Expect President Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden to use Tuesday’s debate to excite their bases of supporters, rather than try to woo a shrinking pool of independent voters, according to a Northeastern University professor who has been tracking presidential candidates’ increasing focus on partisanship.
The move away from showering attention on political independents has a lot to do with technology that allows campaigns to micro-target supporters down to where they live, said Costas Panagopoulos, chair of Northeastern’s Department of Political Science.
Panagopoulos’s new book, “Bases Loaded: How US Presidential Campaigns Are Changing and Why It Matters,” examines election data since the 1950s and connects it to insights gained from behavioral social science.
