In 2007, the French socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal asked her supporters to do something new: send policy suggestions to her website. She promised if she won, all France would be president.
It worked in the primary. Royal muscled out the more senior male socialist candidates. But the idea proved clunky in the general election. The website had technical difficulties. It was difficult to generate coherence out of suggestions running from the far left to the centre. Royal’s campaign suffered from a lack of identity.
Royal’s conservative opponent, Nicolas Sarkozy used a smarter version of that idea. Instead of inviting policy ideas from all-comers, he put his own up for online vote. It gave him both a decisive and more responsive look. His campaign also made the first systemic use of GIF memes.
Later that same year, a young Barack Obama began his campaign for the Democratic nomination. He was challenging a well-funded Hillary Clinton backed by powerful unions. She expected a coronation. She was deposed.
Obama improved on the French innovations earlier that year, bringing together the Royal and Sarkozy campaign tactics. He tested his own campaign ideas on the public. Then his team provided a package for door-to-door volunteers.
These enthusiasts were not given a detailed hymn sheet. They were invited to flesh out their own vision for America based on the Obama campaign package. Partisan materials were augmented by the active imagination of volunteers.
Over 15 years later, we can see how technology has enabled those early attempts to flower into much more powerful campaign tools in the US election. They have been used by Donald Trump, Kamala Harris as well as by third-party candidates.
Chances are that, 15 years down the road, we’ll be looking back at this US election as a pivotal moment that pointed the way to new techniques of persuasion and snake oil salesmanship.
As I write this, I have no idea whether Trump or Harris has won. The polls have not even closed. It doesn’t matter. The 2007 French precedent shows that we need to pay attention to losing campaigns as well. They can be just as influential on the future if technology provides solutions to difficulties they encountered.
I would select two hi-tech personalisation strategies and techniques whose implications need to be studied: bots and influencers to shape conversation and augmented and virtual reality to shape “vision”. (I do not include the use of data for micro-targeting and prediction of voter behaviour because, to my knowledge, the 2024 campaigns have seen incremental improvements but not radical innovations.)
Bots and influencers have been used to shape the political conversation with candidates in ways we didn’t see in 2016 or in the COVID-shaped election of 2020.
Bots have been used to simulate dialogue with candidates. Unsurprisingly, they were extensively used by the Biden campaign when he was still in the race. Robots had the job of simulating engagement with a candidate whose cognitive difficulties made real engagement risky.
The potential for digital deceit is clearly there. But the technology is a gift to under-funded campaigns (especially of third parties) that lack an army of volunteers to answer voter questions.
Besides bots, there are influencers, who have acquired a new status in this election. Prominent ones were accredited at the party conventions, a privilege accorded to the legacy media.
Some influencers were engaged to carry out long-form conversations with candidates. The aim was to humanise the candidate with niche audiences. It’s no coincidence this campaign has seen the major candidates use more vulgar language and casual insults than in previous campaigns (although this is also the result of the Trumpification of politics).
Once more, it’s a development to be watched with ambivalence. It helps water down the power of the legacy media, the traditional gatekeepers of information.
But it tends to conduct the political conversation as though it were about personality, not issues. Its groups are defined by niche interests, not as a “public” or social class. That’s a conversation that favours populists, whether they are operating within political parties or outside them.
As a tendency, it will help select some kinds of politician and not others (the way radio and TV did in earlier times). And the new gatekeepers will not necessarily understand much about the real political challenges or be able to judge glib answers.
Second, we’ve seen various campaigns make use of augmented reality within their campaigns. There have been plenty of fake videos. Although not yet “deepfake”, that can’t be far off.
We’ve also seen volunteers create their own campaign videos in ingenious ways. The Harris campaign outspent Trump by a factor of three to one in digital advertising; but Trump’s supporters have made up with their own memes. We have yet to see if the viral videos and memes using Trump’s “They’re eating the cats” declaration – often produced by Gen Z voters – worked in his favour or not.
We have not had significant use of virtual reality yet. It would make Obama’s 2007 package for volunteers seem like it belonged to a different geological age. However, it might only be one electoral cycle away.
It can’t be long before technology designed to enhance the porn industry – the multi-sensory simulation of encounters of the oldest kind – is borrowed to enhance the second-oldest encounters, where paradise is promised and others are blamed for its loss.