Beto O’Rourke likes to jump up on diner counters to be better seen and heard. Cory Booker takes selfies with pretty much everybody. Elizabeth Warren half-runs out when introduced to a group, as if she can’t wait to speak to them. Amy Klobuchar has a warm, easy laugh that puts people at ease.

These are the kinds of little details that people pick up on when they get to see candidates in small, personal, interactive settings.

It’s the kind of “retail politics” boasted of by proponents of the Presidential selection roles of the early Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary. In those small but intensely important states, the theory goes, ordinary citizens can size up a potential President in a neighbor’s living room, or at the local diner, or walking through a farmer’s market.

But you don’t need to get anywhere near those early-voting states to make the above observations. You just need a phone.

And that’s not by accident. The Presidential candidates all want to bring the perceived authenticity of small-audience, face-to-face campaigning to a vast, widespread audience. They’re getting it by doing little events, meant to be shared on anyone’s devices.

Welcome to the 2020 campaign, driven by oxymoronic, but ubiquitous, mass-media retail politics.

Barnstorming For The Camera

Kirsten Gillibrand has been barnstorming Iowa and New Hampshire this week with a seemingly endless series of “meet and greet” events. O’Rourke just visited all 10 New Hampshire counties in 48 hours, at small venues with an informal, almost pop-up atmosphere. Warren has held actual pop-up meet-and-greet events, with short-notice invites sent to everyone in the area who has given even one dollar to the campaign.

Nearly all of the Democratic candidates are grinding through similar time-consuming schedules, ostensibly for the sake of very few potential voters.

But of course, they are hoping for far more than the few dozen, or even couple of hundred, in attendance.
Warren posts video of those pop-up appearances for her three million Facebook followers. Campaign events are routinely shown across social media platforms; Facebook now allows users to start a “watch party,” which invites friends to join in watching a Facebook Live stream.

Mass-media retail politics gives candidates an opportunity to appear accessible and genuine to more than a tiny percentage of voters—in effect, scaling up the small-scale experience. It’s a great way for hundreds of thousands, even millions, to size up candidates as they interact with real people.

Or, to the cynical, it’s campaigns having it both ways: doing retail politics only to blast it nationally and get credit for it.

Warren, for example, has been posting videos of herself calling to thank random small-dollar donors to the campaign. Is that genuine commitment to connect with individual supporters, or using individual supporters as props for the millions who have viewed those calls?

So far, there seems to be an appetite among Democrats for this vicarious retail politics experience—or at least, the folks running the Presidential campaigns seem to think so.

And it’s not just the candidates themselves. News media, both national and local, constantly livestream from the trail.

When Beto O’Rourke’s spoke Monday afternoon at a Cleveland bar, local reporter Hanna Drown pointed her camera and streamed live on Facebook for Cleveland.com; more than 7,000 watched as O’Rourke gave his typical energetic performance. Many more watched on the O’Rourke campaign’s own stream, but that local exposure is gold to campaigns.

Cable news stations have embraced the idea, and increasingly emulate retail politics by putting Presidential candidates in the middle of a live audience, where they take questions from real voters. This “town hall” format—and the anachronistic term itself—bestows some sense of longed-for authenticity, as surely as adding “pe” to spell “shoppe.”

CNN has already aired nine Presidential town halls this year, including most recently Warren and John Hickenlooper. Cory Booker’s, scheduled for this coming Wednesday, will already equal the number the network held for the entire 2016 cycle, when at least a dozen candidates, of both parties, did not receive invitations. The first of this cycle, with Kamala Harris, drew a solid two million viewers.

MSNBC has entered the game now too, with a Gillibrand town hall this past Monday. Everybody wants in on bringing these small, intimate encounters to the biggest possible audience.

Ye Olde Campaign Trail

The beloved image of early-state Presidential campaigning was portrayed on West Wing back in 2005, as Josh Lyman makes Congressman Matt Santos greet people at a town dump on a cold winter morning. “New Hampshire is about retail politics,” Lyman tells the candidate. “People here won’t vote for you until you’ve had coffee in their house five times.”

In Iowa, which holds the first Presidential caucus, great store is placed in performing “the full Grassley”—visiting every one of the state’s 99 counties, as Republican Senator Chuck Grassley did annually.

Truth is, that type of campaigning has greatly diminished in recent cycles, swamped by mass media manipulation and big-venue rallies. Hillary Clinton grudgingly engaged in some retail politics during her 2015-2016 Democratic nomination campaign—which was more than Bernie Sanders was willing to do. In 2008, both Clinton and Barack Obama were mega-stars performing for packed gym audiences from the moment they announced, while Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson plugged away at retail politics, and got nowhere for it.

Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, and Mike Huckabee all completed the full Grassley in 2016; the nomination ultimately went to Donald Trump, who loathes shaking hands and campaigned almost exclusively by speechifying to rally-sized audiences.

The final symbolic nail in the retail politics coffin seemed to come when Adrie Groeneweg, owner of Iowa’s famed Pizza Ranch chain, endorsed Trump in 2016 over the many Republican candidates who had dutifully upheld tradition by campaigning at his restaurants.

Retail politics, frankly, doesn’t make a whole lot of logical sense when running a Presidential-scale campaign. Reaching a couple dozen ordinary people is not nearly as productive a use of time as calling potential thousand-dollar donors, visiting with key interest group leaders, or giving an interview to a big media outlet.
Still, voters seemed to expect it. And, until recently, it was just about the only way to get a candidate in front of voters, and to get media coverage.

Today, however, the way to get the candidate in front of voters is to get them sharing a video on social media. You don’t want to post videos of the candidate making those big donor calls, or sucking up to influential interest group leaders.

No, to get big, wide traction across the Internet, you need to show small, interactive retail politics. Today, Josh Lyman would bring Santos to the town dump so that he could hold up his phone and livestream the Congressman shaking hands and helping with the recyclables. It just might go viral.