Breaking New Ground
A number of people have asked what POV is doing to break from the same-old, same-old approach of traditional Super PACs. After all, we received the largest single primary election contribution in campaign history. It was an opportunity to do new things and break new ground.
With that in mind, we’re publishing an updated version of a memo we sent to key supporters.
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JD Vance is a unique candidate. He has a compelling biography, of course. But for a first-time candidate, he also has world-class communication skills, a clear political vision that he can articulate persuasively, and broad media interest both among hostile mainstream and generally supportive conservative outlets.
At the same time, like any new candidate, JD entered the race having little name-id with the primary electorate writ large, no staff, and wanting a broad donor network. At Protect Ohio Values (POV), we have worked to amplify JD’s unique strengths while lightening the challenges he faces as a rookie candidate.
As a result, in addition to fulfilling traditional Super PAC roles, POV has broken new ground. This memo outlines some of the novel roles played by POV.
Supporting the Launch
When JD was investigating whether he wanted to run for office, POV began to build out a campaign-in-waiting. JD created an exploratory committee called the Ohio Values Project, which paid for a staffer and allowed him to travel, speak with potential donors, and make an informed choice about running.
Operating independently, POV recruited, vetted, and hired staff who later joined JD as his candidacy approached. This helped his campaign save resources and get off to a quick start.
Before JD’s July 1 announcement, we at POV sent crews to shoot b-roll of Middletown, to follow JD around several events in the Cincinnati area, and ultimately to cut together two videos.
One June 30, a day before JD’s announcement, we released a hype video called “Fighting for Us”, which we gave to FOX News as an exclusive. The video rapidly attracted over 75,000 views.
We had two film crews in place for JD’s announcement rally. Overnight we combined our footage from the event with earlier material to create a launch video, which we called “Shake the System Up”, and which we released the morning of July 2.
“Shake the System Up” has been viewed over a million times on YouTube.
By handling the creation, distribution, and promotion of the hype and launch videos for JD, we allowed the nascent campaign apparatus to focus on his launch event and fundraising.
Finally, in the month leading up to JD’s launch, we began a large-scale small-dollar donor recruitment effort. Based on JD’s message and skills as a communicator, we believed that we could nationalize the primary race. This would allow us to recruit a large cadre of small dollar supporters for his candidacy using Super PAC resources — something no organization has done successfully in a primary before.
Initially, we worked to recruit an email list of prospective supporters. Once JD announced, we pushed these people to become donors while simultaneously taking on board increasingly aggressive prospecting responsibilities. Just based on our own metrics, JD will finish his first quarter as a candidate with several thousand grassroots donors, a genuinely unprecedented feat in a contested primary. These donors will help to close the gap with the other candidates in the race.
So long as we continue to hit our benchmarks, we will continue the small dollar program through the primary.
Shaping the Landscape
Shortly before JD’s announcement, POV launched “Ohio War Room” — a Twitter account devoted to promoting positive coverage of JD to conservative media outlets and influencers, and to promoting original videos that highlight aspects of JD’s message and candidacy.
Every time JD is on television, Ohio War Room clips his appearance and tweets out a high-resolution video for his supporters to embed or use. Ohio War Room also produces original videos that amplify JD’s message, dramatize some of his most effective moments, and make fun of the hysterical reaction to his candidacy in the mainstream media.
Clipped videos reliably draw thousands and tens of thousands of views. Our original content does even better. Ohio War Room’s most recent video, “Reward Their Friends”, has been watched more than 220,000 times.
POV also supports the campaign in less conspicuous ways. Because JD is his own best messenger, we work to grow attendance at his events. Every time JD’s campaign posts an event announcement, POV sends two rounds of texts and robocalls to likely primary voters in the area letting them know when and where the event is taking place.
POV has also hosted JD for a series of statewide tele-townhalls. We robocall and text tens of thousands of Ohioans before each event and several thousand have attended. These provide a casual and conversational environment for JD to address citizen concerns head-on in a Q&A setting. POV collects, aggregates, and tracks the data from each tele-townhall.
