How the media influences voters in America, and what will change if Trump wins elections

Professor David Barker, an expert on American politics with a focus on campaigning and elections  with interview for Turan, touched on the role of the media during the elections and made predictions about the results of the upcoming presidential elections.

How does American law regulate election coverage in the media, and how does it work in practice?

In response to this question, Barker said that the influence of the media on the outcome of the election is minimal.

“The media have minimal influence over the outcomes of elections because again our two party system is so strong and about 80% of all Americans are Democrats or Republicans and the vast majority of them just. Vote in accordance with their party identification, no matter what. And so like, no matter what might be going on, no matter who the candidates are, no matter what the campaigns do, no matter what the media might say.

The vast majority of American voters are just going vote in line with their  party identification. That’s the first thing and it’s also relevant that the two parties are basically equal in terms of their size, the proportion of the population and everything like that. And so they sort of cancel out.

And so you’ve got that maybe 15% or so of people left in the middle who could in theory be influenced by the candidates, the. But those people are also the least attentive. They are the people who are typically like completely tuned out from politics. And if you pay no attention to the media then you’re not going be influenced by it”, – he noted.

If Donald Trump wins the election, will the lives of Americans change for the better?

To this question, the professor said that if Biden is unable to raise his rating before the election, then Trump’s chances will be high. 

“Biden is unpopular, right? His approval rating hasn’t been over 40% in a long time and even though our economy is actually doing well, which typically is a big predictor of whether incumbents get reelected. There’s a big gap between how the economy is actually performing and the perception of how the economy is performing on the part of a lot of  Americans.  

In other words, unless Biden’s approval rating goes up by a few percentage points, then  Trump will have a very good chance of winning. I still wouldn’t make him the favorite because he also has an extremely low approval rating and all kinds of baggage, obviously, and whatever. So I wouldn’t call him the favorite by any stretch of the imagination.

But he could win for sure. And if he does? I think it’s hard to predict what will happen.  He has said that he wants to do right and there’s no reason to not take him at his word is to completely politicize our bureaucracy. So the executive branch, we have a huge bureaucracy. All the different departments, Department of Treasury, Department of State, you know, Department of Agriculture, Department of Health and Human Services. All that the big apparatus of the government, the administrative state employees like thousands and thousands of people. They are civil servants.  So the majority of them are not political appointments. The leaders of those like the Secretary of State and the Secretary of  Defense, the secretary of the Treasury, their political appointees.

Trump has basically said that he wants to fire them all and replace everybody in the entire executive branch with political appointees.

The civil service of the United States, the federal bureaucracy will just become an arm of him. And he wants to do the same thing with the military, right. And that includes the Justice Department, by the way.

And if that happens, that is obviously another significant step away from the democratic ideal.

And this polarization that I was talking about and the  intense hatred that Americans feel for each other is very dangerous. Large numbers of Americans are no longer willing to concede because they don’t believe in the process anymore. They think it’s illegitimate.

Large majority of Republicans in particular really do sincerely believe that the 2020 election was stolen from them. If you believe that, then you’re  not willing to go along with any of the outcomes. And again, that’s what we saw on January 6th. 2021, we could very easily see that again, and we could see it on a grander scale”, - David Barker said.