How Trump rewrote the campaign rule book
Donald Trump didn’t just win the White House last week, said Marc Fisher in The Washington Post; he also rewrote the political rule book. Presidential candidates are supposed to pursue data-driven campaigns “based on focus group-tested TV commercials and microanalysis of voting behaviour”. Not Trump. He “did it the way he’d said he would for more than 30 years”: by ignoring the experts and simply trusting “his gut”. It was a remarkable campaign, agreed Devon Wijesinghe on Mediapost.com. Between midSeptember and the election, Hillary Clinton spent $145m on television ads. Trump? $4m. Clinton had an army of activists canvassing door to door, and appeared on stage with Beyoncé and Jay Z. Trump hardly bothered with a “ground game”, instead connecting with voters directly through Twitter.
Trump’s “most revolutionary” move was to make his campaign entertaining, said Holman W. Jenkins Jr in The Wall Street Journal. He worked out early on that his voters weren’t interested in policy details. “His argument was completely embodied in ‘Make America Great Again’, plus his outsize public persona. He only needed to keep his fans jollied up, and fired up, until election day.” Trump’s talent for controversy garnered him an estimated $5bn-worth of free media coverage, said Ginger Gibson and Grant Smith on Reuters. This, and his reliance on social media, meant his campaign was relatively cheap. Altogether, he spent less than $5 per vote gained – “about half what Clinton did”. So will his “lean, media-savvy campaign” become the new model for winning US elections? Perhaps. Most experts agree, however, that Trump is probably a one-off.
The unconventional manner in which Trump won makes his victory all the more troubling, said Charles Lane in The Washington Post. Now that he’s proved all the experts wrong with his campaign, it will only encourage his belief that he is “gifted with special insight”. The hope is that Trump, now that he has been elected, will tone down his act and accept the constitutional restraints that come with his office. But that won’t be easy for someone who has succeeded by flouting the rules. When the Trump White House is challenged in future, its response could well be: “He was right about the election, when everyone said he was wrong, so who are you to say he’s not right about this, too?”