In the Star Wars franchise, the Death Star is a superweapon in which the antagonists have invested colossal human and physical resources for its creation. Equipped with the power to destroy a planet in a single attack, it is also a gigantic fortress in space. In the 2020 US presidential election, President Donald Trump of the Republican Party also had a “Death Star” that supplied him with immense firepower. It was his digital operations.

Four years ago, when Trump was facing Hilary Clinton, his opponent from the Democratic Party, his campaign was successful in using social media and images to package a political outsider as the hope of making America great again. The success of his digital operations helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election and become the occupant of the White House. Four years later, Trump’s reelection team formulated another digital operations strategy. With the advantage of a sitting president, the digital operations covered nearly all imaginable platforms.

All kinds of content in the digital operations were meticulously planned and executed, so much so that they were like a high-octane program produced by a professional visual team. In early May, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager, was full of confidence when he said on Twitter that the reelection team had created a Death Star for the incumbent president.

However, in the Star Wars franchise, the Death Star, despite its astounding power, is ultimately destroyed by the Resistance whose firepower was no match for it. As one side in the 2020 presidential election called itself a Death Star, it was difficult for the other side not to be automatically labeled the Resistance.

Back in early May, Joe Biden’s digital operations team was far behind Trump’s in terms of talent and spending. Even in terms of exposure in the media, it was crushed by Trump’s team. However, it was then when Biden, an old school politician, took advice from his advisers and began expanding his campaign’s digital operations vigorously.

From May to mid-September, Biden’s digital operations team was expanded from twenty-odd people to more than 200. The pandemic made it difficult for Biden to travel around. His volunteers and parts of his campaign machinery, scattered around the nation, found it hard to organize local meetings and canvass for votes from door to door. But it was also due to the pandemic that most American people stayed at home and adopted a habit of no response when someone knocked on the door or rang the doorbell. This made the Biden team even more concentrated on developing its network operations for mobilizing people and organizing donations.

Biden does not have the swagger of Trump, who was a TV personality, or his years of experience in hosting a reality TV show. Nor is he a favorite among netizens. So, in his digital campaign, he emphasized empathy, his personal character and leadership style different from that of Trump.

Not only did the COVID-19 pandemic in the first half of this year render most Americans homebound, but the new way of life and work also compelled the government, schools, corporations and individuals to invest heavily in software and hardware for videoconferencing. Take, for example, public high schools. Before March, an overwhelming majority of high schools in the US were unable to support complete online teaching. Even if the teachers were willing to do so, students from less privileged backgrounds did not have the essential hardware or access to the internet to connect to their schools from their homes. To ensure that students' learning was not disrupted, local governments launched a massive drive to acquire computers and network cards and borrowed them to students for free.

In October, almost all high school teachers and students in the US were able to engage in learning activities on the internet. To put it simply, over the past half-year or so, the videoconferencing equipment and resources of American society have been upgraded as a whole. True, such an upgrade benefited both the Democratic and Republican parties. However, for Biden, who did not occupy an official position and did not enjoy the advantages of an incumbent president, the changes in the bigger picture gave his team an opportunity to compete with Trump’s formidable digital operations team.

In the following months, the gap between the two sides in digital operations was narrowing. In terms of the ability to raise funds, by late August Biden’s team had almost drawn level with Trump’s. In September, it even surpassed the Trump campaign. On Oct. 1, Parscale, the architect of the Death Star, resigned as Trump’s campaign manager. Judging from the votes garnered by the two sides, the Resistance seems to have beaten the Death Star again.

Despite some lingering controversies over the results of the election on Nov. 3, which have to be settled through the legal procedure, one thing is certain: the election had a vastly increased turnout. At the moment, there are estimates that the voter turnout might have exceeded 65%, the highest in a century. The two sides' shares of the vote are also close. If we merely look at voter mobilization, the digital operations of the two camps have worked very well for them respectively despite the differences in focus.

That was especially the case for Biden’s digital operations team in particular, which got off to a late start and had fewer resources. This year’s pandemic has rapidly changed American society’s way of work and life, and American society has invested massively to adapt to online work and teaching. These are the factors that forced Biden’s team to campaign in a way that accommodated voters' way and pace of life when they were combatting the pandemic. Had it not been for the pandemic, Biden’s team might not have been able to triumph over Trump’s Death Star.

(Hung-bin Ding, Associate Professor, Loyola University, Maryland, USA.)

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