The Electoral College Argument (ANSWERED)

QUESTION

For the initial post, respond to one of the following options, and label the beginning of your post indicating either Option 1 or Option 2:

Option 1: List the ways in which contemporary presidential campaigns have used social media as a campaign tool. Do you consider social media as a successful tool? Explain your answer. Do you see social media as an unsuccessful tool? Explain your answer and provide examples.
Option 2: There are numerous discussions involving the Electoral College. There are some people that want to abolish the electoral college while others want to keep it. What do you think? Keep the electoral college or abolish it? Explain the reasons for your choice.

Be sure to make connections between your ideas and conclusions and the research, concepts, terms, and theory we are discussing this week.

ANSWER

Option 1 – Use of Social Media for Presidential Campaign

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have shaped the way political campaigns, including presidential campaigns, are conducted. Such technologies provide new and innovative approaches that politicians use to advocate for themselves or attack opponents. Politicians can now reach the public directly and craft messages depending on the target audience. The public now considers social media an important source of information. Studies show that 79% of USA citizens use Facebook and 76% access it daily. Twitter’s penetration is at 24% but still serves as an important source of information. The platforms enable politicians, the public, and political analysts to interact in a manner that influences voting choices.

Information shared on social media often reaches and is amplified by the mainstream media, which signifies its potential as a campaign tool. The platforms provide campaigners with different affordances for passing messages to the public. For instance, Twitter is a microblog that allows campaigners to disseminate information and form unilateral relationships while Facebook allows them to interact with their audiences and form unilateral relationships. Social media provides politicians, including presidential candidates, with a strategic advantage as it enables them to interact with supporters in an environment with controlled interactivity.

Social media is, as such, a successful tool for presidential campaigns. It enables campaigners to reach a large number of people and communicate with them directly. Campaigners can now interact, recruit and inform citizens in a new and more effective way. The use of social media for campaigns is comparable to traditional media. Through social media, politicians can describe their characteristics to lead, highlight their past accomplishments, advocate for issues and policies, and attack their opponent’s policies, records, or character (Rossini, 2017). The success of social media as a campaign tool explains why most, if not all, presidential candidates use it for campaigning.

Option 2 – Abolishing or Keeping the Electoral College

The electoral college raises many concerns that make its abolition necessary. The United States has experienced situations where presidential candidates become president without winning the popular vote. For instance, Donald Trump won the 2016 electoral college by 74 votes while he lost the popular vote by almost three million. The situation created an uproar about the necessity of the Electoral College. The Electoral College system also suffers from the faithless elector problem where the electors vote against the popular vote of the states that they represent. The highest number of electors who defected from the popular votes was witnessed in 2016 with 7 electors voting against the will of most people in their states.

Electoral legitimacy is undermined by having a president who loses the popular vote. Corrupt decisions through inner dealings become commonplace when an election is left to state delegations where each elector has one vote in the House of Representatives. The public questions the integrity of the voting process when the Electoral Commission makes decisions on irregularities in contested states. The Electoral College may also over-represent votes of the states with fewer populations since each state has two votes regardless of its population size.

The Electoral College system has been opposed by a majority of Americans for many years. For instance, 58 percent of Americans favored the abolition of the system in 1967 and 75 percent did so in 1981. However, there have been bipartisan views in recent years where most Democrats oppose the Electoral College system while most Republicans support it (West, 2019). Still, given the setbacks of the system, the Electoral College system should be abolished to increase electoral credibility.

References

Rossini, P. G., Hemsley, J., Tanupabrungsun, S., Zhang, F., Robinson, J., & Stromer-Galley, J. (2017). Social media, U.S. presidential campaigns, and public opinion polls. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society – #SMSociety17. https://doi.org/10.1145/3097286.3097342

West, D. M. (2020, March 13). It’s time to abolish the Electoral College. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/bigideas/its-time-to-abolish-the-electoral-college/