“We know everything”
Elections are about marketing, not policy. Will Dems ever get it?
A version of this essay was first published at MediaPost
In 2018, I went off to Washington to meet the wonderful wizard of Democratic voter research. Any research agency that aspired to help the party needed this man’s approval and blessing.
Our work explores people’s unconscious minds and reveals psychological insights that polls and focus groups cannot. Many corporate marketing departments embrace this type of research. Most Democrats recoil from it.
Five minutes into the meeting it was clear this was going nowhere. My host crossed his arms, glowered and glared, and then interrupted to proclaim grandly, “We know everything necessary to defeat Donald Trump for good.”
Ah, well…
Democrats have lost nine of the last 15 presidential elections. Their only victories have come when their candidate has possessed rock-star charisma (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) or in the wake of a Republican calamity (Jimmy Carter after Watergate, Joe Biden after the mishandling of COVID). It takes a historic confluence of events for them to defeat anyone, even though voters are usually with them on the issues.
Democrats play the wrong game. They think elections are policy debates. In reality, they are marketing challenges. Therefore, campaigns should be led by marketing people, not the usual Democratic cadre of activists, public policy PhDs, and career political operatives who think they know everything.
For way too many on the left, “marketing” is a synonym for “sleaze” and “lying.” It’s their loss because marketing professionals could sharpen Democrats’ tactics in three critical ways.
Constant communication
Most marketing students have read about Johnson & Johnson’s masterful handling of the Tylenol cyanide scare in 1982. It remains the exemplar of how to communicate in a crisis. The key: transparency, transparency, transparency.
Joe Biden did the opposite. He assumed office in a moment of national crisis, but failed to set expectations, failed to inform the country about his administration’s progress, and failed to remind people of how the trouble started in the first place.
Ronald Reagan inherited a similar economic mess in 1981, but explained what was to come, never stopped crowing about what was going well, and never stopped flaying his Democratic predecessor for all that was wrong. Statistically, Biden’s economic record is not far removed from Reagan’s, but, unlike Reagan, he gets no credit because as Republicans hammered their talking points day after day, the president was invisible.
Meaningful messaging
In the heady first days of Kamala Harris’s campaign she wrapped all her policy ideas in the language of “freedom,” which is the linchpin American value. It was a clear, emotionally relevant message.
But it didn’t last. “Freedom” soon surrendered to, “When we fight, we win” and “A new way forward.”
Losing Democratic candidates love their “fighting” metaphors — Michael Dukakis in the tank, John Kerry reporting for duty, Hillary Clinton’s “Fight Song.” A call to arms is a poor fit for the Democratic brand and a terrible message for swing voters, who, by definition, don’t have a side and therefore aren’t looking for anyone to fight against.
(Notably, Obama and Bill Clinton seldom used fighting metaphors. Instead, they promoted hope and giving the everyday person a fair shake, universal sentiments no American could argue with.)
As for “A new way forward,” many swing voters remember the Trump years as being just fine and see Biden as a disaster. They want to go back to what was, not forward with more of the same. Harris’s team never acknowledged that.
On his Substack, influential Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg argued that freedom, fighting, and going forward all mean the same thing — but they don’t mean the same thing at all. Apple’s tagline was “Think Different,” not “Think Differently.” Trump never said “Make America Great,” he said “Make America Great Again.” Words matter, and sophisticated marketers are aware of how subtle language choices can have an outsized impact on messaging effectiveness.
Robust research
The left’s research landscape is a wasteland of polls, which have limited value, and focus groups, which have almost none. They offer easy answers to shallow questions.
Some poll or focus group surely suggested it would be clever for Harris to campaign with Liz Cheney. But at a given moment, up to 40 percent of Americans don’t even know who the vice president is. Why would they care about the daughter of the guy who was vice president 16 years ago?
But that is what a campaign does when it only understands voters at a surface level. The same with thinking Bad Bunny’s late endorsement would sway Latinos or that elderly football stars could influence Black men in their 20s simply because young men like sports.
What was needed was an emotionally compelling message from Harris herself, but her team didn’t know voters well enough to know what to say, how to say it, or perhaps even that it needed to be said.
Democrats look to research for answers. The best marketers look to research for understanding — specifically, about what makes people tick: their hopes and dreams, their beliefs and biases, their world view, and the stories they tell themselves about themselves.
Effective communication is born from those kinds of deep insights. Polls and focus groups don’t get you there. In-depth qualitative research rooted in psychology does.
A real “new way forward”
In the summer of 1984, the Reagan campaign hired two consumer researchers and a consumer psychologist to create a map that illustrated how key issues linked to voters’ emotions and values.
Led by Richard Wirthlin, who had been named “Adman of the Year” by Advertising Age a few years earlier, the team used the map as a strategic playing field to bolster voters’ emotional connection with Reagan and undermine their perceptions of Democrat Walter Mondale. Two epic political ads, “The Bear” and “Morning in America” were a direct outcome of this research.
It is difficult to imagine today’s Democrats handing marketing experts this much power. They would find it too weird and corporate. Yet, it is exactly what they need to do.
As Daniel Kahneman observed, “People don’t choose between things. They choose between descriptions of things.” Marketing is all about finding the right descriptions of things, and selling a candidate is no different than selling socks, soap, or soda.
At the ballot box, policy is irrelevant. The story you tell about policy is everything. Whether Democrats move right, left, up, down, or inside-out makes no difference if they can’t market themselves in a way that attracts voters’ attention, arouses their emotions, and makes them care.
James Forr is Head of Insights at Olson Zaltman. The opinions presented here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Olson Zaltman.
