Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The 2016 US presidential election is still more than a year away, but the battle is already heating up on social media — with some unexpected results.

Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and the rest of the 2016 hopefuls are busy duking it out on Twitter and Facebook, as well as newer platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and live-streaming tools Meerkat and Periscope. At stake is a lot more than just likes and views. By many accounts, social media helped Barack Obama tip the balance during the 2012 election. (His campaign spent 10 times as much on social media as did Mitt Romney’s, earning Obama twice as many Facebook Likes and 20 times as many Retweets). Political pundits are already predicting that social media may rival traditional ads for influence in this election cycle.

The result has been a social media frenzy, with candidates from all backgrounds eagerly jumping in and trying to get their messages out. The quest to stand out from the noise has led to some pretty creative experiments on the part of the 2016 presidential class. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they get it wrong. And sometimes the results are just surreal....

I challenge each of the remaining candidates for president. Do you have the courage to make this speech and save America from Donald Trump?

My fellow Americans, today’s speech is not about me. It is about you.

I speak to you today about the greatest threat to America’s future. It’s not ISIS. It’s not gun violence or drugs. It is Donald Trump.

The reason is simple. Unlike every other candidate in this race — and unlike the committed people that make up our government — Donald Trump has only an empty hole where his conscience should be....

In a recent article on Vox, Ezra Klein declared that his generation of Washington journalists had discovered political science, and it is like the hottest thing on wheels. In the old days, he writes, journalists “dealt with political science episodically and condescendingly.” But now, Klein declares, “Washington is listening to political scientists, in large part because it’s stopped trusting itself.” Klein finds that political scientists give better answers to his questions than politicians themselves, because politicians are evasive but scientists are scientists, you know, they deal in “structural explanations” for political events. So the “young political journalists” who are roaring around town in their white lab coats frightening the local bourgeoisie “know a lot more about political science and how to use it” than their elders did.

Hence Klein’s title: “How Political Science Conquered Washington.”

Nearly every aspect of this argument annoyed me. To suggest, for starters, that people in Washington are—or were, until recently—ignorant or contemptuous of academic expertise is like saying the people of Tulsa have not yet heard about this amazing stuff called oil. Not only does Washington routinely fill the No. 1 spot on those “most educated cities” articles, but the town positively seethes with academic experts. Indeed, it is the only city I know of that actually boasts a sizable population of fake experts, handing out free-market wisdom to passers-by from their subsidized seats at Cato and Heritage....