ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN

Electoral Campaign

Electoral Campaign

Introduction

Electoral campaign is basically a part of political campaign which is an attempt to influence the decision of targeted audience/public. Electoral campaign has a very clear cut objective that is to influence the decision of voters in the election. Political parties are the fundamental element of electoral campaigns. The case of US is a very interesting one. United States mainly has two major political parties that are democratic and republicans. Both are parties are often offer contrasting policies. Because the United States has only two major parties, each of which seeks to gain majority support, their candidates normally tend to avoid controversial or extreme political positions. Sometimes, Democratic and Republican candidates do offer sharply contrasting policy alternatives, particularly during times of crisis.

Ordinarily, however, Republican and Democratic candidates pursue moderate and somewhat overlapping policies. Both democratic and republicans have their loyal voters but the real election is influence by swingers who change their view and can vote either party. The electoral campaign across the world and US candidate centered. The advantages of candidate-centered politics include responsiveness to new leadership, new ideas, and local concerns. Yet this form of politics can result in campaigns that are personality- driven, depend on powerful interest groups, and blur responsibility for what government has done.

Discussion

To further discuss about the electoral campaigns. I would like to discuss the most debated electoral campaign in recent US history that is Barrack Hussein Obama electoral campaign.

Before discussing the campaign of Obama, let's have a brief introduction about him

The advent of video sharing technology and the rapid growth in the reach of social networking sites thus opened up vast new possibilities for direct candidate to voter communication. Moreover, new media platforms often provide the campaigns with precise data concerning the background and interests of their users, making it possible for the candidates to “target” pre-defined groups of voters with messages designed to resonate with their interests and policy preferences (Shanto, 2011).

As technology has diffused and more Americans spend significant amounts of time online, the audience for online news gradually approaches the audience for television news. Barrack Obama was the first campaigner to recognize and maximally exploit the advantages of unmediated candidate-to-voter communication. The website barackobama.com, designed for a general audience, attracted more than 2.6 million unique visitors, while visitors to the McCain website numbered fewer than half that number (Rhoads 2008). Another site, my.barackobama.com, was designed to provide resources (scheduling, call lists, fundraising scripts) to volunteers and to encourage blogging. Eventually, more than 2 million users posted user profiles there.

But where the Obama campaign broke new ground was in its systematic use of online campaign communication. (Iyengar, 1996)The video sharing site YouTube played a pivotal role in the dissemination of campaign messages. The campaign used their online presence to counteract or rebut critical media commentary, a capability that proved especially useful in the aftermath of the controversy surrounding Obama's friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The Rev. Wright story prompted a typical media “feeding frenzy” that ...