Looking for a Magic Message in all the Wrong Places

Democrat national political consultants have become mesmerized by the social media success of Republicans and are focusing on duplicating the same kind of echo chamber they enjoy. Multiple groups are forming and pitching their plans to big-money donors. The sums are not small. In the tens of millions, according to recent stories in the New York Times.

The goals: capture the digital mojo of Trump … find the next Joe Rogan … compete culturally … become more creative in stoking on line enthusiasm for Democratic candidates … buy more on-line relevance.

One $20 million recommendation reads “like an anthropological study of people from faraway places.” SAM (Speaking with American Men) proposes to research “the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”

“Emulating the right’s success will take time.”

How often do we see it? A candidate wins. The campaign becomes the model for what winning looks like. Consultants put it in their playbook for the next election cycle.

Somehow lost is the recognition that in a two-way race the winning strategy was better only than the losing strategy. Both strategies might have been bad, but one had to win.

Play to your own strengths. It is as true in politics as it is in sports.

Ask Marco Rubio. After about the third debate in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, Rubio decided he would start acting and talking like Trump. He came across as a fool and withdrew shortly after.

Democrat consultants have been down this road before. The major super PAC active in the 2024 presidential race raised and spent $950 million creating messages that had little apparent effect, despite testing more than 1,000 ads and conducting more than seven million surveys of voters.

Focusing on finding just the right words for a magical message doesn’t work. Words are only part of the message and the message is only part of persuading. A message isn’t on the ballot. A person is. A human with priorities, goals, a personality, a history, a demeanor, a team of supporters, and a way of looking at the world, who is trying to communicate who they are, what is important to them, and what they want to do.

It is all part of creating a connection. From watching and listening, sometimes carefully, sometimes not, voters decide whether or not a candidate understands me, is like me, shares my values and cares about the things that matter to me.

A level of trust helps. Trust that the candidate is not putting on an act. That the message fits the candidate rather than the candidate being made to fit the message.

The evening before one election day, I listened as Michael Bakalis, the Democrat candidate for Illinois governor, talked with a few friends about the campaign just ending. Early on he had hired two consultants from out-of-state. The messaging they crafted was for a conservative Democrat running to the right of a liberal Republican.

Looking back over the campaign that last night, Bakalis said with obvious regret, “I went through this whole campaign and never once talked about anything that I was really interested in.” The lack of authenticity, the absence of passion, registered on the voters.

Last October, about a month before the election, David Brooks made a similar observation in a column he wrote for the New York Times. Noting that the Harris campaign had slowed down from its fast start, he suggested she could finish strong by showing the American people her “strongest, most acute and controlling desire, the ruling passion of her soul.”

He recognized how difficult that might be. “Surrounded by consultants and strategy memos a candidate can lose herself within the machinery.”

In Kathleen’s first race for the State Senate, the staff working on messaging for the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee drafted direct mail pieces with poll-tested language on lower gasoline prices, middle-class tax cuts, landfill fees, mercury in fish, and traditional marriage. There was no narrative that pulled these nuggets together into a coherent story. The strategy seemed to be, if people agree with it, say it.

None of those issues, even though they polled well, were important enough that voters on the campaign trail raised them with Kathleen. And they were not issues that motivated her.

What everyone wanted to talk about was healthcare: the cost of insurance, the difficulty of getting coverage, and access to care. People had their own stories, and they wanted to know, often in some detail, how things could be fixed and how their circumstances would change under different proposals. They were aware of the complexity—they were not looking for easy answers.

Staff told Kathleen that in talking about health care she shouldn’t go beyond the poll-tested words, “reform that would cut costs by 15 percent …cover 98 percent of Wisconsin citizens …make businesses more competitive,” because no solution polled well.

Having taught college courses in health policy, healthcare was an essential part of Kathleen. The campaign did direct-mail pieces solely about healthcare reform. Why it was needed and how it could work. She held community forums on healthcare. Much of her advertising was about healthcare. Most of her press releases were about healthcare.

Her passion resonated with voters. By the end of the campaign, she was the “healthcare” candidate. She had presented a solution to a problem people cared about. Important to her. Important to them. There was a genuine connection.

Acting like a person you are not seldom works. Michael Dukakis in his run for the presidency in 1988 put on an oversized helmet and climbed into a tank to demonstrate his defense bona fides. The helmet, the grin, the machine guns, the tie was not Dukakis. The photo helped tank his chances of winning.

Copying a winning campaign seems a smart thing to do. What worked there and then, will work here and now for me.

The Washington Post story on Sen. Ruben Gallego’s recent visit to Bucks County in Pennsylvania led with, “Democrats are hoping to tap into the Arizona senator’s playbook to win back working-class voters far beyond his home state.”

But what is transferable? Gallego is Latino, a Marine veteran, from a working family, who won in a state with a large Latino population by “connecting with voters -- particularly Latino men -- over their shared anxiety on the state of the economy, border security and immigration.”

For Gallego, all the parts fit. The candidate, the district, the voters, the message, the strategy. Every candidate, however, is different. Every district is different. Every opponent is different. The voters are different. The issues are different. Every election for every office is different. Every campaign is different.

Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher, put it this way, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.”

Kathleen’s three races for the State Senate against three different opponents from three different parts of the district followed three different strategies. In each case, answers to basic campaign questions were different. Where is the opponent strong? How many voters do I need to win? Who are they? Where are they? How can the campaign connect with them?

What we learn from those who have won difficult races in contested districts is that success is more likely when the candidate reflects the district, speaks from the heart, and talks of things that matter to the audience. The campaign, rooted in the local, is built from the bottom up.

“All politics is local” used to be true. Today, the money, campaign structures, interest groups, party organizations, candidate recruitment, messaging, media strategy, and political decisions are all centralized. Politics has left the neighborhood.

Except on election day when voters --who all have to be local -- get the final say. Results show that candidates and campaigns that start with the local, build on the local and embody the local have the better chance of winning.

Local, however, is hard to do from the center and is not part of the business plan of consultants largely based in New York and D.C., who shape Party strategy and are now busy soliciting donors to fund their projects.