Hillary Clinton gave a speech Monday addressed to, well, me. In Philadelphia, the Democratic candidate for president delivered an address aimed explicitly at “millennials”—those of us born, roughly, between 1982 and 1998. (Like all bogus pseudoscientific categories, who exactly constitutes a “millennial” is only roughly defined.) As Clinton evidently sees it, we millennials care only about a few things—student debt, paid leave, and raising the minimum wage among them. Message: she cares.
There are myriad flaws in this approach. But just to point out one: People have many identities distinct from the year they happen to have been born. I’m a millennial, sure. But as a city dweller, I could be concerned about rising crime. As a denizen of the nation’s capital, I might be concerned about terrorism. Of what relevance to those issues is the year of my birth?
Donald Trump is following a similar approach, explicitly slicing and dicing voters into categories. And so he’s gone out of the way to court black voters, talking about issues like crime and jobs to target that subset of the electorate. But why, pray tell, can’t black voters be concerned about the national debt, or the environment? Reducing people to mere categories is, well, just that: reductive.
Granted, “micro-targeting” has been a part of politics for a while, but rarely has it been so explicit. Mitt Romney’s campaign may have sent a widely mocked flyer in 2012 directed at the vanishingly small number people concerned about Lyme’s disease, but that year’s Republican nominee never gave an address aimed at such people.
And successful campaigns often remain staunchly universalist in rhetoric. Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign may have amassed a Stasi-like file on each American voter, but his speeches weren’t targeted at this or that subgroup—or at least not explicitly. Indeed, Obama famously rose to the national political scene on the strength of a speech in which he specifically rebutted simplistic notions on what constitutes blue and red state America. Micro-targeting seems to work better when it’s occurring under the hood. Clinton and Trump, by contrast, are saying the quiet part loud.
Ultimately, Trump and Clinton’s approaches recall Al Gore’s famous mangling of America’s founding creed. As the former vice president once glossed e pluribus unum: “Out of One, Many.”
