The Way to Campaign in a COVID-19 World.
The Way to Campaign, Period.
What is a winning campaign message? It is a message that wins the election. It is a message that persuades a majority (or plurality) of voters to trust a candidate to look out for them. It is a message that says, “I got your back, you can trust me.” It is a message that resonates.
Resonance
More than anything, the campaign message should resonate with voters. Voters are human beings, each with a life full of joy and sorrow, success and disappointment, love and loss. A voter’s life usually requires hard work and almost certainly involves a good deal of anxiety. It is, without a doubt, impacted by daily stressors. And for all its triumphs and delights, it is also disrupted by many forces that are beyond any one person’s control, and by some that are not.
A message that resonates will tap into voters’ emotions and elicit a feeling. A voter will feel that the candidate understands her or at least understands the kinds of trials and tribulations that pepper her life. A voter may sense sympathy, maybe empathy from the candidate. A voter may hear anger in the candidate and identify with that. A voter will feel that the candidate just might grasp what she is going through. A voter will feel excited or safe or hopeful or cathartic.
With a resonant message, a voter will believe that the candidate is perceptive, has insight into his world, is sensitive to his frustrations and fears and pains. He will feel a connection to the candidate, will feel that he and the candidate share something
important in common. He will trust the candidate. I won’t go into the importance of trust right now, I’ll just say that TRUST IS EVERYTHING. And when you boil it all down, one way for a candidate to win the trust of a voter is to establish a meaningful connection. And the way to do that is more often through the heart than the head.
Passion
If we are targeting emotions, it is necessary to examine what voters, especially swing voters, are feeling this year. Frustration, first and foremost. Anger. Fear. Anticipation. More frustration. Exhaustion. And some sadness and loneliness. We all feel an overwhelming need for a leader who can bring order from chaos and return us to a world that only ever existed in our American dreams.
For Joe Biden, this means crafting a message that conveys strength, confidence, command, and kindness. It will draw on his strengths, be true to who he is, and provide what everyone in the country needs.
While the campaign message should be something of a loner (one message, not many messages, definitely not a laundry list), that does not mean that policy issue cannot be addressed. A website can summarize policy positions and link to white papers; candidate questionnaires, journalists, and opinion pages can flush out the tough issues; and social-media campaign soldiers can cover everything from the candidate’s favorite candy to data points on his or her voting record. But the message should convey feeling because the goal is to create a message that wins the campaign, not an argument.
When it comes to the day-to-day on social media, the candidate should convey a sense of humor (if funny, be funny, if not, add levity and enjoy other people being funny). Be clever, not mean. And take advantage of opportunities quickly. As noted by David Plouffe and David Axelrod, after the President mused about using disinfectant “by injection inside,” the Biden campaign shot off a great little video: “This is a cup of Lysol. It is poison. Please do not drink it.”
Content is King
As Bill Gates predicted back in 1996, content is king.
What are the options? Speeches, op-eds, event announcements. Live hangouts (maybe a backyard BBQ with the candidate at the helm) and virtual pressers (with presentations, videos, pics, etc.). Gifs & cartoons because laughter and smiles are good. Make the most of viral moments by sharing them with clever quips and poignant pronouncements. Virtual tours peppered with stories (ideas for the Biden campaign: VP Biden narrates a virtual tour of Scranton, commute to the Capitol, “bar hop” through Delaware, walk through his Delaware home (today we’re visiting the living room, join us tomorrow when we venture out to the family room!). Share posts (feel-good, funny, political, public interest, informative), articles, and all kinds of volunteer, community, and other user-generated content. Virtual town halls (with video questions from voters or from within gaming platforms—get creative!). Livestream a Fortnite one v. one with a young voter, let the competition begin.
Candidates can live-stream interviews as interviewee and as interviewer. In fact, I believe that candidates should take as many interviews as possible on television, radio, possibly YouTube shows, and
definitely podcasts. Do the interview, say something worth repeating, share the interview. Repeat.
Candidates can also host their own podcasts where they interview community activists, fellow politicians, policy experts, or maybe their mom—no matter what, have fun with it. Make sure your candidate’s podcast is findable on Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, and the iTunes and Google podcast apps. Place ads on others’ podcasts if they’ll have you. And be sure to keep up to date with what’s hot in the worlds of entertainment and sports.
