St. Thomas University hosted a book launch event on Nov. 25 at Brian Mulroney Hall for Political Marketing in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, edited by a communications professor, Jamie Gillies.
The book focuses on the political marketing aspects in the campaigns of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the innovation tactics around the social media campaign and the media engagement of both candidates.
“When you’ve got a brand like Donald Trump and ‘Make America Great Again’, it is extremely difficult to run against something like that,” he said.
Gillies said many faculty members and academics wrote different chapters. Out of the nine chapters, three are written by Gillies and the rest are a collaborative effort with academics.
“We get this group of academics from mostly the United States but also internationally from New Zealand and the U.K.,” he said. “We get some different ideas and different approaches and then we put together the collection based on what people want to write about.”
Gillies is chair of the department of journalism and communications, but he is a political scientist by trade. It all started with the 2016 United States election, where he looked at political communications and marketing that coincided with the election of former president Trump — somebody from the private sector who had never been in politics before.
“This is the follow-up looking at the 2020 election, where the Democrats and Joe Biden were able to win using a sort of an array of different strategies in dealing with how to run against Donald Trump,” said Gillies.
The book should be accessible not only to academics but students and practitioners who are working in Canadian or American elections.
Gillies said he already had a lot of interest in the 2020 U.S. elections, as he taught a class in September 2020 looking at its communication strategies.
“This was one of the easiest books I’ve had the opportunity to write and put together largely because I was talking about it and discussing it and thinking about ideas, both while I’m teaching and while I’m doing research,” he said.
