Elections

Candidates running for any position know how hard it is to appeal to a diverse populas. They must capture the attention of citizens through advertisement and speeches expressing their true opinions. The election cycle is the primary and general elections. In primary elections Democrats and Republicans from the POLITICAL PARTIES run against each other to see who moves on to run against the opposite party in the general election. To win an election, one must consider the people who are voting. Appealing to the people and having similiar ideologies as them would be beneficial in a race because people want to choose who they think will do the best with the country. This leads into VOTER TURNOUT, which is the number of people who actually took time to vote and voice their opinion. This is important because demographically speaking, some candidates will have more followers less likely to vote because of certain reasons. This could work either way, for example, Fox News did a segment where they had a reporter ask several African-Americans about Sarah Palin running with Obama. This was obviously a false fact but most of the individuals asked were oblivious to the fact that they were not running together, even though they were willing to support Obama because of race. MEDIA BIAS is in every news station, this is how public politics work. One station takes an either conservative or liberal view on a topic and skews it as much as possible without blatantly lying. In days of technology, the easiest way to get your supporter's attention is to advertise through television and computer ads. To fund these expenses candidates obtain either HARD or SOFT MONEY through donations or POLITICAL ACTION COMMITEES. Soft money is money donated to political parties in a way that leaves the contribution unregulated. this means the candidate can spend the money on basically whatever the like. Hard money is money given directly to the candidate and is regulated by the Federal Election Commission. This money is often obtained through loopholes in the law.

Low turnout, I believe, is a bad thing because there is lack of opinion and diversity. If not all of the citizens voted, how can there be a truly fair race? I think to keep the "melting pot" icon inscribed in American history, everyones opinion must be voiced.