Political "Disruption" in the 2016 US Presidential Election

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen illustrates why well-managed, market leading companies are vulnerable to disruptive technologies. While reading his articles this week, I was reminded of the 2016 US Presidential Election, and how Hillary Clinton, the political veteran with tremendous resources and expertise on her side, was unexpectedly challenged by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In this blog post, I will examine how the Trump and Sanders campaigns mirrored the disruptive technologies Christensen describes in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

While Clinton was expected to be a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders posed a larger threat to her than pundits and analysts initially anticipated. A defining feature of Sanders’ campaign, and one reason for his underdog status, was his refusal to accept donations from SuperPACs. If we crudely think of political donations as “products”, then we can see how small crowdfunding donations fit Christensen’s description of disruptive products. Compared to SuperPAC donations, small crowdfunding donations are “simpler and cheaper” and “generally promise lower margins”. Crowdfunded donations “first commercialized in emerging or insignificant markets”- meaning, they are collected from middle class people that many politicians do not see as major revenue sources, as opposed to the large PACs and wealthy donors that many politicians compete to win over.

When the race for large donations creates policy benefits for the wealthy class at the expense of the middle class, fundraising politicians fit Christensen’s description of “overshooting” their market’s needs:

In their efforts to stay ahead by developing competitively superior products, many companies don’t realize the speed at which they are moving up-market, over-satisfying the needs of their original customers as they race toward competitions toward higher-performance, higher-margin markets. In doing so, they create a vacuum at lower price points into which competitors employing disruptive technologies can enter (15-16).

In the case of the 2016 Democratic Primary, this “vacuum at lower price points” can be interpreted as a feeling of distrust and disenfranchisement among middle class voters, and a willingness of those voters to donate money to feel like they are part of the political conversation again. While Sanders did not ultimately win the Democratic Primary, he proved that there is a market for small crowdfunded donations, and prominent candidates in the 2018 midterm elections such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Connor Lamb, and MJ Hegar have been rising to prominence by capitalizing on this same “market”.

The ultimate winner of the 2016 US Presidential Election, Donald Trump, did not rely on crowdfunding, but his campaign is still described by many pundits as “populist”. Contrasted to Clinton’s highly data-driven, highly scripted, and highly planned campaign, Trump was arguably better at what Christensen describes as “get[ting] out of laboratories and focus groups and directly creat[ing] knowledge about new customers and new applications through discovery-driven expeditions into the marketplace” (16).  Take for example CNN Contributor Amanda Carpenter’s description of Trump’s Twitter tactics:

[Twitter] is the platform where [Trump] tests his jabs…A lot of people think Trump flings barbs for sport and to support his ego, but…he tests a lot of words and phrases on Twitter to see what gains traction. The Twitter metrics are like ratings. He can see in real time what branding is working (228).

Carpenter also describes a similar “market research” tactic at Trump’s rallies, where he will abruptly change subjects on the fly if he notices crowd engagement waning, throwing out seemingly unrelated remarks until he gets the big reaction he is looking for. By using real time feedback to inform his messaging in the moment, Trump lines up with Christensen's description of how successful disruptors “feel their way into the market, leaving enough resources to redirect their program if necessary and building upon what they learned on the way” (7).

The 2016 US Presidential Election ultimately exhibited what Christensen calls the “one anchor” governing disruptive technologies: that “experts’ forecasts will always be wrong” (12). While most pollsters predicted Clinton would win, it was Trump who ultimately took the electoral college. Using the principles from Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, we gain more insight into how a prominent mainstream politician like Clinton was challenged by two “political outsiders” who were initially viewed by many pundits as fringe candidates.

Works Cited

Carpenter, Amanda. Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us. New York, Harper, 2018.

Christensen, Clayton M. “Discovering New and Emerging Markets”. The Innovator’s Dilemma: Why New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2006.

Christensen, Clayton M. “Introduction: Why Good Companies Fail to Thrive in Fast-Moving Industries”. The Innovator’s Dilemma: Why New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation, 2006.