According to WVS, one of the major dimensions of cross-cultural variations in the world include Traditional values versus Secular-rational values. Interestingly, the United States is a deviant case, having a much more traditional value system than any other wealthy postindustrial society except Ireland. On the traditional/secular dimension, the United States ranks far below other rich societies, with levels of religiosity and national pride comparable with those found in a number of other poorer developing nations. Traditional values emphasize “deference to the authority of God, fatherland, and family,” and people who embrace these values also reject abortion and espouse high levels of nationalistic outlook. The chief architect of the WVS, noted American political scientist Ronald Inglehart in his book Cultural Evolution: People's Motivations Are Changing, and Reshaping the World, propounded his “evolutionary modernization theory” which held that economic and physical insecurity elicits an authoritarian reflex leading to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, populist politics and adherence to traditional cultural norms. As if on cue, Donald Trump arrived on the scene after wages for middle- and lower-income Americans, especially for blue collar workers, had been flat or even declined for some occupations since the late 1970s. Economic insecurity in turn led to political and electoral upheavals.
Does that sound like the TrumpWorld we all live in today? It sure does to me.
This hardwired reality has further consequences for women's political success. According to the most recent World Values Survey, half of those surveyed -- women as well as men – “still accept the idea that men make better political leaders than women,” especially in those countries like the US that tilt more toward a traditional value system. By even larger margins, people believe that women are less equipped to make the life-or-death decisions that heads of government need to make as they manage national security and foreign policy. In other postindustrial societies, this view is rejected by growing majorities, and is overwhelmingly rejected by the younger generation within these societies. On the scale of traditional values, the United States is not the most male supremacist knuckle dragger among the world's nations, but neither is it the most progressive. For this reason, the WVS report observes that “the United States is not a prototype of cultural modernization for other societies to follow, as some modernization writers assumed.”
The role of the internet in the new style of leadership
Election after election, Americans are viscerally reminded that we live in a 50-50, Red versus Blue nation. Since 2000, each presidential and congressional election cycle has been a nailbiter. In 2016, with 129 million ballots cast nationwide, and with a total victory margin for Donald Trump of only 40,000 voters in the three decisive states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that means if just 20,000 voters had changed their minds, Hillary Clinton would have been elected president. 2020 was even closer, with 155 million votes cast and Joe Biden besting Donald Trump by only 22,000 total voters combined in Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, so a switch of a mere 11,000 voters in those three states would have elected Trump (after throwing the election into the House of Representatives), even though Biden won by 7 million more votes nationwide.
Given the stakes, in every election both sides are looking for any little advantage that will make a difference. In the 50-50 nation, the internet infrastructure increasingly has become a decisive factor deciding who wins presidential contests. Whoever deploys it in the most clever and effective ways has an advantage. But the internet has proven to be a very strange cyber multiverse to campaign in, based on an inexact campaign science despite having mountains of data available. With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, YouTube, TikTok and other digital media’s ability to allow political campaigns as well as businesses to micro-target ads and news stories, it’s not clear what critical news and information voters are seeing anymore. What I see in the FacebookInstagramTikTokX-verse may be diametrically different from what my wife, housemate, neighbor or crazy uncle sees. Voters are not all sitting in their living rooms watching the nightly news anymore, instead they are watching an innumerable number of different YouTube channels and InstagramFacebookTikTokX feeds. Given the ability of campaigns to use the new digital technologies to micro-target voters down to the individual level, there is no longer a “national media” that binds people’s understandings together, as the political attention span of average voters becomes fractured and fissured.
Especially for younger voters today, many of them are receiving their news and info from digital media populated by the new media mavens known as “influencers,” with their podcasts and social media feeds. Digital media influencers are not trained journalists, instead they intermix their own views into the current events and report it out as fact. The users/listeners click on what they like and what interests them, the digital platforms keep track of every little webpage visited and compile it into individual psychographic profiles, and then feed the users more of what they have already viewed or heard and what the algorithms think they might like. The seduction process leads each viewer, breadcrumb by breadcrumb, down a path towards escalating sensation and extremism to keep them watching and clicking. All of that amidst a swirling cloud of advertisements that brings in hundreds of billions in revenue to the Silicon Valley companies.
