Communication Evolution: A Report on the 2016 US Presidential Election

This report provides an in-depth analysis of the 2016 US Presidential Election, focusing on the communication strategies employed by candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It examines the impact of media coverage, including both traditional news outlets and social media, on voter behavior and public opinion. The report delves into the unconventional campaign strategies used by Trump, such as his use of the "outsider" persona and his engagement with unlikely voters. It also explores the role of data analytics and the controversies surrounding the election, including gender issues and alleged Russian interference. The analysis considers the media's division into pro-Trump and anti-Trump camps, the popularization of "fake news," and the impact of Trump's social media presence. The report concludes by assessing how these various factors influenced the outcome of the election and shaped the political landscape. The report also provides a literature review and content analysis of the election, supporting the findings with references to academic sources. This document is contributed by a student to be published on the website Desklib.

Running head: COMMUNICATION EVOLUTION
COMMUNICATION EVOLUTION
Name of the Student
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Abstract
The 2016 Presidential election in USA has been a controversial and competitive one. The
presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton has been engaged in verbal debates
and a high voltage media campaign to influence voters and sway the votes in their favor. This
paper will endeavor in analyzing the 2016 Presidential elections and exploring the various ways
in which the people have been influenced to vote in a certain pattern. The various mediums that
have been used are also to be understood in context of the American culture.
Literature Review
The elections this time in United States unlike the previous elections, as the candidates
directly represented the status quo of the two parties they belonged form, Democrat and
Republicans. The election was more about the personality and approach of the two candidates,
rather than their party ideology (Lilleker et al. 2016). Donald Trump took a very ingenious
approach in presenting himself as an “outsider” in politics and someone who was a perfect
representative of the American dream. He is an established business personality, and property
honcho, however he had no substantial experience in the field of politics (Williams 2017).
Trump had from the very beginning shaped his personality to the voters as a person who is
strictly right wing and he included a no compromise policy against the immigrants (Norpoth
2016). A lot of political experts dubbed his approach as being pro white and viewing the Asian
and African people as outsiders. This made a lot of people doubt the victory of Trump into office
as a substantial amount of votes come from the Asians and Afro Americans. However, the media
campaign that Trump took was different and unconventional (Davis 2016). Trump focused on
unlikely voters who “rarely” has been participants of the primaries, which elects the Presidential

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nominates, and Trump successfully managed to win the primaries. The low propensity voters’
strategy worked out well (Montanaro 2016).
The data analysts and the campaign designers launched one of the most unusual
campaigns that had been ever been conducted. A data operation to predict the campaign
outcomes had been designed inside the Trump towers known as the “Trump Tech”. There were
contracts set up with “Nation builder” a platform that has been designed digitally to establish
contact with the volunteers, workers and supporters.
There have been various controversies during the political campaign that was taken up by
Donald Trump, one of which was Gender issues. According to Wang et al. (2016) both Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump used woman card in their political campaign to win the votes of the
women. However, some comments made by Donald Trump helped the media against him to
portray him as anti-women. Apart from that the media took up the case of Russian hand in US
election to establish that Trump has been getting outside support in the elections, and his election
as a President can hamper national security (Lichtblau and Myers 2016). As reported by BBC
“US intelligence agencies have concluded Moscow tried to sway the presidential election in
favor of Mr. Trump. It is alleged that Russian hackers stole information linked to the campaign
of his rival Hillary Clinton and passed it to WikiLeaks so it could be released to undermine her.
Congressional committees were set up to investigate the matter and, in March, then-FBI director
James Comey confirmed the bureau had its own inquiry.” However, the clever election campaign
adopted by the Trump camp was effective enough to remove the obstacles and hurdles posed by
the media and successfully win the elections.
In terms of the media of United States, it was initially seen that most of the big media
houses were against the Trump campaign. Huffington Post, The New York Times and CNN were

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some of the news agencies that continuously reported against Donald Trump, to which Trump
decided to give direct rebuttals (Azari 2016). The media got divided into pro Trump and anti-
Trump Camps (Pickard 2017). Trump even popularized the term “Fake News” to contradict the
US media campaign against him. The word was popularized soon enough and got enlisted as the
word of the year (Hirst 2017). Trump has been closely followed by the media and his tweets and
Facebook posts during the election campaign has been given a detailed coverage. There was a
typing error that was posted from Donald Trump’s twitter account which was later included in
many online dictionaries. This “more than required” coverage on Trump actually helped him in
the process.
Trump did not appear to be a figure who would compromise on his stance. He portrayed
himself as someone who is fixed on his plans to build a wall to keep ways illegal immigrants
from Mexico and to deport the existing illegal immigrants from the country (Lakoff 2016).
America had recently seen some violent terrorist attacks and many crimes committed by illegal
immigrants had affected the citizens of the country to a large extent. Trump’s political campaign
had taken all these factors into consideration and the campaigners wisely penetrated the minds of
the people (Francia 2017).
Content Analysis
The various strategies taken by the political campaigners of Trump had affectively
managed to influence the mind of the audience. The media campaign was designed intelligently
and in a sequential method. In the required phase the primaries were targeted, and the most
unusual voters in this category were influenced to vote in favor of Trump. This had helped in
ensuring the candidature of Trump. The media campaigners successfully detected what are the
issues which had angered the public in the 8 year long Obama tenure. Unemployment, crime

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rates, terrorist activities and illegal activities of the immigrants were topping the list. Trump
systematically imbibed these into his political campaign and displayed a no compromise policy
against all of these issues. This had successfully initiated the process of bringing many
disenchanted Obama supporters to his side as well. The data center of Trump was one of the
highest tech data centers used in any political election ever by any party. This gave the
campaigners a real time understanding of the moods of people and the political trends of the
country. These are some of the ways in which a political campaign was used to influence voting
during the 2016 United States Presidential election.

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References:
Azari, J.R., 2016. How the news media helped to nominate Trump. Political
Communication, 33(4), pp.677-680.
Davis, A., 2016. How Trump Won: Why Hillary Clinton Lost and What the Democrats Can
Learn from the Shocking 2016 Election. Amazon Digital Services LLC, NY, USA.
Francia, P.L., 2017. Free media and Twitter in the 2016 presidential election: The
unconventional campaign of Donald Trump. Social Science Computer Review,
p.0894439317730302.
Hirst, M., 2017. Towards a political economy of fake news. The Political Economy of
Communication, 5(2).
Lakoff, G., 2016. Why Trump?. Huffington Post blog, March, 3.
Lichtblau, E. and Myers, S.L., 2016. Investigating Donald Trump, FBI Sees No Clear Link to
Russia. New York Times.
Lilleker, D., Jackson, D., Thorsen, E. and Veneti, A., 2016. US Election Analysis 2016: Media,
Voters and the Campaign.
Montanaro, D., 2016. 7 Reasons Donald Trump Won the Presidential Election. NPR. org.
November, 12.
Norpoth, H., 2016. Primary model predicts Trump victory. USA TODAY, 7, p.16.
Pickard, V., 2017. Media failures in the age of Trump. The Political Economy of
Communication, 4(2).

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Wang, Y., Feng, Y., Luo, J. and Zhang, X., 2016, December. Pricing the woman card: Gender
politics between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. In Big Data (Big Data), 2016 IEEE
International Conference on (pp. 2541-2544). IEEE.
Williams, C.B., 2017. Introduction: Social media, political marketing and the 2016 US election.