This post was written by Hatchet reporter Elise Zaidi.
The College Democrats hosted a panel on trends in the 2016 election for an audience of about 60 people in the Marvin Center Tuesday night. Frank Sesno, the director of the School of Media and Public Affairs and former CNN anchor, moderated the panel made up of journalists and political scientists.
As the election season heats up, here’s what the panelists said to keep in mind:
1. The digital age requires bolder candidates
Samuel Goldman, a contributor for the American Conservative, said the digital age has sparked an interest in more revolutionary, outspoken candidates like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. and Donald Trump, who do not display signs of “manufactured authenticity.”
“A great part of Sanders’ appeal, and this is why I think he is similar to Trump, is that he really seems to say what he believes; he considers himself a socialist and is happy to tell you about it. That is refreshing as other candidates have become increasingly robotic and scripted,” Goldman said.
Multiple 2016 candidates seem to be succeeding in their campaigns based on celebrity appeal and outspokenness than on the support of their parties, the panelists said.
Lara Brown, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Political Management, has conducted a study on how presidential candidates are discussed and how politicians’ messages affect mainstream and social media. She said during the course of Tuesday’s event that Trump had gotten more than 54 million “mentions” in the media.
2. Moderates take a backseat to polarizing candidates
The panelists discussed the ways a polarizing candidate like Sanders is able to stand as a serious contender to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Goldman said Clinton is struggling to maintain her appeal as “a relatively neutral executor of policy,” in a time where the national mood seems to be favoring radical change.
Richard Skinner, an analyst at the Sunlight Foundation, said appealing to younger audiences has been key for Democrats.
“More than anything else, Sanders has shown a lot of appeal to the millennial generation,” Skinner said. “This is a very left wing generation, this is a generation that was formed by the Iraq War and the financial crisis. The term socialism is not scary to them.”
3. Election as entertainment
Sesno, the director of SMPA, said the current election is less focused on presenting facts than it is on providing audiences with reality television-style entertainment.
“I have never seen anything like this, I have never heard rhetoric like this, I have never heard a level of disrespect like this,” Sesno said.
Sesno added that the media, which is meant to provide relatively equal coverage of all candidates now willingly provides hot-button candidates, like Trump and Sanders, with more air time based on the minute-to-minute ratings thos figures can bring.
He said that, fair or not, if a “30 minute phone call with Trump” gets higher ratings than an in-person interview with any other candidate, the phone call will go on the air.
“We are following the public more than we are leading the public in journalism,” Sesno said.
