Want an Unbeatable Marketing System? Here’s One that Can Even Get Presidents Elected.

The following is adapted from The Undefeated Marketing System by Phillip Stutts.

On television, election night always looks like a big, happy party for the winning candidate. The victor is all smiles as they celebrate with their family, campaign leaders, and voters. That’s because TV loves a happy ending. But let me tell you, for people in George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, most of election night looked nothing like that.

Instead, picture 20 people in a campaign war room hunched over laptops. We were all inches away from our screens, trying to decipher how voter turnout was looking in all the states that could decide the election. Who had actually showed up to vote? What did it look like on the ground? And how were our predictions measuring up?

That kind of tense mood is normal on election night. But when the news website the Drudge Report released its early coverage, things suddenly turned to the jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching kind of tense. Drudge dropped a bomb with an alert that said John Kerry was going to beat President Bush in a landslide.

Even more concerning, their information wasn’t based on early voting. It was based on exit polls, which are taken immediately after voters leave their polling places. (Nowadays, we know how inaccurate exit polling actually is. But in 2004, it was the most reliable metric the media used.) Those exit polls were showing that John Kerry was going to rout George W. Bush. In every key state, he was crushing the president, and it looked like it was going to be a bloodbath.

We were completely deflated.

Bush had raised close to $1 billion in a matter of months. We had created the most sophisticated Get Out the Vote operation in history, called the “72-Hour Program” designed to get voters in key swing states to the ballot box in the last 72 hours before the vote. We had worked our assess off, and no one had seen those exit polls coming — least of all me.

I was the national 72-Hour / Get Out the Vote director for the reelection campaign. For 12 nonstop months, I had worked with campaign operatives in the field to figure out what would motivate voters to turn out in the last few days of an election.

Based on everything we had tested and seen in the field, the Drudge Report numbers just didn’t add up.

“Stunned” doesn’t begin to cover the mood. No one in that war room said a word.

Karl Rove was the first one to act. He immediately jumped on TV and told people to stop talking about the exit polls. “That’s not what we’re seeing,” he said. “We’re seeing different numbers. We’re seeing record turnouts in places that we expected to have huge turnouts.”

Rove was right to try to stop the media in their tracks. Those exit numbers were coming out before all the polling places were closed. They could have easily swayed the election. If Bush voters in battleground states saw those reports, they might have thought, “Well, what does my vote matter if Kerry is just going to trounce Bush anyway?”

“War rooms” have that name for a reason, so come hell or high water, we were going to fight to the last minute of that election. While campaign leaders like Karl Rove went on the media offensive, the rest of us buckled down with our laptops. We trusted our data, no matter what the Drudge Report said.

We were right to stick to our guns. The exit polls were wrong, and President George W. Bush won the 2004 election. Ohio was the key state in the race, and the winning margin was slim. And I mean slim. Out of 122,295,345 total votes cast in that election, the race was decided by 118,599 votes in the state of Ohio.

Think about it for a second: 118,599 votes determined the course of the entire election. Talk about a close race. If only 59,300 votes had flipped from Bush to Kerry, then John Kerry would have won the presidency.

Still, even with all the misinformation, we stayed confident that we were going to win. Why? Because we were following a sophisticated 5-step formula that we knew would carry Bush to victory.

We had unlocked the secret to becoming undefeated.

To understand why this secret formula is so powerful, first you have to understand what made that 2004 campaign so revolutionary. And to really understand 2004, we have to take a step back to the 2000 presidential election.

In 2000, 101,455,899 votes were cast nationwide, and the race was so tight, it hinged entirely on the results in Florida.

Imagine that. The course of the next 4 years was at stake. And it came down to 1 key state.

Meanwhile, on the ground in that key state, the word “tight” doesn’t even begin to describe the situation. Out of the 5,963,110 votes cast in Florida, how many do you think Bush won by?

537.

You read that right: 537 — total. That’s a jaw-droppingly small margin of only 0.0009 of 1%. It was the most disputed presidential race in over 100 years, and maybe of all time.

So, when 2004 rolled around, Bush’s campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, did not want a repeat. He and Karl Rove decided to do something that had never been done before in American political campaigns. They changed the game with their approach to voter data.

This one innovation changed the course of history and was modeled by every future presidential campaign. Obama, Trump, and Biden all owed their success to this paradigm shift.

