April 22, 2008
Semiatin on the cutting edge of political campaigns
It could all end today.
But even if Barack Obama delivers the final blow to Hillary Clinton by not losing too badly in the Pennsylvania primary, the lessons from their race will live on.
“Campaigns are changing,” says longtime Washington Semester professor Richard Semiatin, editor of a new book, Campaigns on the Cutting Edge. “They’ve gone through two phases and are on the verge of entering the third. They used to be party driven for the first 160 years of American history. Then they became personality driven. Now they’re becoming more consumer driven. This just follows what goes on in the marketing world. The marketing and advertising world are usually half a decade ahead of the political world. What they do now in campaigns is merge all the information from the traditional sources—researching, polling, public records, voting data. Now we’re heading into an era where the information you’re going to receive is more individually tailored to you and your background. It used to be tailored to your neighborhood, then your precinct, now it can be targeted to your home directly.”
Every time you buy a car, or a dryer, or practically anything, that information is recorded and filed in a database that eventually is sold.
“When you go to the store and they ask for your zip code, all that information’s being merged together,” says Semiatin, who earned his PhD from AU in 1989. “They take that information; they find your magazine subscriptions; they look at the calls they’ve made to your home. If you buy a Subaru, have a subscription to National Geographic, then there’s a very high probability that you’ll go out and vote Democratic. You saw some of this in 2004, but it’s becoming much more widespread.”
With chapters on, among other things, fund raising, paid media, and voter mobilization, the book explores myriad topics. Among the contributors are School of Communication professor Joseph Graf, who penned the entry on new media, and School of Public Affairs professor Candice Nelson, who examined polling.
“Polling’s going through an interesting time right now,” she says. “For the last 40 years it’s been done by and large by phone, but with caller ID it’s harder to get people to answer their phone, and with more people moving to cell phones it’s harder to get those numbers. The next obvious answer is to move to online, but it’s not representative. For the moment most political firms are still doing phone surveys, because they can still reach enough people,” said Nelson, “but down the road that’s going to change.”
In many other facets of campaigning, the change already has taken place. This year’s Democratic race offered a clear picture of that, Semiatin says.
“The Obama campaign has been more cutting edge, in part because of the demographic it was appealing to,” he says. “It started out appealing to young voters, the granola crunchy Democrats. These people tend to be highly educated, under the age of 40, much more used to using technology to seek information. As a result of that, the Obama campaign really drew on a lot of what the Howard Dean campaign did, but did it in a less bombastic way. The Internet has been a very successful source for the Obama campaign. They’ve also done a lot with text messaging to get information out.”
In contrast, Hillary Clinton has been much slower to adapt.
“Their campaign was always aimed at voters over 40, so they had to run a more conventional campaign,” Semiatin says.
Obama’s aggressive online approach paid dividends right from the start.
“The Internet is for the faithful, and so is a caucus,” Semiatin says. “You have people who have a high degree of interest who want to participate. This was really instrumental for them in Iowa getting them started. By far it played a more important role in Iowa than any other place in the country.”
Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Sen. John McCain has thrived in this brave new world, Semiatin says. In fact, the seeds of his 2008 GOP victory might have been planted during his failed 2000 bid for the White House.
“McCain’s campaign is much more cutting edge than a lot of people think,” Semiatin says. “In 2000, McCain won the New Hampshire primary, and his campaign was the first presidential campaign to use the Internet to its own benefit. They raised $21,000 a day for the first four days following New Hampshire. Their e-mail list grew from 60,000 to 142,000 in a short period of time. They had foresight to open more portals so their Web site wouldn’t go down if they got more hits. That effort helped propel him to become the No. 2 candidate, and the Republican party nominates the heir apparent every time.”
Semiatin has lived and breathed politics ever since the 1968 presidential race captured his attention.
“I think I got interested in it because it was something like sports,” he says. “Who’s winning, who’s losing, why. But in politics, unlike sports, it really matters.”
