The prevailing media narrative for the last two U.S. presidential elections confirms what our high school math teachers always told us: It pays to be nice to nerds.
Technology, from social media to “big data,” has become the new key to campaign success. This narrative even holds true for political pundits—some people now refer to data geeks like FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver as the “true winners” of political elections since they started using technology and econometrics to predict outcomes as if they were the creepy water-hostage people in Minority Report.
In politics, the story now goes, the candidate who wields the most nerd weapons wins.
But now that every candidate has leapt on the digital bandwagon—in the same way that soda brands and insurance companies now crowd onto hip new social platforms like Peach and Ello faster than the average teenager—how true is the “most tech wins” hypothesis in 2016?