Paid, earned, and social media are all crucial elements of modern electioneering, yet there is a scarcity of supplementary texts for campaigns and election courses that cover all types of media. Equally, media and politics courses cover election-related topics, yet there are few books that cover these subjects comprehensively. This brief and accessible book bridges the gap by discussing media in the context of U.S elections. David A. Jones divides the book into two parts, with the first analyzing the wide array of media outlets citizens use to inform themselves during elections. Jones covers traditional, mainstream news media and opinion/entertainment-based media, as well as new media outlets such as talk shows, blogs, and late-night comedy programs. The second half of the book assesses how campaigns and candidates have adapted to the changing media environment. These chapters focus on earned media strategies, paid media strategies, and social media strategies. Written in a concise and accessible style while including recent scholarly research, the book will appeal to students with its combination of academic rigor and readability. U.S. Media and Elections in Flux will be a useful supplementary textbook for courses on campaigns and elections, media and politics, and American introductory politics.

A state-of-the-art account of what we know and do not know about the effects of digital technology on democracy.

Provides crucial context for important recent developments

The Impact of YouTube on U.S. Politics analyzes the broad and evolving political impact of YouTube, specifically addressing political campaigning, communication, and engagement. The text provides a synthesized illustration of the ways in which YouTube has become a requisite tool in U.S. politics.

Behind the deeply contentious 2020 election stands a real story of a broken election process. Election fraud that alters election outcomes and dilutes legitimate votes occurs all too often, as is the bungling of election bureaucrats. Our election process is full of vulnerabilities that can be — and are — taken advantage of, raising questions about, and damaging public confidence in, the legitimacy of the outcome of elections. This book explores the reality of the fraud and bureaucratic errors and mistakes that should concern all Americans and offers recommendations and solutions to fix those problems.

Stephen K. Medvic’s Campaigns and Elections is a comprehensive yet compact core text that addresses two distinct but related aspects of American electoral democracy: the processes that constitute campaigns and elections, and the players who are involved. In addition to balanced coverage of process and actors, it gives equal billing to both campaigns and elections and covers contests for legislative and executive positions at the national, state, and local levels, including issue-oriented campaigns of note. The book opens by providing students with the conceptual distinctions between what happens in an election and the campaigning that precedes it. Significant attention is devoted to setting up the context for these campaigns and elections by covering the rules of the game in the American electoral system as well as aspects of election administration and the funding of elections. Then the book systematically covers the actors at every level—candidates and their organizations, parties, interest groups, the media, and voters—and the macro-level aspects of campaigns such as campaign strategy and determinants of election outcomes. The book concludes with a big-picture assessment of campaign ethics and implications of the "permanent campaign." New to the Fourth Edition: • Fully updated through the 2020 elections, looking ahead to the 2022 midterms • Covers the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the 2020 election as well as the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol • Adds new sections in Chapter 3 on election integrity and the assessment of election administration • Reviews recent Supreme Court cases on gerrymandering and faithless electors • Expands coverage of social media as a source of news, of the increasingly partisan nature of the media, and of the role of media fact-checking in campaigns and elections • Reorganizes the chapters on the various actors so that the chapter on candidates leads directly to the chapter on campaigns • Fully updates the resources listed at the end of each chapter

The 2016 U.S. presidential election revealed a nation deeply divided and in flux. This volume provides urgently needed insights into American politics and culture during this period of uncertainty. The contributions answer the election’s key mysteries, such as how contemporary Christian evangelicals identified in the unrepentant candidate Trump a hero to their cause, and how working class and economically struggling Americans saw in the rich and ostentatious candidate a champion of their plight. The chapters explain how irrationality is creeping into political participation, and demonstrate how media developments enabled a phenomenon like “fake news” to influence the election. At this polarized and contentious moment, this volume satisfies the urgent need for works that carefully analyze the forces and tensions tearing at the American social fabric. Simultaneously intellectual and accessible, this volume is designed to illuminate the 2016 U.S. presidential election and its aftermath for academics and students of politics alike.