February 2012
8 posts
North Carolina's Gubernatorial Race
North Carolina’s position as a swing state in the 2012 presidential race has thrown the state’s internal politics into the national spotlight. This reality makes recent developments in North Carolina’s gubernatorial primary more significant outside the borders of the Tar Heel State.
Background
The contest to become the next governor of North Carolina has become more interesting in the past weeks....
Campaign donations going mobile: Why it's here,...
The proliferation of new media in political campaigns is well known. It opens opportunities for unprecedented dialogue between candidate and constituency, supporter mobilization and offers lucrative fundraising opportunities. One emerging fundraising avenue is campaign donation from mobile devices. A recent Huffington Post article discusses the various clashes between mobile fundraising and...
N.C. "Double Bunking" altering local elections
This semester I began learning more about the N.C. State legislature by working with State Senator Ellie Kinnaird. North Carolina will hold primary elections for State Senate May 8, with the General Election scheduled for November 6. Kinnaird represents Chatham and Orange counties in the upcoming elections, but this is a fairly new development. The 23rd district included Orange and Pearson...
Gender Boundaries--
The NY Timesrecently ran separate articles on Michelle Obama and Callista Gingrich, detailing the former’s campaign efforts and the latter’s, well, hairstyle.
Taken together, the articles might suggest that the Times takes one more seriously than the other, and maybe it does. But, let’s not forget the mindless chatter about toned arms and Jcrew cardigans that surrounded Obama when she first...
What if electoral vote allocation were to change?
An article written in the News and Observer on February 10 discusses Mitt Romney’s television ad campaign strategy for the primaries, and mentions that the Romney campaign and Restore our Future, a group supporting the campaign, has spent significant amounts of money in some states and virtually none in others. The reasoning given for this was that the campaign spent more effort and advertising...
The different political systems in Europe and the...
The ideas of a democratic system of governing the countries first appeared in Greece. With the years, there have been changes but the main point, that of the citizens choosing who is going to lead them, has remained untouched. Even if we all recognize in democracy the essence of a free society, there are still some countries where people are not free to vote for whomever they want, maybe because...
The Great Debate
A recent article in The New Yorker, “The Debate Debate” by Hendrik Hertzberg, brought up the question of whether this election cycle has been host to too many debates between the Republican primary candidates. The number has already surpassed where it was at this point for the Democrats in 2008 — nineteen to a previous sixteen — which means a new “pre-nomination record” is a distinct...
January 2012
1 post
New Media and the 2012 Campaign
Cross posted at Culture Digitally.
If you want to understand new media and politics from a practitioner’s perspective, a great place to start would be this interview with Zac Moffatt, the Digital Director of Romney’s presidential campaign, in the Atlantic. It offers a wonderfully detailed look at the organizational and technical challenges that practitioners face in their uptake of new media in...
