Marketing Malpractice
The heady rise and painful fall of the Elizabeth Warren campaign
I spend a lot of time working in marketing and too much time thinking about politics, and I tend to view the latter through the lens of the former.
Political scientists, pundits, and way too many politicians assume voters make their choices after a deliberate, painstaking evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate. What I have learned in my career suggests that we decide whom to vote for in the same half-assed way that we decide most everything else. We rely on mental shortcuts and are led by our emotions.
The political Twitterati are putting forth all kinds of explanations for Elizabeth Warren’s failed run for the Democratic nomination. One of the most common explanations is sexism, and almost certainly that played a role. Others have noted that her fall from the top of the polls coincided with a New York Times/Siena College poll of swing states that showed her faring significantly worse than Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders in a hypothetical match-up with Donald Trump. Surely, that didn’t help, either.
However, I maintain that Warren ultimately was done in by her own unforced errors, specifically the muddled messages that she used to communicate her story.
The Warren archetype…and that one…and that other one
Jungian archetypes, which live in our collective unconscious, have proven a valuable tool to help marketers think about their brands. Branding is just as critical in elections as it is in the world of consumer products. We aren’t voting for a set of policies. We are voting for a person who will advocate for those policies. And most of us don’t have the time or, sadly, the interest to study in fine detail what makes one candidate’s policy proposals different from another’s, particularly in primary elections, where those differences tend to be relatively arcane.
Ask an average Democratic voter (or an above-average Democratic voter, for that matter) to name a policy area and clearly explain how Warren, Sanders, and Biden differ in that area. I suspect the vast majority of people, for the vast majority of topics, would have no idea. So, candidates stand out from their competitors not just through better ideas but through building better branding and messaging to support those ideas.
“We decide whom to vote for in the same half-assed way that we decide most everything else. We rely on mental shortcuts and are led by our emotions.”
Sanders has delivered a rock-solid, consistent message for 35 years. He is the outsider — The Rebel, in archetypal terms — who wants to shake up our system of government. Biden is The Everyman (or at least that is the archetype the media has bestowed on him). He is America’s lovable uncle whose goal is to restore sanity and decency to the Oval Office.
Warren, by contrast, couldn’t make up her mind what she was. Sometimes she was The Everyman/Everywoman, the daughter of the American Midwest who grew up on the fringes of poverty and made herself into something. At times she was The Warrior, incessantly firing off metaphors of fighting and battles. For a while, she embraced the archetype of The Sage (“She has a plan for that”) filling her website with wonky solutions to every problem imaginable.
From a branding perspective, this is a disaster. Warren had three different narratives, which meant she had no narrative. At best, that made it hard for voters to know how to think about her. At worst, it made her seem disingenuous.
Moreover, it isn’t clear that either The Sage or The Warrior are especially useful electoral archetypes. Progressives who win national elections and earn broad appeal generally don’t use “fighting” language. And given that many Democrats prefer a candidate who builds bridges and heals, naïve as that may be in today’s environment, the archetype of The Warrior seemed like an ill-advised choice from the start.
As for The Sage, “I have a plan for that” is all about me, the candidate, not about you, the voter. It neither inspires nor sets forth a vision for the country, unlike a message such as, “Yes We Can” or, in a very different way, “Make America Great Again.” We cast our ballot for the person who appeals to our emotions and identity, not necessarily for the smartest person in the room.
A liar or a bullshitter?
Over the last 30+ years, Republicans have won a number of presidential elections by framing their Democratic opponents as people who couldn’t be trusted. From Michael Dukakis (remember him in the military tank?) to Al Gore (and his transparently forced eye-rolling and sighing during the first debate with George W. Bush) to John Kerry (who got “swift-boated”) to Hillary Clinton (“but her emails!”). Democrats have repeatedly allowed themselves to be portrayed as shifty, phony, opportunistic, and even downright dishonest. In other words, liars.
We don’t like liars. But we can get down with bullshitters. Bill Clinton was a bullshitter. His carefully cultivated “Bubba” persona helped him come off to a lot of Americans as a slightly goofy, cheeseburger eating hillbilly. He might have told a whopper now and then, but he was just a good ol’ boy who didn’t mean no harm. Donald Trump is a bullshitter, too. He says so many things that are so outrageously false that we don’t even notice it anymore. For years, though, his image has been that of a tough guy who talks loud and gets things done, and sometimes tough guys have to bluff and bluster to make their adversaries blink.
Elizabeth Warren is much too earnest to be a bullshitter, and she never got past Trump’s horrible but diabolically effective “Pocahontas” jibes. In fact, she took the bait and compounded the problem exponentially by releasing a DNA test to much fanfare, celebrating a result that showed her to be 1/1,024th Native American. Not surprisingly — at least not to anyone but her — this didn’t exactly end the controversy over her ancestry. Rather than prompting voters to think, “Well, she has a little Native blood. Good for her,” the test instead invited them to say, “1/1,024th? That’s…not much. Maybe she was kinda lying, after all.”
A missed opportunity
I respect Elizabeth Warren deeply and believe that, among the leading Democratic candidates, she would have made the best president of the bunch. She is experienced, energetic, seems like a good and well-intentioned person, and is filled with ideas for how to move the United States forward.
Like many Democrats of the last 50 years, though, Warren is afflicted with the Enlightenment notion that if you just tell people the facts, the facts will win the day and voters will make the correct and rational decision. However, winning elections is about being persuasive, not just about being right, and being persuasive requires an appreciation for how to use language strategically, how to frame a message, how to connect with voters’ emotions, and how to adhere to a tight narrative. Warren’s inability to do so is a loss for her and for the country.
James Forr is Head of Insights at Olson Zaltman
