This volume focuses on the 2016 Presidential campaign from a communication perspective, with each chapter considering a specific area of political campaign communication and practice. The first section includes chapters on the early candidate nomination campaigns, the nominating conventions, the debates, political advertising and new media technologies. The second section provides studies of critical topics and issues of the campaign to include chapters on candidate persona, issues of gender, wedge issues and scandal. The final section provides an overview of the election with chapters focusing on explaining the vote and impact of new campaign finance laws and regulations in the 2016 election. All the contributors are accomplished scholars in their areas of analysis. Students, scholars and general readers will find the volume offers a comprehensive overview of the historic 2016 presidential campaign.

How the 2016 news media environment allowed Trump to win the presidency The 2016 presidential election campaign might have seemed to be all about one man. He certainly did everything possible to reinforce that impression. But to an unprecedented degree the campaign also was about the news media and its relationships with the man who won and the woman he defeated. Words that Matter assesses how the news media covered the extraordinary 2016 election and, more important, what information—true, false, or somewhere in between—actually helped voters make up their minds. Using journalists' real-time tweets and published news coverage of campaign events, along with Gallup polling data measuring how voters perceived that reporting, the book traces the flow of information from candidates and their campaigns to journalists and to the public. The evidence uncovered shows how Donald Trump's victory, and Hillary Clinton's loss, resulted in large part from how the news media responded to these two unique candidates. Both candidates were unusual in their own ways, and thus presented a long list of possible issues for the media to focus on. Which of these many topics got communicated to voters made a big difference outcome. What people heard about these two candidates during the campaign was quite different. Coverage of Trump was scattered among many different issues, and while many of those issues were negative, no single negative narrative came to dominate the coverage of the man who would be elected the 45th president of the United States. Clinton, by contrast, faced an almost unrelenting news media focus on one negative issue—her alleged misuse of e-mails—that captured public attention in a way that the more numerous questions about Trump did not. Some news media coverage of the campaign was insightful and helpful to voters who really wanted serious information to help them make the most important decision a democracy offers. But this book also demonstrates how the modern media environment can exacerbate the kind of pack journalism that leads some issues to dominate the news while others of equal or greater importance get almost no attention, making it hard for voters to make informed choices.

This edited collection explores a wide range of communication elements and themes, representing a variety of topics and methodologies. It focuses broadly on the role and function of communication within the context of the 2016 United States presidential election, with chapters devoted to topics including an overview of the election from a communication perspective, the nominations, strategies of campaign visits, the impact of gender in the campaign, the impact of WikiLeaks, front page election coverage, messaging and performance of third-party candidates, Trump’s campaign announcement address, and Clinton’s concession speech. This is an eclectic collection that makes a significant contribution to current understandings of the various roles of communication in the historic presidential election of 2016.

Although many developments surrounding the Internet campaign are now considered to be standard fare, there were a number of new developments in 2016. Drawing on original research conducted by leading experts, The Internet and the 2016 Presidential Campaign attempts to cover these developments in a comprehensive fashion. How are campaigns making use of the Internet to organize and mobilize their ground game? To communicate their message? The book also examines how citizens made use of online sources to become informed, follow campaigns, and participate. Contributions also explore how the Internet affected developments in media reporting, both traditional and non-traditional, about the campaign. What other messages were available online, and what effects did these messages have had on citizen’s attitudes and vote choice? The book examines these questions in an attempt to summarize the 2016 online campaign.

Political Rhetoric, Social Media, and American Presidential Campaigns explores how social media influenced presidential campaign rhetoric. The author discusses media use in American presidential campaigns as well as social media campaigns for Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump. This book addresses how presidential candidates adapted their rhetorical performances for newspapers, radios, television, and the Internet. Scholars of rhetoric and political communication will find this book particularly useful.

Now in its sixth edition, Political Campaign Communication provides a realistic understanding of the strategic and tactical communication choices candidates and their staffs must make as they wage an election campaign. Trent and Friedenberg's classic text has been updated throughout to reflect recent election campaigns, including 2004 and 2006 as well as the early stages of 2008. A new chapter focuses on the use of the Internet. Political Campaign Communication continues to be a classroom favorite and is thoroughly researched, insightful, and is a reader-friendly text.

Written by leading scholars of political communication, this book provides a comprehensive accounting of the campaign communication that characterized the unprecedented 2016 presidential campaign. The political events leading up to election day on November 8, 2016, involved unprecedented events in U.S. history: Hillary Clinton was the first woman to be nominated by a major party, and she was favored to win the highest seat in the nation. Donald Trump, arguably one of the most unconventional and most-unlikely-to-succeed candidates in U.S. history, became the leading candidate against Clinton. Then, an even more surprising thing happened: Trump won, an outcome unexpected by all experts and statistical models. An Unprecedented Election: Media, Communication, and the Electorate in the 2016 Campaign presents proprietary research conducted by a national election team and leading scholars in political communication and documents the most significant-and in some cases, the most shocking-features of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The information presented in this book is derived from national surveys, experiments, and textual analysis and helps readers grasp the truly unique characteristics of this campaign that make it unlike any other in U.S. history. The chapters explain the underlying dynamics of this astonishing election by assessing the important role of both traditional and social media, the evolving (and potentially diminishing) influence of televised campaign advertisements, the various implications of three historic presidential debates, and the contextual significance of convention addresses. Readers will come away with an appreciation of the content and effects of the campaign communication and media coverage as well as the unique attributes of the electorate that ultimately selected Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States.

Throughout the contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, politicians and voters alike worried that the outcome might depend on the preferences of unelected superdelegates. This concern threw into relief the prevailing notion that—such unusually competitive cases notwithstanding—people, rather than parties, should and do control presidential nominations. But for the past several decades, The Party Decides shows, unelected insiders in both major parties have effectively selected candidates long before citizens reached the ballot box. Tracing the evolution of presidential nominations since the 1790s, this volume demonstrates how party insiders have sought since America’s founding to control nominations as a means of getting what they want from government. Contrary to the common view that the party reforms of the 1970s gave voters more power, the authors contend that the most consequential contests remain the candidates’ fights for prominent endorsements and the support of various interest groups and state party leaders. These invisible primaries produce frontrunners long before most voters start paying attention, profoundly influencing final election outcomes and investing parties with far more nominating power than is generally recognized.

Major textbook introduction to the ways that the people of the US use the process of human communication to select their Presidents. Looks at the function and effects of talk about American presidential politics in everyday life.

This book traces the evolution of White House news management during America’s changing media environment over the past two decades. Comparing and contrasting the communication strategies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, it demonstrates the difficulty that all presidents have in controlling their messages despite a seemingly endless array of new media outlets and the great advantages of the office. That difficulty is compounded by new media’s amplification of presidential character traits for good or ill. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube notwithstanding, presidential power still resides in the "power to persuade," and that task remains a steep challenge. More than ever, presidential character matters, and the media presidents now employ report on the messenger as much as the message. The book also looks at the media strategies of candidates during the 2016 presidential campaign, puts presidential media use in global context, and covers the early phase of the Trump administration, the first true Twitter presidency.