ABSTRACT
The arrival of mass-based democracy in the 1830s, with the concomitant formal organization of political parties, created the first popular attempts to market candidates and ideas to the general population. Figuring out how to make politics and political campaigns appealing to common voters led to torch-light parades, events featuring candidate speeches and hard cider, and sloganeering such as “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too!” In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as political campaigns became more sophisticated, political marketing has taken on greater significance. Network marketing and micro-targeting are the tools du jour and they have the potential of changing the face of party politics.
