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Nathaniel Persily, James B. McClatchy Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, recently served as research director for the U.S. Presidential Commission on Election Administration. He is the editor of Solutions to Political Polarization in America (2015). The present essay, written with support from the Stanford CyberInitiative and the Carnegie Foundation, is part of a book project exploring the Internet's impact on U.S. democracy.
If one had tried to write the story of the 2016 digital campaign for the U.S. presidency before knowing the election's result, the account might have gone as follows. "Hillary Clinton improved on the model built by the successful campaigns of Barack Obama, perfecting the art of microtargeting and the use of online tools to mobilize voters through social media. To be sure, her ability to vastly outspend her opponent on all forms of campaign communication (television, digital, get-out-thevote, or otherwise), as well as her opponent's relative weakness on all traditional metrics, makes it hard to say whether the new media strategies were decisive. Nevertheless, Clinton's victory suggests that having a diverse portfolio of media and campaign strategies, while spending an increasing share of campaign funds on digital tools, presages a future in which traditional electioneering becomes married to new technology."
The actual story of the 2016 digital campaign is, of course, quite different, and we are only beginning to come to grips with what it might mean for campaigns going forward. Whereas the stories of the last two campaigns focused on the use of new tools, most of the 2016 story revolves around the online explosion of campaign-relevant communication from all corners of cyberspace. Fake news, social-media bots (automated accounts that can exist on all types of platforms), and propaganda from inside and outside the United States-alongside revolutionary uses of new media by the winning campaign-combined to upset established paradigms of how to run for president. Indeed, the 2016 campaign broke down all the established distinctions that observers had used to describe campaigns: between insiders and outsiders, earned media and advertising, media and nonmedia, legacy media and new media, news and entertainment, and even foreign and domestic sources of campaign communication. How does one characterize a campaign, for example, in which the chief strategist is also the chairman of...