This continual downgrading of the media and communications ecosystem must be accounted for in trying to understand the phenomenon of Donald Trump. A recent Pew study found that one-fifth of US adults regularly receive their news from online influencers, but that number rises to 37% for young adults aged 18 to 29. The influencers themselves are overwhelmingly men (63%) who outnumber women influencers by roughly 2 to 1. So this part of the online world is very much a male rodeo, with more of those male influencers explicitly presenting a politically right-leaning orientation than a liberal one (despite long-standing charges from Republicans that social media sites lean left and censor their views). On Facebook, there are three times as many explicitly conservative news influencers as liberal ones (39% to 13%).
So this is Trump’s world. And the Democrats have fallen behind in this increasingly dominant communications matrix with so many ways to reach voters. In recent years, each presidential election deploys the latest communication innovations in the incessant effort by campaigns to target key swing voters. Each individual is targeted by her/his own individual news and advertisement feed preferences, landing them in their own info bubbles. In 2016, the Trump campaign ran 5.9 million different versions of the same basic ads on Facebook, each one tweaked for individual targets (according to research from Facebook itself). Each ad was rapidly tested on a unique niche of prospective voters to see which ones generated the most effective engagements, which then were used as a base model for designing and launching even more ads. The Trump campaign ran up to 100,000 iterations of a single ad in a single day, in which language and visuals were tweaked to entice as many individual viewers as possible. The “long tail” harvesting of specific psychographic profiles for each user was deployed to bombard millions of prospective voters with manipulative ads.
In 2020 and 2024, that kind of relentless micro-targeting via digital media continued, but the game changed yet again. This time the innovation was the influencers and their podcasts, like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson and many more. Alternative news sources like podcasts and social media were much more prevalent among new Trump voters (59 percent) and swing voters (52 percent). TV broadcaster news was much less popular with swing and base Trump voters, even as half of base Harris voters got their news from broadcast TV (though Fox News, a cable news channel rather than a broadcaster channel, was still popular among Trump supporters).
Trump won his biggest margins among those getting their news from podcasts and digital media. Those who reported using social media as their main news source voted for Trump over Harris by 6 points (51– 45 percent). Those who used podcasts as their main news source voted for Trump by a 16-point margin (56 – 40). For those using Twitter/X daily, a platform owned and manipulated by multi-multibillionaire Trump ally Elon Musk, 52 percent reported voting for Trump, 44 percent for Harris. Harris won only among those watching broadcast news, by 17 points (57 – 40).
Among the undecided swing voters, the most popular social media platforms for daily usage were Facebook (80 percent usage) and YouTube (75 percent). For undecided swing voters who were Facebook users, Trump benefited from a 10% margin over Harris. Among X/Twitter swing voters, Trump enjoyed a 15 point margin, and among swing voters who were podcast listeners Trump held a whopping 31% margin, which is larger than the Trump margin of swing voters who watched Fox News, at 20%. These are revealing numbers, well outside the final victory margin of only 49.9% to 48.4%. All in all, Trump won sizable margins from voters who watched, listened to or used digital media, podcasts, Facebook, X/Twitter and Fox News.
Given the vagueness, bias and outright misinformation that are rampant on so many of these communication platforms, it's possible that many of these voters did not know who Trump is, the outrageous and unpresidential things he has said and done, his threats against opponents, the many criminal charges against him, or the dangerous plans that Trump has announced for his second term. But hey, no problem, at least their favorite influencer was there to help them get up to speed in time to cast their votes.
The latest innovation -- streaming TV rises in influence
Another new technology that appears to have made a difference in the 2024 presidential outcome is the ever-evolving technology of streaming services. Unlike paid subscription services like Netflix and Hulu, streaming businesses such as Roku, Max and Tubi provide movies and TV shows for free in exchange for viewers seeing ubiquitous ads. While broadcast and cable television limit campaigns to advertising based on where voters live or what programs they watch, many of the increasingly popular streaming services allow advertisers to more precisely target specific individuals to send ads to. The New York Times reports that the Trump campaign and its leading super PACs figured out how to micro-target these “streaming persuadables,” as the viewers were called, accessing a new world of roughly 14 percent of battleground state voters who the Trump campaign identified as being swayable. In the seven swing states, that amounted to 6.3 million people, which provided a critical new edge for the Trump campaign.
