Forget about email. Forget about social media. Candidates who will be on the ballot next week are focusing their attention on a very old-school form of communication: direct mail.
“Direct mail has been a pretty major part of political campaigns going back to the ’80s,” says Stephen Farnsworth, political science professor at the University of Mary Washington. “What you see, though, is an increasing ratcheting up of the negativity of the campaign discourse.”