In fact, US elections are notoriously difficult to predict with a fair degree of certainty. More recently, we’ve seen Michael Bloomberg being forced to drop out of the campaign, despite spending as much as $936.2 million, whilst Sanders and Biden, the last two Democratic contenders, had spent $162.3 million and $84.7 million, respectively. In the last (2016) election, this proved not to be the case, as the Democrats, at $1.191 billion, raised nearly twice as much in dollar terms than the Republicans (at $646.8 million) but still lost. This disproportional share for digital spending is indicative of what scholars have termed as the rise of “computational politics, ” defined by one study as “the application of digital targeted-marketing technologies to election campaigns.” With this increase arises the question of which candidate will come out victorious, and whether expenditure is a predictor for which will win. By one 2019 Forbes estimate, the current electoral cycle has seen “an increase of 59% from the 2016 election year when an estimated $6.3 billion was spent,” which represents nearly 16.5% of total local broadcast TV advertising revenue for this year, whilst digital media is forecast for 21% of political ads, whilst cable TV and radio both claim 14% and 5% respectively. The digital sphere has become the main arena in which the various campaigns reach out to potential voters. This is no coincidence as in each successive year previous records are shattered in terms of expenditures on advertising by the various campaigns. ![]() Out of these, the US electoral cycle is perhaps the most closely watched the world over. Whilst international observers are commonly deployed in fragile or new democracies in the developing world, elections in the developed world are viewed from outside, partially out of a sense of stake-holding in the outcome by the rest of the world (due to the preponderance of the West in the affairs of these countries) and partially out of curiosity, and therefore are consumed as a piece of popular culture.
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