I come across the word, “retail (oriented) politics” in an article under the title, “All presidential politics is local” in Conway Daily Sun (December 23, 2015), which contained the following paragraph:
He (Marco Rubio) said a lot, but at the same time said nothing. — If
there was a human side to senator, a soul, it didn’t come across
through. That might sound like harsh critique, but in essence that is
the point of the New Hampshire primary, to test candidates in a retail
politics setting. Rubio said it himself: “New Hampshire is very town
hall based,” he told us, the politics “retail-oriented.” After the New
Hampshire primary, he said, it transforms into a media race, not a
human race.
From the context, I surmise the retail (oriented) politics means either mass-marketing / mass media oriented politics or just populism, but I’m not sure of. Though it comes out in quotation mark, what does it mean precisely?
Is “retail politics” an established political word, or just the one coined by Mr. Rubio?
Best Answer
The term retail politics is the opposite of wholesale politics and they are established political terms. The link shows the difference between the two:
As you can see, the original definitions of retail and wholesale are used for politics to differentiate the two. Retail politics focuses more on direct (eye-to-eye) contacts while wholesale politics focuses more on mass media such as radio, television and newspaper advertisements.
[Flashcard Machine.com]