2016 Election Essay

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THE ORDINARY IN THE EXTRAORDINARY: 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Many political commentators and pundits have described 2016 US Presidential elections as bizarre and unique (Rothenberg 2016). But when factors pertaining to the current election are observed and compared to that of the past elections, the 2016 election does not appear different from past elections. While the candidate with less popular vote winning the majority of the electoral votes makes this election little unusual, common factors like partisanship, the power held by the swing states, dynamics and tactics of the candidates’ election campaigns and the anger towards the establishment still played the most powerful role in determining the fate of the election.
The Extraordinary …show more content…

Donald Trump has justified his candidacy with the talk of his business acumen and wealth, and this has often been controversial. But candidates running on the power of their wealth is not a new phenomenon. One example of a past candidate running for the Presidential office with their wealth as the foundation of their election campaign was Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s election. Theodore White (1962, 66) describes Rockefeller as being “Born into what is America's closest counterpart to a royal family, raised within the walls of the greatest private fortune known to man”. So, a Trump candidacy is not as unconventional as it is often …show more content…

He has referred to Mexicans as “rapists” and called for the blanket ban of Muslim immigration to the United states. Media and political commentators have called Trump’s politics the politics of fear (Stokols 2016). Despite all of this, this is not a new strategy that Trump’s election campaign team invented. For instance, Lynden B. Johnson ran advertisements (“Daisy” 1964) that leveraged the threat of a nuclear war in order to win the 1964 election against Barry Goldwater. Richard Hofstadter in his 1964 article (The Paranoid Style in American Politics) lists the Anti-Masonic movement, the nativist movement, the Anti-Catholic movement and so on as the examples what he calls “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Trump’s platform is just another example of this style of

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