Academic studies of political advertising suggest it reinforces existing biases, but is ineffective at changing voters' minds
Steve Bannon; then Jared Kushner; now it is Brad Parscale. Ever since Donald Trump began persuading millions of Americans to support him while behaving as no successful politician ever had, mainstream commentators have looked for the evil genius pulling his strings. Messrs Bannon and Kushner were both auditioned for the part, but rejected, after achieving little in office besides notoriety. Now, as Mr Trump’s re-election campaign starts going full tilt, Mr Parscale is being considered.
Like Mr Trump—who launched Mr Parscale by paying him $1,500 to design his first campaign website—he is a political gadfly, rabble-rouser and dissembler. A sometime libertarian, who has rarely voted, he is now a staple warm-up act at Trump rallies: praising the president and attacking his enemies. A self-described “farm boy from Kansas”, he in fact grew up in suburbia, the son of a wannabe Democratic politician.
The liberal commentariat fears Mr Parscale is about to repeat his electoral feat. Mr Trump’s campaign is now awash with cash and even more ambitiously digitised than it was in 2016. It also stands to benefit disproportionately from his incumbency, because digital campaigning is based on data-gathering, which he has been doing non-stop.
That sort of money buys impunity as well as advertising. Though Facebook has tried to impose a code of conduct on political advertisers—for example, it vowed to block content ruled untrue by a third-party fact-checker—the Trump campaign has often violated its terms. And in response the platform has backed down; for example, although the campaign recently pushed a lie linking Joe Biden to corruption in Ukraine, Facebook decided to make political campaigns exempt from its fact-checking rule.
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