1. Today, television and media is the most prevalent method used by candidates to reach voters.
2. The Internet now also plays a major role in political campaigns. It is the common channel/source through which young people get information about campaigns. As a result, presidential candidates generally establish a website with detailed issues about their issues stands and background, videos of their key speeches, a schedule of upcoming events, and a form enabling people to donate to the campaign online.
3. More people are making political donation now then every before because the internet makes it easy to do so.
4. The most important goal of any campaign is simply to get media attention.
Media coverage is determined by two factors: (1). How can candidates use their advertising budget and (2). the "free attention they get as news makers. The first is relatively easy to control. The second is more difficult but not impossible.
Almost every
logistical decision in a campaign (where to eat breakfast, whom to include on stage, when to announce a major policy proposal, etc.) is calculated according to its intended media impact.
The major item in a campaign budget is television adversing, with at least half the budget for a presidential or U.S. Senate campaign being used on campaign commercials.
5. Critics of political ads say that the ads usually emphasize style over substance and image over information similar to how
products such as cereal are marketed.
However, political ads are not like product ads because political ads are designed to prompt people's thinking, product ads are designed to create awareness of an item for sale. Product ads usually avoid conflict and take a soft sell approach, political ads tend to heighten conflict and employ a hard sell approach.
These differences between product and political ads help explain why political scientists have found that campaign advertising is an
important source of information about policy issues.
6. Candidates have little control over new coverage. Most campaigns have press aides who feed "canned" news releases to reporters. However, the media largely determined themself what is happening in a campaign and what they want to cover.
Campaign coverage interplays between hard news, what candidates say and do, and the human interest angle. It depends on which one journalists think would sell newspapers or interest television
viewers.
7. News organizations believe that policy issues are of less interest to voters than the campaign itself. As a result, news coverage is disproportionately devoted to campaign strategies, speculations on what will happen next, poll results, and other aspects of the campaign game.
The groups and interests that support a party
Democratic coalition draws support disproportionately from society's underdogs—blacks, union members, the poor, city dwellers, Hispanics, Jews, and other "minorities."15 The Democratic Party also draws more support from women than men
The Republican coalition consists mainly of white middle-class Americans.
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