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Every four years American citizens that are eligible to vote have the important task of deciding who will be the leader of America for the next four years. Some years it is a matter of will we bring in a new man to lead the country or will we let the sitting president have four more years in office and finish out what he started. During early America there were not many factors influencing who became the president. The process was rather simple, men decided they wanted to run for president and they ran. Over the years the process got more complicated with the invention of parties and eventually the two party system, and then men had to be nominated to run and so on and so forth. Even with the new party system there still was not many things influencing who was elected as the president of the United States, citizens listened to what the presidential nominees had to say and then the citizens would vote. This simple process of nominate (a candidate to run), listen (to where he stood on important issues), and vote (for the man you felt was best for the job) first started to get a little messy in the 1960 election which is widely known as the first media election. After the 1960 election running for the president would never be the same, this research paper is designed to answer how social media affects who American citizens pick to be the president of the United States of America.

To answer this question two historic media elections will be examined focusing on how the presidential candidate preformed during the presidential debates. The two elections that will be looked at are the presidential election of 1960 between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, focusing on the October 07, 1960, and October 21, 1960 debates over foreign polic...

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...ates. The social media chatter is just about jokes that were said are shocking moments that happened during the debates. It looks like social media is just a faster way to talk about the debates but not a way that citizens are using to pick the president if that was the case based on Obama’s social media the 2012 presidential election would not have been as close as it was. (There is a picture comparing their social media below.) It also seems that the debates are not as important as always thought considering that nothing shocking really happens in them to catch the viewers’ attention. What does matter is who is picked for the role of vice president, where does the presidential candidate stand with their own person religion etc. Hopefully this research will led to scholars fathering their research to include some of the things that has been discussed in this paper.