How ‘The Walking Dead’ And ‘NCIS’ Helped Donald Trump Win The Election
Turns out 'The Walking Dead' fans really don't like immigration.
One of the worst things about election campaigns is relentless bombardment of terrible, terrible political advertisements that interfere with the art of TV watching.
There’s nothing worse than settling in to watch the season finale of The Wrong Girl (Omg what will Jess do next??) only to have a cliffhanger moment interrupted by a confused looking old man yelling about innovation (Hi Malcolm).
The situation is even worse in the US where elections seem to go on forever, and every second-rate candidate for Congress is running non-stop advertisements.
In total the Clinton and Trump campaigns, as well as third-party groups supporting them, spent nearly half a billion dollars on television advertising in the leadup to this year’s election.
These days political campaigning is driven by enormous amounts of voter data and research, to help make sure the money is spent in the right areas and targeted to the right voters. The same goes for TV advertising. If you’re Donald Trump you don’t want to spend all money running ads on Master of None, for example.
So what TV shows was Trump targeting? According to Jared Kushner, Trump’s chief data expert (who also happens to be his son-in-law), it depended on the issues.
The Trump campaign spent about half as much on TV advertising compared to their opponents so they needed to focus their money on the issues that mattered the most to potential voters.
In an interview with Forbes, Kushner laid out the campaign’s TV strategy: voters who were anti-Obamacare were hit up with ads during NCIS while voters concerned with immigration tended to watch… The Walking Dead.
It’s kind of terrifying that voters angsty about immigration are really into a show set in a brutal, post-apocalyptic wasteland. Is that what they think is responsible for the zombie invasion? Immigrants?
You might have expected potential Trump voters to be more attracted to Game of Thrones, given one of the show’s biggest plots revolves around a giant wall constructed to keep out another race.
Meanwhile, the word is One Nation will exclusively advertise on Home and Away, in support of the show’s vision of an incredibly white and boring Australia.