Lastly, we aggressively track digital spending in the state, and have several supporters across Ohio who notify us of direct mail flights. We have been able to counteract spending by the Club for Growth, among others, attempting to smear JD as a RINO and a NeverTrumper.
We have built a custom website that sets the record straight about JD’s views of Trump. We have also spent to dominate search results for terms connected to Trump and Vance. Anybody in the Buckeye state who turns to Google to learn about JD and Trump is served our website as the first result. We will continue playing digital defense against this charge for the duration of the campaign.
Research Support
In April, we hired pollster Tony Fabrizio and the industry-leading opposition researchers at Prospect Strategic. Our researchers compiled extensive dossiers on JD and his opponents. Tony then conducted a series of four polls, from April to August, to inform our thinking about the race. We tested a set of policy positions and messages based on JD’s public statements, JD’s vulnerabilities, and the vulnerabilities of our leading opponents.
Using these insights, we hired the data science company DeepRoot to build a series of models and segments around different issue concerns and messages. The campaign is also hiring DeepRoot to provide data services. The campaign will therefore be able to access the modeled universes POV has created, and POV will be able to access voter contact data uploaded into the database by the campaign. This arrangement allows POV to bring presidential-level targeting sophistication to JD’s campaign without expecting the campaign to shoulder the cost of audience construction.
Substantively, our polling and modeling have separately found that JD has a clear path to victory, that his message and biography fit that trajectory well, and that he’s making good progress along the way while his opponents stall or slide.
Fabrizio has polled Ohio Republican primary voters for POV four times. In April, we tested a range of issues that we expected JD to run on should he choose to become a candidate, along with several positive attributes of JD’s biography. In June we tested JD’s vulnerabilities shortly before his announcement. In July we tested Timken’s vulnerabilities and in August we tested Mandel’s.
Across these four polls, we find JD rising, Timken collapsing, and Mandel sliding on the ballot. At the same time, a large group of voters remain undecided.
We have also seen JD’s favorable ratings grow steadily along with awareness of his candidacy. Most importantly, his Very Favorable rating is growing the fastest.
As a corollary, even though JD is still running behind Mandel in terms of name recognition, he is rapidly closing in on Mandel’s consideration score.
Much the same can be said of JD’s ideological positioning in the electorate. As the primary continues, he has come to be seen as considerably more conservative. Mandel, for all his antics, is essentially unchanged.
Finally, our polling indicates that JD has a lot of room to grown. As mentioned, we tested several positive attributes and messages in April, when JD he was unknown. He immediately jumped to more than a third of the vote and a commanding lead, with Mandel’s ballot support cut in half.
In August we tested negative attributes and messages about Mandel. Mandel’s support fell to nearly an identical level as the April informed ballot survey and JD takes the lead. Interestingly, Timken saw no change in her position. All this is to say that, if we have the resources to put JD and his message in front of voters, he will win.
Data Infrastructure
Moving from the bigger picture to tactical questions, our modeling helped us identify who in the primary electorate needs to hear what. In June, before JD’s announcement, we identified several key segments of the electorate. We found that JD indexed well with comparatively affluent GOP primary voters, especially college-educated suburbanites — a difficult group to reach with traditional media buying.
These initial supporters, plus a cohort of demographically similar voters, were the shortest path to viability. We focused our initial efforts on getting JD’s announcement video in front of them.
Crucially, a large segment of the population remained fully undecided on the ballot. This group clustered in southeastern Ohio because we included Congressman Turner in our modeling survey. Excluding him, the entirety of southern Ohio is full of voters up for grabs. JD is the only non-Cleveland candidate, with a biography and message well-matched to the stretch of counties running from Mahoning County, down the West Virginia border, and across the state south of Columbus.
These undecided voters are older, less likely to be married, have lower incomes, and lower rates of college graduation. They consume traditional media, especially broadcast and cable television.
