onald Trump has clinched the US presidency against all odds. He proved not just his opponents, but also the media and pollsters wrong. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was projected to be a clear winner, but that wasn’t to be. In 2024, the race with Kamala Harris was predicted to be too close to call. In the end, Trump sailed through comfortably.

So, what has worked in his favour that analysts couldn’t quite put a finger on?

When Donald Trump announced his first candidacy for the 2016 campaign, he was painted in the mainstream media as a businessman with a flamboyant past and a showman attitude who couldn’t be a serious political player. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, fit the parameters of a traditional politician and was also much more likeable for the media fraternity. She wasn’t hostile towards them and was politically correct in her interactions. On the other hand, Trump was being his usual weird self, taking on legacy media and engaging with his supporters directly through social media. X (formerly Twitter) was his medium of choice. Apparently, his unique appeal resonated with voters a lot more than Clinton’s traditionality.

Following his bittersweet relationship with the media in the White House, Trump disputed the election results in 2020. He chose to brand the mainstream media as his enemy and engaged directly with his supporters. His outbursts on legitimacy of election results intensified to the extent that Twitter had to ban his account. The player was thus kicked out of his favourite playground. He launched his own social media platform, Truth Social, but it wasn’t as effective. That changed when Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, renamed it as X, and restored Trump’s account under the premise of promoting free speech. Soon after, Trump formally announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race.

Throughout the election cycle, it was obvious that neither Trump nor the mainstream media were forgetting their bitter relationship. The only major media player going all out in Trump’s favour was Fox News. Most of the cards on the legacy media deck were stacked against him. There was less discussion on his agenda points during primetime news shows and more on his personality attributes. The Democratic Party characterised Trump as a threat to democratic norms and the mainstream media, for the most part, appeared to amplify this concern.

There was one problem though, which the mainstream media and Trump’s political opponents didn’t account for. The target audience weren’t relying on mainstream media and traditional sources of news. More than 41 million voters had been added to the US electorate since the 2020 elections. Since 2016, when Trump first became candidate, voter demographic had increasingly become younger. In 2024, their number was expected to rise significantly from the approximately 50 percent of total potential voters in 2020.

Trump went all in. He pushed back against the mainstream media at his rallies and through social media. Elon Musk was a willing ally. He used X as a launchpad for furthering Trump agenda. Algorithms backed his efforts. Conservative leaning podcasters were topping the charts and the Republican campaign tapped into that. Trump skipped the first GOP primary debate and instead chose to sit down with Tucker Carlson for a podcast that generated over 150 million views. This number was close to the total number of registered voters (161.3 million) in the 2024 elections.

When Donald Trump appeared on the hugely popular conservative podcaster Joe Rogan’s show, a few days before the polling day, it generated tens of millions of views on multiple platforms within the first 48 hours. The viewership numbers easily surpassed the primetime numbers he could hope to generate on any mainstream media network. The three-hour long podcast showed an unedited side of Donald Trump, and his supporters loved it. To an extent, the undecided voters also got to know a side of his that was absent in the mainstream media soundbites. His VP pick, JD Vance, appeared on the Joe Rogan show separately. Kamala Harris declined the invite.

The Democratic Party and Kamala Harris also used social media, but it wasn’t as effective for them as it was for the Trump campaign. The major difference being that Trump’s social media onslaught had his signature style stamped all over it whereas there wasn’t much difference between Kamala’s mainstream and social media persona. The Democratic campaign was run by paid employees and volunteers instead of a loyal base that was emotionally invested in the agenda as in Trump’s case. Potential voters, in every likelihood, noticed the difference in approach.

In the age of social media, algorithms of many platforms feed confirmation bias and selective perception. Research supports the view that most people use mental shortcuts to accept or reject a message rather than critically thinking through the contents. It is much easier to use social media for propaganda purposes where gatekeeping mechanisms are weak, fake news is big business and a receptive audience is readily available. Liking a personality means that there is no need to check credibility or to process the quality of arguments. Even when these people come across counter-attitudinal information, most of the times, this results in a boomerang effect. They start looking for information that supports their original position rather than changing it.

Political communication research shows that most of the communication in such campaigns is meant to reinforce existing attitudes because those who have already taken an extreme position in the opposite camp are unlikely to be swayed. The second target of such messaging are the undecided voters who could potentially adjust their attitude towards a candidate or an issue. When people watch mainstream media content, their threat guard is high because they think they are being manipulated. These guards are very low when they use social media platforms because that is considered personal space. The interactive nature and feedback loop connects them to their chosen party or candidate that mainstream platforms can only dream of. Trump pounced on the opportunity and maximised it. The Democratic campaign fell short since their primary reliance was on traditional means of mass communication.

It merits attention here that the role of media, whether mainstream or social media, is only supplementary. It is only one part of the jigsaw puzzle. If the message is weak, the channel being used to convey it to the audience won’t be able to overcome the deficiencies. In this campaign, economy was the big issue and the messaging from their campaign failed to offer an effective counter strategy. When Kamala Harris sat down with NBC a week or so before elections, she was asked how her policies will be different from Joe Biden’s. She hesitated for a moment before saying “there is not a thing that comes to mind.”

This generated a plethora of memes on the social media and further alienated the younger voters she was desperately trying to attract. It wasn’t the first time this had happened. It elevated voters’ concerns that she was a weak candidate and would just be an extension of Biden’s term, which they didn’t want any more of. On the other hand, Trump was successful in projecting himself as a mercurial outsider who could achieve the unthinkable. His images on social media after the assassination attempt added to that image.

The rest, as they say, is history. The voters went to polls on November 5 and chose against Kamala Harris. It was a rejection of the four years she had spent as part of the Biden administration. It was also a failure of her message and the channels she was using to convey that message. This is a time of disruption not just in the US politics and media landscape but also globally. The traditional lens through which the media fraternity, pollsters and political parties look at these campaigns and potential voters isn’t effective any longer. The sooner they realise this, the better.

The writer teaches journalism at Lamar University in Texas. He tweets at @awaissaleem77