Targeting
In campaigning 101, they (yes, them) teach candidates and staff to identify how many votes are needed to win (50 + 1 + a few more, just to be safe) and from whom in the district those votes may be found. This is about identifying your audiences, or in this case, your voters (for instance, suburban women, union members, people who voted for President Trump in 2016 and a Democratic congressmember in 2018, and lifelong Democrats). Then, for each of your targeted audiences, determine whether you want to persuade them to vote for you, simply motivate them to vote, or mobilize them to vote, volunteer, and organize.
A/B Testing
Once you work all this out, ideally you will want to use social media to target potential voters with nuanced variations of the campaign message (as applied to different issues, by varying the wording, using modified designs), each one targeted to a different audience or even to specific voters. A/B testing is one way to determine which messages work best with each of your audiences. A/B testing is a method for comparing the effectiveness of two versions of an ad that differ only subtly and in only one respect. The ad that performs best with that audience is the one you’ll run because it has been shown to be most likely to give you your desired outcome, in this case, votes. Some of the social media platforms, such as Facebook, take A/B testing to the next level.
Facebook’s Loom of Gold
Facebook’s algorithms do A/B testing on steroids, not only testing many multiple variations of ads, but taking it one step further and making the adjustments to the ads based on performance results (data analytics). In this way, micro-audiences receive messages that are particularly well-suited to persuade them. Ian Bogost and Alexis C. Madrigal explain how it works in the Atlantic. Suffice it to say that you can create a very simple, low-cost digital ad that isn’t much more than a Facebook post with a pic or 6-second video, pay Facebook a hundred bucks per ad buy, provide Facebook a bunch of custom audiences from which to start (some of which may be grouped by interest area, all of which contain information that is used to create variants of the original ad), and have Facebook work its algorithmic magic like the inexhaustible Rumpelstiltzkin weaving hay into gold.
“Facebook’s ad software doesn’t try to get someone to buy a product or vote for a candidate. It merely tries to produce the results that advertisers [and candidates] declare they want…. Each action a user takes or doesn’t take—clicking, liking, sharing, commenting, donating, hovering, buying, filling out a form—slightly changes the complex network of predictions that form Facebook’s picture of a person, which is to say, a [voter].”
Hire digital gurus, find digital guru volunteers, or turn to the social media platforms themselves for assistance. I highly recommend watching the 60 Minutes interview of Brad Parscale in which President Trump’s 2016 digital director (2020 campaign manager) downloads just how they made the most of what social media had to offer and got millions of people who had never voted or who had been voting Democratic to vote for a hotel/reality-TV personality on the Republican ticket.
Learn From Your President In Order to Defeat Your President
Now, Donald Trump may not be the sharpest crayon in the box generally speaking, but when it comes to propaganda, he is a savant. Our president is someone who understands what the masses want on the most visceral level (he is from Queens, after all). In 2016, he knew what kinds of messages his target audience wanted to hear, and he knew enough to hire a digital director who could drill down on this and make the most of it. Facebook and other platforms not only amplified his message, it helped sculpt his message for maximum return. I believe that the role of Facebook, in particular, in getting Donald Trump elected president cannot be overstated.
When you boil it all down, it’s about getting access to eyeballs. Facebook has automated this process. Assume your campaign knows that Republican women in Orange County who are concerned about school shootings just might entertain voting for a Democrat. You therefore need to identify and reach these women and people like them. One good place to do this is on Facebook where the campaign can send them a particularly persuasive ad about responsible spending and responsible gun control. The Facebook recipe includes data about user behavior, artificial intelligence, and fancy pants computer programming to do just this. It’s a dizzying combination of targeting, micro-targeting, and broadside blanketing using dozens of variants of an ad (yes, it is narrow and it is wide). And they kind of get your campaign addicted to it, the Candy Crush of digital campaigning, as you spend more and more to reach voters you otherwise would never reach. In the case of the Trump campaign, it was and still is money well spent. The Biden campaign would be derelict not to take advantage of this, no matter how distasteful it is to feed Facebook’s coffers (that, my friends, is a battle for another day). Embrace it.