Voters raised on social media reject soundbite culture.... Corbyn Win./ Sanders.
One poll found 57% of Corbyn supporters use social media as their main source of news, far above the national average. Corbyn’s team have increasingly rejected traditional outlets, refusing to speak to The Sun – the UK’s biggest-selling newspaper.
Traditional political attacks don’t work among this support base: Attempts by opponents to portray the MP as an extremist with a tendency to share platforms with unpalatable speakers fell flat – or even backfired spectacularly in the case of Tony Blair’s repeated interventions. Even a newspaper headline that accused Corbyn, somewhat out of context, as saying he thought Osama Bin Laden’s death was a “tragedy” didn’t stick. Instead, it just hardened his supporters’ resolve to face down what they perceive to be the unfair attacks of a worried elite. What actually went viral were lengthy Corbyn speeches or large paragraphs of texts setting out his political worldview.
Corbyn’s ad hoc campaign massively outperformed his opponents’ top-down media bombardment.
The establishment candidates fought more traditional campaigns that relied heavily on set-piece speeches and carefully controlled announcements. Corbyn took to the streets and let his supporters do the work on his campaign’s behalf. Volunteers flooded into phone banks and venues were booked and paid for by local groups, with the left-wing MP forced to address crowds on the street who had been turned away.
Corbyn engaged with young party activists on an enormous scale.
This led to a mass surge of new supporters and activists into the party. It’s telling that a generation of young left-wingers who came of age during the era of anti-austerity and Occupy protests found an outlet in the form of a white-haired, old-school socialist. Warnings from the party establishment that his policies were unworkable and a throwback to Labour’s wilderness years in the 1980s were dismissed as ancient history – for a start, many of the young Corbyn supporters weren’t even born in that decade.
The lesson of the Corbyn campaign is that you ignore the mass mobilisation of a party’s young party activists behind a candidate at your peril. “Who says young people aren’t interested in politics? Politics wasn’t interested in young people,” a delighted 66-year-old Corbyn told supporters at his victory rally, where some Corbyn activists could be overheard talking about flying out to the US to help out Sanders.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/what-hillary-clinton-can-learn-from-jeremy-corbyn#.el63wE1p2
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