i appreciate you trying to take a reasonable look at this, but you are wrong on both fronts here.
first, nothing stopped the trump campaign from doing the same thing they did in 2016. The innovative work they did in 2016 was to identify pain points and the types of messages that moved people by combining ad testing in facebook with data and information purchased about voters outside of Facebook. Then they ran hundreds of iterations of each until they found the one that worked. nobody had ever been that sophisticated with Facebook targeting before. The problem here, is that they didn't innovate again. Everyone does this now, not just the trump campaign, and dem campaigns had ready access to this same kind of data and testing that allows us to microtarget messages. All the way down to state leg campaigns. Nothing the social media companies did stopped us or the trump campaign from doing it again.
Debates don't win or lose elections. They are a partisan spectacle. They might make one group of voters more excited to vote for a candidate, but unless you absolutely have the worst night of your career, you arent losing based on a debate. I do think trump was bad, but I don't think it was nearly as bad as you are positing. He's never been presidential, the debate didn't change people's minds.
voters rejected the democratic platform across the country last week. But they also rejected donald trump. They had enough, and they didn't trust him to handle the pandemic. Its as simple as that. To be frank, without the pandemic, trump likely wins in a landslide.
I’m definitely not going to get into an argument with someone who does this for a living over the importance of televised presidential debates. That would be argumentative suicide!! Lol
but televised debates definitely play some role (albeit minor) in convincing or dissuading the independent voter to go one way or the other.
I think it was true with Kennedy/Nixon and I think it still is true today
With regard to social media, however, that is an area that I heavily engage in with my business. On a daily basis I find myself knee deep in social media trends and data analysis. It fascinates me how people can be persuaded or manipulated by this form of advertising
While I agree Dems learned how to effectively target the same people and in the same way that Trump did in 2016, the social media censorship guidelines that were recently imposed had a huge impact on Trumps ability to get his message across to independent voters.
when a very large portion of your social media posts are regularly taken down by the social media platforms it makes it very difficult to get your message across to any group of voters.
And those censorship guidelines were applied differently between Trump and the Dems.
And FTR i fall into the: “social media is not a public forum in the sense of legally determining whether free speech has been violated, so the platforms can do whatever they want” group
Trump needed to move faster in figuring out the rules and adapt and adjust accordingly which might have led him to pivot to another (albeit more expensive) form of advertising
