On TV, a liberal pundit dismissed the idea of social media affecting election results. I talk to those people, she said, and they have entrenched ideas. They simply cannot be convinced. 

LOL! Social media certainly does not affect election results by changing opinions through measured arguments.

Take me, for example. If I were active on FB, one might conclude that I am generally anti-corporate. Though I can hardly avoid corporations, I think they are voraciously greedy, perfectly willing to grind anyone into the dust for the mildest profit, including their own mothers.

Personification, yes. And if you are thinking, That’s just capitalism!, that’s not a discussion for today, though I will opine that you have little understanding of the historical relationship between capitalism and business, or an understanding of capitalism as a economic concept.

How to win two-viable-candidate, ie most, US elections? By getting folks to vote for your candidate, yes, but also by getting them to vote for someone who can not win, or not to vote at all. As a person with grabbable parts, I am on the Never-Trump roster. But if I were targeted by persuasive articles from what I would accept as accurate sources–many of them corporations, ironically–about nefarious ties between Hillary and Wall Street, Big Pharma, or the red-leaning big box realtors, I might well have chosen one of the secondary strategies.

Most people’s passions are evident to our corporate trackers, and your passions can be used to push you in either direction:

• If you are devout, you perhaps can be swayed by evidence of a candidate speaking in favor of something your religion doesn’t approve of. Very few religions–I mean none–are evolved enough to stay out of politics in respect of freedom of religious choice for all.
• If you are a misogynist or a racist, secretly or subconsciously of course, maybe you were shown a candidate doing or saying something that gives women or blacks any advantage, which you will conclude is unfair. I’m focusing on black people since our country has been crushing them explicitly for 400 years, de facto and de jure.
• If you are an environmentalist or a technologist, evidence can be found to indicate any candidate won’t have a positive impact, either because of having the “wrong” attitudes or of having the “right” attitudes but not getting results.
• Whether you’re for or against immigration, it’s easy to demonstrate that any candidate is not doing the right thing, because politicians haven’t made progress on this issue for decades. Perhaps a candidate without a record has some persuasive sound bites.
• If you feature yourself to be informed about economics, first of all, you probably aren’t. Most economic opinions aired in this country are breathtakingly uninformed. I’m just going to say if you haven’t at least taken undergrad Intros to micro- and macroeconomics, or read one objective, instructive book above the “for Dummies” series level, you should not proffer an opinion, and even then, well, it’s not exactly a science, is it? Wait, is my argument speeding down a spur line? Back to the main track: Economics can be used by anyone to mean anything, so folks focused on the “business” side of government are easy targets. Same is true for history.
• Going specific on the 2016 Presidential election, if you were a Bernie supporter, you certainly heard about the DNC impeding his success, and of course the Republican platform pretty much disdained everything he proposed.

Just to reiterate: you can be swayed either way. Your feed can be stuffed with what feels like an overwhelming, definitive amount of information, but is really billowing smoke designed to get you and your “friends” to swarm out of the hive and make a reckless choice.

Seek other sources!