Political campaigns are changing. Now, that’s not to state the obvious, but 10 years ago, some of today’s most viral campaign tactics simply didn’t exist. America (and the world) can thank the Internet for that. Social media have vastly altered the way candidates not only reach out to voters, but interact with each other.
Take, for example, the Twitter exchange between Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
It was Monday night and Clinton was presumably getting ready to wrap up her message for the day, which was fixing the problem of student loan debt in the U.S. She had already taken to different social networks like Facebook and Snapchat (a new venture for Clinton as of last week) to talk about college affordability.
Then, Clinton tweeted out a photo with a link to her plan to make college easier on students’ pocketbooks.
She received many responses, some positive, some negative. Virtually all unlikely to elicit a response from Clinton. But one in particular struck a chord with her campaign.
It was from Bush, who had taken her photo and tweaked it -- this time with a very different message. Bush says in the photo college debt has increased 100 percent under President Barack Obama’s White House, which Clinton served in as secretary of state from 2009-2013.
The photo also accuses Clinton of “mortgaging the future” of college grads for four more years.
The “tweef” (Twitter beef) didn’t stop there.
Clinton jumped on the offensive, creating yet another image macro, this time scribbling over Bush’s picture and replacing it with a huge “F,” indicative of the grade given to Florida for its college affordability while Bush was governor. Florida still charged the least for tuition among all 50 states when Bush left office, but Bush sparked a fire and Clinton and wasn’t going to back down.
Bush’s camp then gave Clinton’s easily-recognizable arrow logo a face-lift, changing the arrow into an upward direction, on top of “TAXES” where the parts of the letter “H” were.
Candidates getting ugly over policy isn’t anything new, but social media have given politicians a new boxing ring perfect for sucker-punching each other.
It’s likely the tweets didn’t come from Clinton or Bush personally, but from their campaign teams. Yet, the strategy of two candidates running multimillion-dollar campaigns poring over which image macros and memes to release is indicative of a changing political atmosphere which will inevitably continue into 2016 and beyond.
This isn’t the first time the two have sparred via Twitter. Just last week they butted heads over Planned Parenthood.
Clinton tweeted to Bush he was wrong in suggesting women’s health issues were “overfunded” at a Southern Baptist Convention.
“What’s absolutely, unequivocally wrong is giving taxpayer $ to an org whose practices show no regard for lives of unborn,” Bush tweeted back.
Monday’s battle was reminiscent of an Internet message board like reddit, where users will often respond to each other with memes and image macros.
Said one reddit user on the feud:
“Oh, politics. This campaign has officially become a Twitter meme war. Nice.”
Twitter creates the perfect storm for political battles because it’s more conversational than other social media networks like Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat.
Politicians have lately used it to smash their opponents into the virtual ground -- see U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson’s six-hour rampage against fellow congressman U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy, whom he will face off against for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Sentate.
Twitter is (essentially) free publicity and reaches a huge audience. Over 300 million people use the site worldwide (53 million were Americans in 2015), with the largest share of users between the ages of 18 and 24.
As the campaign trail begins to heat up, don’t expect a lack of entertaining and fiery tweets from the country’s top names as they duke it out to claim their respective thrones in American politics.
