As Donald Trump takes office as the forty-fifth president of the United States, this course explores presidential elections in historical perspective, via five case studies. It tells the story of key campaigns in US history, and by doing so it investigates how politics changed over time—and how understanding the past sheds light on the current campaign. From the arrival of "dirty politics" to the impact of the "digital revolution," the course looks at the historical background to some of the key phenomena that shaped the controversy-laden campaign of 2016. The five elections that we'll investigate are among the most significant in American political history. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in a contest that encouraged politicians to reform the electoral college, the system by which presidents are still chosen. The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 prompted the outbreak of the Civil War. It's an election that helps us to understand the development of political parties. In 1968, the Vietnam War was a dominant concern for Americans, and yet foreign policy played a secondary role in Richard Nixon's victory. Twelve years later, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won an election that initiated a new era of conservatism. Finally, we'll turn our attention to the election that took Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, to the White House in 2008. Many saw the Obama's success not only as revealing the impact of the digital revolution on campaign politics, but also as signaling a turn to progressivism. Image credits: Course logo - "Former President Truman holds a copy of the famous Chicago Daily Tribune paper declaring 'Dewey Defeats Truman'" Harry S. Truman Library & Museum (https://www.trumanlibrary.org/photographs/view.php?id=38592). Course banner - "US Flag Backlit" by Joshua Nathanson, CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_Flag_Backlit.jpg).
Roundtable on 2008 election
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The Election of 2008
At the end of our course, we look back to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. This is explored through the testimony and perspectives of a practitioner who took part in the Obama campaign, of a journalist who traveled across America in fall 2008, and of a political scientist who has written about the election. Did Obama's victory signal a turn to progressivism, and how did digital technologies transform electoral politics?
Impartido por:
Frank Cogliano
Professor of American History
David Silkenat
Lecturer
Fabian Hilfrich
Senior Lecturer in American History
Robert Mason
Professor of Twentieth-Century U.S. History
One of the things Mike Moffo reflected on when he told us about the 2008 election
was the role of technology and social media in that election.
That led me to consider the degree to which technology influenced the particular
elections we've considered in this MOOC.
In my own, for example, in 1800, newspapers were vitally important.
Newspaper editors were seen not as objective
providers of information, but as political activists and political players.
And newspaper editors played a really big role in that election,
in seeking to get candidates' messages across, and
in disseminating information from a particular perspective.
So the newspapers were very, very partisan and
they were the chief vehicle by which the voters were communicated with.
David, I wondered the degree to which that it was still true in 1860.
>> I think it's even more true in 1860 than it was in 1800, in part because
the steam presses made newspapers much cheaper and much more widely available.
So the number of newspapers grows exponentially in the 1830s and 1840s and
1850s.
So by the time you get to 1860s, both the Democrats and
Republicans have many newspapers at their disposal to disseminate information.
They also have the telegraph, which allows them to communicate in
a way that it hadn't been possible in 1800.
We actually also have things like the Pony Express;
one of the first things the Pony Express does in 1860 is send
the message about Lincoln's election to California.
>> Yeah, and the 1960s, obviously, counts as the era of television.
We've all heard how supposedly it swayed people's minds in
the presidential debate between Kennedy, and Nixon in 1960.
Of course by 1968, Vietnam is widely known as the first television war.
Television certainly does make an impact.
Those iconic images that I was talking about in my lecture about
the election of 1968, the iconic image of the embassy in Saigon being
breached by Viet Cong, that was one of the images that comes across via television.
So for the first time, viewers feel like they are really part of the war
and the war seems much more immediate in what they experience.
So, undoubtedly, that also had an influence on how they felt Vietnam
impacted on their lives, and therefore, on their decisions in the election of 1968.
>> 1980 is still the age of television.
Television was bringing home the Iranian hostage crisis, in particular,
which reinforced disaffection with Carter.
On the Reagan side,
what had been going on in the late 1970s was the development of direct mail.
That was a new technology in the 1970s.
Direct mail offered a new way of targeting voters,
of identifying voters who might be sympathetic with the conservative cause,
and then of cultivating their support in various ways.
I suppose that was an ancestor to the kind of social media targeting that we
see today.
So in different ways, it seems as though there is often a technological dimension
over time in American elections.
>> All of these, I think, are about communicating with voters.
When we think about the introduction of new technologies,
I think there are actually usually two elections we need to look at.
One is when the technology is first introduced,
as sort of an experiment to see whether we can get it to work.
And I think maybe what Mike Moffa was talking about in 2008 with social
media was an instance in which politicians were trying to figure out how to use a new technology,
but then there's always a second election where they actually do figure out how to
most effectively leverage those kinds of technology.
I think we see in some more recent elections candidates who are able to
take these new technologies and actually use them to their full merit.
>> Well, that's right, Mike drew a contrast between 2008, when social media
was still in its infancy, and 2012, when the Obama campaign really exploited it in
a much more effective fashion than they had even four years before.
>> I have similar example for 1968.
I mean, of course, there is the reputation, and
I just echoed that, of TV being vitally important.
But then there are also studies that have been done in the wake of the Vietnam War
really testing in how much people are swayed by television
and actually, it seems that the press has more of an impact.
Because whatever people read seems to linger longer in their minds than
whatever they see on the nightly news.
So very often, the stories that just a few hours later the voters cannot recall,
are the stories that they have seen on TV.
So this, of course, raises questions about the impact of technology.
>> Another issue that emerged in the interviews was the sense in which
the interviewees were sure that 2008 was historic election at the time,
not only in retrospect.
As people who have studied the history,
if you think about the elections that you've lived through,
would you also identify 2008 as particularly significant in that way?
Are there other elections that you remember living through seeming important
at the time?
>> I remember 1984 distinctly, when I was at university, and
there was a sense then that that was a historic election.
And Reagan's landslide of winning 49 states
seemed very significant at the time.
But I would agree, I think 2008 really did feel like a turning point and
a kind of historically significant election.
I think it was, because for the obvious reason,
it was the election of the first African-American president.
But also, that Obama coalition, particularly the engagement
of young people and minority voters in the United States, seemed to augur a change.
It remains to be seen whether that's the case, but
that was certainly continued in 2012.
To some extent, the answer with all these questions, Robert, for us as historians,
is well, we don't know yet,
we'll have to wait for another 25 to 30 years.
But it seems to me as though it was a historically significant election.
>> I mean, and also perhaps viewed from the outside, so viewed not through
the eyes of an American, but through the eyes of a European, it really seemed at
the time to be vitally important that Obama promised a new foreign policy,
a departure in foreign policy that would not be
determined by the interventionism that we saw in the Bush years, and
that particularly a lot of observers in Europe were not happy about.
And sure enough, Obama did inaugurate a very new foreign policy,
one that was much more cautious about intervention.
Although we shouldn't forget that Obama vastly expanded the drone war,
particularly across Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But otherwise, of course, what we see is much more of a reluctance to
engage, particularly through the use of ground forces in combat abroad.
>> One thing I think all of the elections we've looked at in this program have had
in common is, I think people knew it was a historic election before Election Day.
I think people knew it was a pivotal inflection point.
I was trying to think of an election in which voters didn't know that going into
Election Day, and probably one that occurred to me was 2000,
when everyone knew it was going to be a close race.
But I'm not quite sure people realized the consequences of that election, obviously
in terms of how that election actually panned out on Election Day and
in the weeks and months that followed.
But then obviously 9/11 and all of the events that followed after that.
That election, I think, will go down as a pivotal turning point in a way that I
think voters on Election Day in November of 2000 probably weren't fully aware of.
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