Study: Hillary’s Advertising Spending Couldn’t Offset Lack of Resonating Message

“Baskets full of deplorables” unmoved by massive advertising expenditures
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The 2016 presidential election was, by almost any measure, unconventional and unique.  The Democrats’ unfathomable decision to run Hillary Clinton, a woman whose deep and abiding unpopularity among many Americans goes back to the 1990’s and HillaryCare—an antipathy that resurfaced when ObamaCare became the focus of the Obama administration, will go down in history as a world-class blunder.A new study of the usefulness and effectiveness of advertising in presidential campaigns addresses the unique nature of the 2016 presidential election and offers insight into the catastrophic failure of the Democrats generally and of Hillary in particular.

The Wesleyan Media Project reports:
The 2016 presidential campaign broke the mold when it comes to patterns of political advertising.. . . . The article published in The Forum: A Journal of Applied Research in Contemporary Politics (open access through mid-April 2017) shows that the presidential race featured far less advertising than the previous cycle, a huge imbalance in the number of ads across candidates, and one candidate who almost ignored discussions of policy. . . . The authors share lessons about advertising in the 2016 campaign, and argue that its seeming lack of effectiveness may owe to the unusual nature of the presidential campaign with one nonconventional candidate and the other using an unconventional message strategy.Furthermore, the authors demonstrate that:

1) Clinton’s unexpected losses came in states in which she failed to air ads until the last week.

2) Clinton’s message was devoid of policy discussions in a way not seen in the previous four presidential contests.

Other big lessons drawn in the paper include:

• The impact of advertising may depend on the larger media environment and knowledge of the candidates. Ie. It’s much more difficult for advertising to have an impact in a media environment that is saturated with sensational media coverage of the campaign—and of two already well-known candidates—but that does not mean that all advertising fails to work
• Message matters, and a message repeated endlessly does no good unless it resonates with a sufficient number of the right voters. Team Clinton’s message that Trump was unfit for the presidency may not have been enough
• What happens at the presidential level does not always follow down ballot.