The digital age has made an online presence the cornerstone of political campaigns that enable the candidates to reach more people, express the message, and mobilize supporters more efficiently and effectively than it was years before. This paper compares and contrasts the campaign websites of the sitting President Joe Biden and Congressman Dean Phillips within the context of the 2024 Presidential Race. Both candidates, who come from diverse backgrounds and have various political outlooks, use their websites as essential elements within their campaign strategies to inform, engage, and unite with voters.
Website Description
President Joe Biden’s Campaign Website (https://joebiden.com/)
President Joe Biden’s campaign website is a testament to his commitment to continue his agenda for the American people. It looks like any other professional website. It has a patriotic color scheme of red, white, and blue graphics representing the president and what he wants to bring to the country. The site offers easy navigation, taking the user intuitively to information on his policy positions, biography, and even ways his supporters can be part of his campaign. The content is chosen meticulously, indicating where Biden performed well while holding office and his hopes for the country’s future. He even makes calls to action regarding donations and signing up as a volunteer (Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website, 2023). The website is also neatly linked with social media and multimedia elements, which ensures a user gets a dynamic and interactive web experience.
Congressman Dean Phillips’s Campaign Website (https://www.dean24.com/)
The campaign website for Congressman Dean Phillips is fresh and modern, sounding strong with a message behind change and innovation in the political shift. The clean and attractive design has straightforward typography, featuring good ease of use and engaging users. It is briefly about the nature of Phillip’s website, centered on stories, with sections on his personal journey, core beliefs, and policy initiatives. The content on the site is primarily geared toward demonstrating Phillips as a relatable, fresh-thinking candidate to all types of voters. This is evident through the interactive features provided, like event calendars, volunteer opportunities, and multimedia, to help the visitor derive a sense of community and activeness in participation.
Comparative Analysis
The comparative strength between the respective campaign websites of President Joe Biden and Congressman Dean Phillips is marked by design, content, and strategies for engagement that are distinct enough. The website is instrumental for Biden in that it capitalizes on his incumbency through the presentation of an established brand, placing trust and experience at the center of its design. It has rich content full of policy achievements and calls to action, fostering community involvement. In contrast, Phillips’s site puts forward a new and original approach in which most attention is paid to its interactive features and future-looking vision that speaks to the young generation. It is put there to show off both the spirit of innovation and inclusiveness. In reference to the above-outlined dimensions of effective political communication and persuasion by Gass and Seiter (2022), backed by the principles of design, Biden’s site stands stronger in comparison to Trump’s, as it gives significant importance to user engagement and the message’s clarity on the employment of ethos, pathos, and logos. This is because the speech makes use of the persuasive elements extensively in creating credibility, connecting emotionally with its audience, and giving a logical presentation that would support his case for re-election, all in ways the incumbent really possesses in trying to appeal to the broad voters.
Persuasive Elements and Strength Evaluation
The presidential campaign website by President Joe Biden holds more vital elements of persuasion, mainly because of the way they use them effectively in principles, according to Gass & Seiter (2022). First off, the site manifests a strong ethos in building credibility around Biden, supported by his organized display of political victories and influential people he received endorsements from, which buoy the confidence of the viewer even further. Second, it manages to employ pathos effectively, hence touching emotionally on the voters by the use of personal stories of Americans who have benefited from Biden’s policies, thus creating empathy and a connection in the end. Last but definitely not least, the website applies logos by providing detailed policy proposals and factual information that gives logical argumentation to Biden’s capacity to lead in moving the country forward. All these together serve as a combination that creates a narrative that is not only informative but also emotionally engaging and rhetorically convincing for the visitors to the site, and hence serves as a potent tool in the Biden digital campaign strategy.
Recommendations for Improvement
The level of persuasive impact of the President Joe Biden campaign website can be increased through the addition of more interactive elements such as polls or quizzes around the policy preferences that one will wish to use in his governance, which is in tune with the principle of engagement through interactivity (Gass & Seiter, 2022). It will also send a more explicit message by simplifying the navigational structure in order to reflect key policy positions up front and center, as guided by clarity and conciseness in effective communication. On the campaign website, Dean Phillips can use video content to show the real-life impacts of policies that are suggested. It appeals emotionally through the story, the aim of which is to make viewers relate to it and understand its purpose. For example, Gass and Seiter (2022) noted that the campaign would benefit from using video in relaying its messages as it makes them more persuasive and memorable. Also, the inclusion of a section where the volunteers’ stories will be placed will boost ethos in the actuality of commitment and support coming from the community itself, thereby elevating even more credibility with future voters.
Conclusion
Conclusively, the campaign websites of President Joe Biden and Congressman Dean Phillips are seen to have unique strengths in their online presence through variations in user engagement, design, and messaging strategy. This well-established brand on his website is also the basis for the power of incumbency, a metaphor for trust, experience, and policy achievements. All these form potent elements for a broad vote base. Phillips’ website is an interactive and forward-looking vision from an innovative, fresh kind of approach, appealing to a younger demographic. While both websites, in general, used similar design, content, and engagement strategies to appeal to the voters, Biden’s website came off as more persuasive because of the comprehensive and well-strategized use of ethos, pathos, and logos. Both websites could be more robust in terms of persuasion if there were more interactive features as well as storytelling content to interest the potential voters and to feel more natural. This clearly illustrates how digital campaigning is developing.
Reference
Dean Phillips for President: Official Campaign Website. (2023). Dean Phillips Para Presidente: Official Campaign Website. https://www.dean24.com/
Gass, R. H., & Seiter, J. S. (2022). Persuasion. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003081388
Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website. (2023, December 21). Joe Biden for President: Official Campaign Website. https://joebiden.com/
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