Prior to 2004, every political campaign received a “voter file” of data provided by each state. The files didn’t reveal who a person voted for, but they allowed political campaigns to gauge who the high-propensity and low-propensity voters were. (We would know if you voted only in presidential years or in every election.) They also included demographic data; we could see ages, ethnicities, how many children were in the household, income level, and similar statistics.

For years, that was it. That was the total voter data campaigns utilized. And every campaign had the exact same information. When the fate of a campaign (read: the fate of an entire country) is in your hands, that’s really not a lot to go on.

In 2004, based on Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball (required reading), our campaign introduced analytics and consumer purchasing data into our decision-making process for the first time. We invested in a brand-new thing called “micro-targeting,” which matched that basic voter file with consumer data. Instead of just knowing people’s voting tendencies, we had access to thousands of data points on an individual voter: what car they drove, what credit cards they used, what their purchasing behaviors were like, what magazines they subscribed to, and so on.

It may sound simple, but overlaying those statistics changed the entire marketing landscape. We knew, down to the last detail, what made our voters tick.

We knew that certain voters are 1-issue voters. They only show up at the polls when they think their most cherished value is at stake. What we didn’t know before micro-targeting was exactly what Jane Doe or John Smith’s 1 issue was.

Now we had a crystal-clear perspective on which issues would motivate those voters. We knew who cared about guns, abortion, taxes, education reform, and homeland security.

Then, once we understood what was going to get those voters riled up, we were able to micro-target them with carefully designed mailers, phone calls, and door-to-door visits. Even in an era before social media, we figured out how to speak to them directly about the issues that mattered to them most. The more energized we could get them about their key issue (and our candidate’s stance on it), the more likely it was that they would show up at the polls — hopefully with their family and friends in tow.

Since then, data and analytics have become the key to winning elections, and political marketers are extremely savvy about how they use consumer data. In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign took our micro-targeting model and married it with social media, which was just beginning to boom. They did the same in 2012 and far surpassed our 2004 success. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump innovated even further. He combined micro-targeting and social media with branding to create another innovative political campaign. Whether you love him or hate him, everyone knows “MAGA” (“Make America Great Again”).

In 2020, Donald Trump got more votes than any presidential candidate in the history of American politics — except for Joe Biden. Biden won the 2020 election with more than 81 million votes, compared to Trump’s 74 million. And do you know how he did it? He and his team used data and analytics to understand what voters wanted.

And what did voters want? Voter research showed that people were getting tired of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. They were tired of grandstanding and wanted some peace in the middle of what had been a really turbulent year. In other words, the data showed that the same traits that got Trump elected in 2016 were actually hurting him in 2020.

Trump is who he is. You’re not going to change him. So the Biden campaign knew that if they didn’t engage with Trump on a daily basis, Trump would eventually dig his own grave with these weary voters. Joe Biden had nothing to gain by going head-to-head with Trump, but he had everything to gain by coming across as a calm, peaceful alternative. So the Biden team ran a stealth underground campaign — which, at some points, seemed like no campaign at all — and clinched a record-breaking win.

The data and analytics methods that were born in 2004 are much more sophisticated now, and they’re 1,000 times more powerful. Still, it’s safe to say that the 2004 election forever changed political marketing history. In fact, it forever changed marketing history, period — because the very same strategies that put George W. Bush in office can put your business on the map.

After all, politics really isn’t that different from business. A candidate is the product you’re trying to sell to the voter, aka the customer or client. In both contexts, you’re using compelling stories and targeted messaging to convert people.

As you’ll see, the “secret formula” that elected every president in the modern age works just as well for the businesses that are willing to implement these steps to grow their bottom line. In my book, I plan to show you the many success stories that you can utilize in your business to win over your customers and clients and grow your business — in any economy.

To learn more about how to develop a fool-proof marking plan, The Undefeated Marketing System is available on Amazon.

Founder, CEO, and bestselling author Phillip Stutts plays the game of corporate and political marketing on the highest level, battling with fierce competition, multibillion-dollar budgets, and a win-or-die mindset. He’s worked with multiple Fortune 200 companies, contributed to more than 1,400 election victories (including three presidential wins), and made more than 350 national media appearances on outlets like ESPN, CBS, and CNN. Phillip has been lauded by Fox Business as a “marketing genius” who has “generated record sales for his clients.”