We found that the messages we tested based on JD’s public statements matched well with the policy priorities of these undecided voters. This group is hungry for a conservative outsider who is tough on immigration, willing to tax companies that outsource jobs, and reign in the Biden administration’s inflation-causing spending spree. JD fits the bill to a tee.
Winning over these undecided voters, while retaining JD’s strong suburbanite support, would reassemble the Trump coalition in miniature, which carried Ohio twice. It would certainly put JD over the percentage needed to win the nomination.
And JD appears to be well on his way. JD has dominated earned media in the state since his July 1 announcement, carrying the lion’s share in every market and across both broadcast and cable.
His 2,838 television appearances swamp Mandel’s 397 and Timken’s 226. Indexed to the GOP primary electorate, we estimate JD has earned more than 350 targeted rating points in every market in the state, with 539 in Columbus, 527 in Cleveland, and 483 in Cincinnati. He dominates the secondary markets, where cable is king.
When we refreshed the models earlier this month, we found across-the-board improvement for JD. He continued to consolidate the suburbanite vote and, based solely off earned media, has begun to build support among the previously undecided bloc in southern and far-eastern Ohio.
Tripling his vote share among white working-class men in particular shows immense promise. At the same time, he’s growing fastest among the most reliable GOP voters, who make up the lion’s share of the primary electorate and who are the most likely to vote.
Geographically, we see steady and nearly uniform ballot position across the state. This despite having spent nothing on television advertising so far.
Indeed, we saw positive change for JD among every key demographic in the GOP primary. While that in and of itself is not terribly surprising — he was not a declared candidate when we conducted our first round — he is nonetheless growing across the party, and is growing fastest with the largest groups.
As a result, in the second round of modeling, we find JD’s prospective support audience broadening demographically and ballooning proportionally to 22% — the same percentage as Mandel. Clearly, JD has a straightforward path to consolidating support outside of Cleveland and Columbus. Once Turner publicly foregoes a Senate run, that path will broaden still further as JD consolidates support in and around Dayton.
These results contrast favorably to both Mandel and Timken. Mandel has stalled out, and in many places taken a small step back. While he still enjoys meaningful advantages in name-ID and on the ballot, the breadth of his support is narrowing and concentrating in eastern Ohio. Indeed, his modeled universe of likely supporters is now smaller than JD’s.
Worse, still, for Josh is he’s seeing decay among the highest-propensity GOP primary voters, who are more likely to make their minds up early and thus may be a leading indicator. Josh’s history as State Treasurer will do little to endear him to blue collar voters in the southeast and east of the state. His dependence on them for his current ballot position is an ominous sign for his campaign. As with his earlier support levels in western Ohio, Josh is known but unloved, and voters will clearly move away from him if given an alternative.
JD’s unique message about taxing companies that ship our jobs overseas appears to be especially powerful with these cohorts.
That may in part be why we’re beginning to see early movement towards JD concentrated in the southern and western portions of the state.
Timken, by contrast to both Mandel and JD, appears to be in free-fall, especially in Cincinnati and Columbus. The prospects for her candidacy are grim.
Importantly, Jane’s voters are leaving her in places where we are either uniquely strong geographically, like Cincinnati, or where no candidate has established a regional foothold, like Columbus.
Looking Ahead
As the above makes clear, JD is on a trajectory to win. He has the right message for the primary. His opponents are treading water or sinking. Mandel especially has major vulnerabilities that we have identified and can exploit to let voters know that he is not the America First champion he purports to be.
The momentum is on our side. We have a clear path to victory.
However, we will need resources to put JD in front of voters. His opponents already attack him daily on social media. The campaign and Super PAC have been disciplined and have refused to take the bait. However, we will need to go on offense as 2021 becomes 2022.
POV is already putting together the materials we need to make JD the next United States Senator from Ohio. But we are facing a two-time statewide elected official with a massive campaign war chest, and four self-funders who can commit millions of their own dollars. We have the path, we have the plan, and we have a uniquely talented candidate with a message that matches the moment. We simply need to secure the resources necessary to win.