Because these streaming services are mostly free, they are increasingly the go-to entertainment for many middle- and lower-income families feeling the bite from high prices. Reports the NY Times, “The 2024 presidential race is the first when streaming services with ads were drawing big enough audiences to matter. By October 2024, Nielsen had estimated that streaming made up 40 percent of TV viewing.” A 20,000-person survey commissioned by a Trump super PAC in early 2024 gained provocative insights not only into who was potentially persuadable in the swing states, but also how they got their news.
The Trump researchers discovered, much to their surprise, that not only did the swing vote in 2024 skew younger and more Latino and Black than usual, but crucially roughly half of those undecided or swayable voters could be found exclusively on streaming services. Another third used streaming in addition to more traditional television. It was like discovering a lost tribe of voters who had the potential to form the decisive voting bloc in the seven swing states. The list of 6.3 million undecided voters was incorporated into the Trump campaign’s electoral map for how to precisely micro-target their efforts. All told, the super PAC reportedly spent about $80 million on micro-targeted streaming advertisements.
The segmentation of news and info favors candidates like Trump
The increasing segmentation of the news and information ecosystem makes running for political office increasingly challenging. Voters are bombarded with information from different sources -- as well as different communication technologies -- like never before. The quality of available information is degrading, and the sheer volume is growing exponentially to the point where it's like drinking from a firehose of info points that many people cannot easily assimilate.
Previously, in the era of broadcasting television, every viewer in the same city or town, regardless if they were a Democrat, Republican or undecided, saw the same TV ads and even the same news and sitcom programs. Now, under the increasingly Mad Science of political campaigns, individuals within the same household or family can be micro-targeted differently, and each of them has no clue about what the other is seeing or hearing. People in their role as media consumers are truly balkanizing into their own news and information bubbles, their own little Private Idahos.
Maybe that could be okay, except that each media outlet, each influencer, each podcaster and digital media platform, increasingly has their own set of facts. Consensus-building and any sense of an information commons – originally one of the alleged euphoric net-gains from the internet – is bogging down in the miasma of diffusion and confusion. In order to find "real news" one has to purposefully seek it out at credible news websites like the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal (Fox News has proven not to be credible by its own admission, when it paid Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million in a libel settlement after its own internal memos revealed that it was reporting lies as news that Fox knew to be lies. Caught…red…handed). Yet most people can’t be bothered because they are too busy, or already entertained, or alternately enraged and provoked like a lab rat in a maze, by the constant “feed” (perfect name for it) of a steady diet of sensationalized, AI-amplified bullshit.
So there is no longer a national media landscape that is capable of fusing public awareness into a rough consensus based on a goal of finding mutual compromise. And the internet itself is in the process of shaping what kind of candidates will likely be successful. While the emergence of this new style of media-savvy, Trump-like, algorithm-enhanced strongman is not simply a plug-and-play formula that one can easily copy like an Open AI Sora text-to-video image generator, the fact is the medium is starting to determine the message. The media multiverse has not proven itself to be a forum where robust, erudite policy discussion can flourish in the middle of a presidential election. In this new political era, the policies and issues may matter less and less, and style and image may matter more. Policy substance would seem to be crucially important toward solving present and future challenges, yet often it is going to be trumped by these other intangibles.
That doesn’t mean that a woman can’t ever be elected president, or even a black woman, but it does mean that they have a much bigger hill to climb than most men to reach the summit. Also, don’t count on a female candidate winning votes from many women based solely on pro-choice or gender solidarity sentiment. Many women today are motivated by a range of sympathies, sometimes conflicting. Particularly considering the trajectory of the new communication technologies, it may well mean that it will take a particular type of “larger than life” candidate to puncture through the fog of modern daily living. The still-evolving digital media jungle that is refining its dark algorithmic arts each election cycle is increasingly functioning as a kind of personality test that filters which candidates will have a chance of sitting in the Oval Office. Will a woman candidate ever pass that test?
[In a future article I will cover how it’s no coincidence that, in the Trump/Putin/ Bolsonaro/Milei/Modi era, women elected officials are being intimidated, harassed and threatened in growing and alarming numbers, with the internet once again a primary weapon in the women-haters arsenal. This harsh environment has impacted women’s representation in different countries, including the US.]
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776@gmail.com