Get A Message
Last night was the GA-06 special election. The candidate that many on the left hoped would win, Jon Ossoff, lost by an excruciating few percentage points. This sent me into an unexpected spiral of anger and depression for the rest of the night; I had been emotionally invested in GA-06 from afar, despite not being directly involved. I had hoped that a Democratic upset would help hamstring the AHCA, which is currently winding its way in total secrecy through what was supposed to be the most deliberative body, the US Senate.
As I laid in bed unable to sleep I pored over the recriminations and finger-pointing among the left. Ossoff was too centrist; he listened to the wrong people; he was too establishment; the Left has no Big Ideas. It’s been a common refrain since November. When my head cleared this morning I started thinking about what I felt the problems were, and why we kept snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in elections.
I work in advertising, and I follow politics very (probably too) closely as a hobby. The bulk of my day job is to create messaging that resonates with people and convinces them to click a link to a product or service. One of the big complaints among the left commentariat is that Dem politicians do not have a clear message, and cannot articulate their ideas clearly. I think many would agree that there are quite a few ideas on the left and polling indicates a large swath of the populace agrees with many of them, at least in principle. So what is the disconnect? Since I can’t do anything about a candidate’s charisma, I choose to focus on the messaging.
I’d argue, in fact, that the messaging is the most important part of any campaign. I say this because the vast majority of voters do not spend any amount of time listening to speeches, attending rallies, or watching debates. When polling indicates that a large percentage of people have “no opinion” of a candidate or an issue it’s not because they are necessarily dense or ignorant, it’s that very few people have the stomach to follow politics closely enough to form an opinion. What they do remember are slogans. Ask people what Trump’s slogan is and I’ll bet nearly all of them know it. Does anyone remember Hillary’s slogan? I don’t, and I can cite the vote margins she lost by in multiple states.
How do you reach the No Opinion Voter? This is a person who either by choice or by necessity does not follow politics or political news. The NOV is worried about getting their kids into a good school, or paying their bills, or getting home in time to watch The Bachelor. Some of them have willfully checked out of the political process because it has become so cynical and fraught with pander they simply can’t take it. I don’t blame them.
The Republicans have been very good at messaging for as long as I can remember. Slogans are their thing. Trump is a self-promoter, essentially an advertising executive at an agency of one. He understood that appealing to people at a visceral level breaks through the general apathy towards politics we feel in America. The greater Republican brand has long been rooted in turning complex concepts (or masking their agenda) in easy-to-digest sound bites, while the Democrats create flow charts and policy papers by the ream. The right has created a Makers Versus Takers narrative, and everything they do propels it. Their framing of the discourse is clinical. It’s “entitlements” and not a “safety net” because one word evokes smug moochers while the other makes any cuts seem cruel. It’s Obamacare because the President is giving you something, not the Affordable Care Act which makes an expensive thing more accessible to all.
Republicans also built the apparatus to support their messaging, the megaphone with which to shout their slogans to the Heavens. Roger Ailes was a detestable human being, but he understood the importance of controlling and shaping the narrative. The Democrats and the left never had an answer. They took to the Internet and to “fact checkers” but missed the greater point; you need a message that people remember. It’s no longer enough to simply have good ideas, you have to turn them into cohesive talking points and tell a tale. You have to have a narrative.
For almost a year I struggled to create ads that would entice people to sign up for health insurance. Digital advertising is a merciless space; you have fractions of a second to get someone’s attention or it’s gone for good. Every time I thought I had a solution, my ad’s performance would crater and I’d be back where I started. Finally, a colleague of mine helped me crack the code. It turned out that FOMO — or fear of missing out — was the secret sauce to get someone to apply for something they knew they needed in the first place. Telling them that someone else got health insurance for a good price, that created just enough interest to tip the scales. Since then we’ve refined our message countless times, but it was that first realization that made all the difference and allowed us to build a successful line of business.
I read a lot about decision making and how the human brain processes choices, partly to help me do my job better and partly because I find it fascinating. Voting is all about making a choice based on limited or sometimes incomplete information sets. Rather than attempting to affect someone’s choice in the ballot box, I prefer to focus on the building blocks of that decision — the tidbits of knowledge they absorb out of the noise of political discourse. Much hand-wringing has been done, especially by the left, about why “fake news” and falsehoods spread like wildfire, seemingly immune to rebuttal. How many conversations have all of us had with strangers or associates who — out of nowhere — start spouting erroneous talking points they clearly heard or read on a right wing news site? These people aren’t necessarily political, they just heard a small nugget of information and it stuck with them. In the vacuum of the No Opinion Voter, such seeds can grow into trees of distrust, as we saw with the backlash towards Hillary Clinton. Her campaign allowed so many negative narratives to spread that by the time election day rolled around, people defected in droves.
It’s a lot easier to package a concept like “Crooked Hillary” than it is to explain a tax credit system that would allow people to send their children to college. The left has plenty of good ideas, and many of them can be easily packaged into soundbites and deployed in the ongoing war against the right’s mischaracterization of the social and fiscal policies of the Democratic party. All high level debate about the direction of the party and which ideas should be in their national platform, local and state candidates can absolutely seize upon the power of narrative and tell a story that people can relate to. We’ve seen it happen in local elections all over the country, and with progressive splinter groups gaining momentum, I hope to see it a lot more as we enter in the early stages of the 2018 national election cycle.
As much as I appreciate the work of thought leaders and Serious Wonks who spend years researching and crafting good ideas and good policy, I have to point out that the narrative is the vehicle that gets those ideas turned into laws, and not the other way around. Just like someone doesn’t come to one of my websites and tell me how they’d like to be advertised to, campaign managers and speechwriters need to think more like ad men; you should be drafting your narrative around a digestible concept or talking point, not trying to shoehorn a sales pitch into a complicated set of policy ideas. Find something everyone can understand — Medicare For All! — and write your policy around that. The people who want more information will ask you for it. The people who don’t will still remember your pitch. I do a lot of advertising on Google and people are consistently baffled that anyone clicks on the ads. I tell them that if only three or four percent of people click on my ads, I can make a lot of money. Then I point out that Google does around 80 billion dollars a year in revenue, much of it from AdWords. People who run political campaigns need to remember that only a small percentage of the people who hear their message are going to become activists or hop eagerly aboard the Train To Change. If you can insert a slogan or a simple concept in the minds of the other ninety seven percent of people who see your message, that moves the needle. Most of the association happens subconsciously, which is why brands spend billions of dollars a year to put their slogans in your face when there is no quantifiable way for them to gauge effectiveness.
The right-wing media has done long lasting damage to the political discourse in America, but the good news is that with powerful tools like social media, that can be mended. In another post at a future date I will talk more about how social media has been and will be leveraged to change the way campaigns reach voters, but needless to say it is extremely effective and I hope that more left organizations embrace it in the coming months and years. As we saw in November, the right is once again ahead in the digital arms race, but they have the disadvantage of a fundamentally bankrupt set of social and political ideals to run on. Unlike the echo chambers of the right wing media apparatus, social media gives both sides the opportunity to tell their story, if they can crack the code and write the ad that can convey a clear, inspiring message…in around a third of a second.