Question

How do you think new election campaign methods affected American democracy

Answer 1

It would help if your question included context.  In what time period are you looking at "new campaign methods."  There was, for instance, the campaign of Andrew Jackson in 1828.  Jackson had lost the election for the presidency in 1824, when no candidate gained a majority of the electoral vote, and Congress gave the victory to John Quincy Adams even though Jackson had received the greatest percentage of both the popular vote and Electoral College vote.  Jackson called it a "corrupt bargain," and when he ran again in 1828 he promoted the idea of greater democracy that would listen to the voices of all voters rather than continuing to follow a system that seemed to favor elite establishment leaders.  Jackson founded a new political party, the Democratic Party.  Prior to that, and after the Federalist Party had disbanded, there was a single main political party that functioned, the Democratic-Republican Party.  So a big campaign change in 1828 was the reintroduction of two-party competition.  The main idea espoused by Jacksonian democracy was to allow common Americans to have more influence in the political processes.  His campaign methods reached out to the masses of white males who were voters at the time.  (Women did not have voting rights then, and African-Americans were still living under slavery.)

A different context for your question might be the most recent election, in which campaign methods using electronic media platforms were seen to play a strong role in advancing the candidacy of Donald Trump.  How much that was good or bad for democracy is much on the minds of Americans now, as investigations about the 2016 election campaign are taking place.