Introduction
Donald Trump’s election campaign, as well as his personality itself, are atypical for the election campaign of an average politician participating in presidential elections. The processes that took place during the 2016 election race in the United States should be presented as inflating a number of maximum possible scandals. However, instead of burying the political career of such an unusual candidate for the post of head of state, they allowed him to take the post of the 45th President of the United States of America (Knuckey & Hassan, 2019). Given the upcoming US presidential election, it seems useful to study and comprehensively analyze this strategy, which is likely to be encountered.
Research Findings
Time has shown that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign turned out to be very effective, and the first sign of the success of his strategy at the beginning of the election race was that he was the only candidate whom all the respondents recognized. A study conducted by Knuckey & Hassan using political tools provided by the Natural Selection Model showed that the more attention is paid to a particular candidate in news stories, the faster his rating grows (2019). It is logical to assume that the more a person observes one of the politicians in the media, the more likely they are to be purposefully interested in the candidate’s personality and then in their activities, and in the absence of fundamental disagreements with the politician’s ideas, they will vote for the candidate. Apparently, Donald Trump’s priority goal during the campaign period was to determine dominance in the media space and find a response in the soul of the average American. This is what served as critical elements that influenced people’s selection of their desired candidate as well as the reason that led them to retain their choice.
Analysis
Variation
When voters compared Trump with other candidates, Trump chose a strategy of criticizing opponents. The media in their activities widely use the property of human consciousness to react more sharply to negative information and fixing it in memory. Newspapers, radio and the Internet primarily try to cover incidents and scandals (Erichsen et al., 2020). Trump actively used to build his image as an opponent of the domestic and foreign policy pursued by the current US government at that time. Harsh criticism and even attacks on opponents brought him, against expectations, an increase in the rating. For example, Trump made a number of extremely harsh statements about Senator from Arizona, US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Selection
At the selection stage, Trump took advantage of the knowledge of his target audience. For quite a long time, the future 45th president of the United States was engaged in producing a number of television reality shows and worked purposefully with her problems. The average supporter of Donald Trump during his election campaign is a white man aged about 50 with an income of less than $50,000 per year, that is, less than the average annual income of a US resident, without a higher education, a conservative (Erichsen et al., 2020). Such a person is most interested in the topics of immigration, healthcare, the economy, or rather, the standard of living in general and the level of income in particular. Trump’s slogan, “Let’s make America great again”, successfully playing on the nostalgic and imperialist feelings of Americans, suited such an audience selection perfectly.
Retention
To retain his audience, Trump used the most simplified speech and presentation of information. According to a meta-analysis, out of two hundred words of Trump’s speeches, every twentieth carried a negative connotation of harm, enmity, death and other concepts clearly fixed in human consciousness as negative (Knuckey & Hassan, 2019). Trump’s speeches do not contain contradictions and mutually exclusive points. Thus, Donald Trump, uses the old method of repeating the same information repeatedly, providing it with an emotional component. He sought to lead the audience to the conclusion that the world is full of hostility, and Islam is especially hostile towards the United States, and this hostility must be fought. Thus, appealing with simple and understandable concepts, Trump kept his audience, making it clear that he was close to his voters.
Conclusion
An analysis of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign shows that his strategy has been paradoxically successful. Approval for this state post was one of those rare cases when a candidate loses by the total number of votes but finally wins by receiving a majority of the votes of the electoral college. Organizational managers have selected the working components of the success and effectiveness of the election campaign of the 45th President of the United States. They conducted purposeful actions aimed at destroying the image of the opponent. In addition, managers chose the tactic of regularly provoking scandals, which invariably resulted in attracting public attention and fixing an easily recognizable image in the minds of a potential target audience. Moreover, organizational managers were guided by an excellent knowledge of the legislation of the American state and the electoral system in it, which contributed to Trump’s success.
References
Erichsen, K., Schrock, D., & Dignam, P. (2020). Bitchifying Hillary: Trump supporters’ vilification of Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. Social Currents, 7(6), 357–360. Web.
Knuckey, J., & Hassan, H. (2019). Authoritarianism and support for Trump in the 2016 presidential election. The Social Science Journal, 59(1), 47–60. Web.