Bernie and His Bros - The Bernie Campaign on Reddit

Bernie and His Bros - The Bernie Campaign on Reddit
By Morgan Downing


Link to the Reddit page

For this blog post, I analyzed the Bernie Sanders’ official campaign Reddit page, r/SandersforPresident. Bernie’s campaign uses other social media platforms that have millions of followers respectively, which currently places him as one of the most popular democrats online (Kwong). I thought it would be interesting to look at a platform that is not usually considered a mobilizing tool. 

Besides the main page tab, there are three other tabs that navigate users to subpages of the Reddit page or official campaign links. Each tab acts as a call to action because they provide details on how supporters can get involved. The first tab, “Donation” directly links users to a page to donate to Bernie’s campaign. The “Volunteer Online” tab has a drop-down that gives users insight into the various forms of volunteering for the campaign such as phone and text banking and canvassing. Finally, the “Issues” tab asks users to stay informed on the issues Bernie is campaigning on, including his Medicare for all plan, passing the Green New Deal bill, and ensuring housing for all. 

The Reddit page has 454,000 users, each user uploading or interacting with content. Therefore, there is a strong mix of engagement amongst users. There are many “Clictivists” on the page, therefore practicing institutional engagement (Bimber et. al). They post short texts like “Who is feeling the Bern this morning” (u/AngryIndependent), to memes of CNN correspondents reporting on state polls (u/Blockstatearight7). Then there are your enthusiasts that practice entrepreneurial engagement (Bimber et. al). For example, user hamtarofan999 uploaded a long text post explaining how their increased healthcare bill paired with their loss of faith in candidate Elizabeth Warren has ultimately led to them jumping on the “Bernie Bus.”

The main posts on the page are memes, personal stories, and texts. There are barely any posts about Bernie himself, playing into Bernie’s campaign slogan “Not me. Us.” Therefore, there is no real answer to determining how the platform projects Bernie as a leader. While all the posts share a similar theme of providing insight into how Bernie’s presidency would be beneficial, it’s less about how he would lead as president and more about how his presidency would change voters’ lives. This ultimately creates a community of people that believe in his message and are willing to do anything to make sure it’s put into practice. 

Bernie’s Reddit page looks like any other Reddit page. There are thousands of posts with users actively uploading content hourly. While this may not seem innovative to some, it’s important to note that the page’s moderator allows the page to look the way the users want it to. The moderator could easily choose to delete less professional posts (i.e. memes, short texts) but they remain on the page because the diversity of each post represents the diversity of Bernie’s base.

This leads me to my thoughts on who Bernie’s team is trying to reach on the page. Though the other social media accounts for Bernie’s campaign have millions of followers, they’re followed by Bernie lovers and haters. Reddit is different because people only join pages on topics they appreciate. Therefore, I believe the campaign is trying to target users that are only supporters of the campaign. On that note, I think the page is limiting themselves to reaching voters that are Reddit users and may be undecided voters. While users don’t have to pass any “background check” to be accepted onto the page, it’s clear you have to already be a part of Bernie’s movement to truly be a part of the page. 

The language on the page like “feeling the Bern,” “Bernie Bro” and “Hot girls for Bernie” is prevalent amongst younger Gen-Z and millennial voters that an older “boomer” voter may not understand or be comfortable with. Then there are memes that are shared to taunt voters who support candidates, which relates to the current discourse of Bernie’s base alienating crucial voters. To combat these issues, the campaign could attempt to clean up the page by deleting posts that include this kind of content, but ultimately this would ruin the authenticity of the page and possibly anger their base.




Sources

Week 3 Reading - Collective Action in Organizations

BERNIE SANDERS IS MOST POPULAR 2020 DEMOCRAT ON SOCIAL MEDIA