What Democrats are Learning in 2018, and What it Means for 2020
Nearly two years ago, Democrats lost a presidential election. I could bemoan the devastating consequences ad nauseam, but I’m not going to do that. You know what they are. Instead, I’ll focus on what the left has learned on a strategic level in these last two years, and look ahead to where we must go from here.
We’ve awakened to some important realities in these last two years, and have begun to take action to address them:
— We have finally recognized the importance of authenticity, and have begun to invest in candidate recruitment initiatives. We must continue to do this, at scale, and for every level of office across the country.
— We have leveraged technology to enable rapid, mass mobilization of volunteers and resources.
— We’ve begun to replace issue-driven messaging with value-driven messaging. We’ve finally, finally (!) realized the importance personal story. Shout out to all those viral campaign launch videos.
— We’re slowly investing in a relational approach to campaigns — one that treats voters like human beings. We have a long way to go here, but we have seen more humanity in campaigns this year than we have seen in a very long time.
All of these things have emerged in a new political ecosystem that includes but does not depend on institutions. Good and smart people have begun the long and difficult work of rebuilding the Democratic party, while others have built impressive movements and nimble new organizations that are moving resources and removing barriers to civic participation.
14 days from now, we will be bombarded with hot takes on what the outcome of this election means. If the Democrats reclaim the U.S House of Representatives, it will be tempting to think that we’ve written a new playbook that works, and we should just keep doing what we’re doing. But we’d be wrong to draw that conclusion. Yes, we must build on what we’ve learned but there are still major gaps that will hold us back in the long term, if they continue to go unaddressed.
If Democrats want to swing the pendulum to the left more permanently, we must disrupt the political industrial complex and build enduring infrastructure that lasts beyond any one election cycle.
Here’s how:
- Invest in talent. We must turn political campaign work into a viable career. This, in my opinion, is the single greatest lever we have for building winning campaigns in the short-term and long-term. Campaign managers — when empowered — are the bottom line decision-makers. They plot the strategy, approve the messaging, and allocate the dollars in the budget. They build the teams, train the staff, and define the culture that trickles down into every aspect of the campaign, including how we talk to donors, volunteers, and most importantly, voters. Effective campaign management requires a critical mind and sophisticated understanding of data, analytics, digital, communications, and public engagement. It requires personnel and fiduciary management skills. It also requires familiarity with a complex set of stakeholders who influence the political landscape. And yet, how one becomes a campaign manager is ill-defined. There is no sizable program that focuses on their recruitment, nor is there one that focuses on their training and professional development. Most campaign staff drop everything to join a campaign for a candidate they believe in, and last one election cycle. Maybe two. We declare the entry point for a campaign to be an unpaid internship, creating socio-economic barriers that disproportionately affect people of color. We pay campaign staff next to nothing, ask them to live in a volunteer’s basement or spare room, and demand that they work 14 hours a day, seven days a week. But — it’s just until Election Day. When a campaign ends, staff are given two weeks’ salary and sent off into the world to find what’s next. The lucky ones land a job at a consulting firm or an advocacy organization. Others burn out, and decide it’s time to grow up and look for a real job with more stability and sustainability. The revolving door of campaign talent creates a brain drain. This, in turn, leads to an over-dependence on consultants and vendors, who become the keepers of “best practices” and institutional memory. And the cycle repeats, leaving us with outdated strategies, consultant-driven campaign budgets, and a small and homogenous talent pool.
- Build bridges between political scientists and practitioners. There’s a lot we don’t know about how to persuade and turn out voters. Even the most effective scalable methods we’ve tested only impact voter persuasion and turnout to the tune of 7–8%, with an occasional study showing double digit impact. And the average effects of these methods are much lower. But when elections in battleground districts are won and lost by 2–3% (or less), the efficacy of every intervention matters a lot. The problem is that academics and campaign managers operate in siloes, and only national and statewide campaigns tend to have the resources to run experiments and test their messages and programs. Furthermore, most campaign managers simply don’t have access to the research, and when they do, they have to wade through 60 pages of academic writing to glean the takeaways for their campaigns. Efforts to bridge this gap are few and far between, and only a single organization — The Analyst Institute — has made political science central to its mission in supporting progressive campaigns. The AFL-CIO is another leader in this space, having run dozens of experiment informed programs over the years. Here are four names that every campaign manager should know, but very few do: Hahrie Han, Todd Rogers, David Brockman, and Joshua Kalla.
- Get real about the financial incentives that drive misguided spending on direct mail and TV. Television is the 900-pound gorilla in the room. Cycle after cycle, campaigns spend millions of dollars on running 30-second ads on broadcast and cable TV. Media buyers will often link their shop to a creative one, and write “free creative” into their contracts with campaigns, because they make all their money back — and then some — by taking a cut of the ad buy. To be clear, TV is still a mode worth investing in. Studies have shown that candidates lose votes when they are dark while their opponent is running ads. It’s also a near-guaranteed way to meet people where they are: 93% of Americans over the age of two have a TV in their home. But the amount of money that campaigns pour into TV is inordinate, and ultimately unwise, given how little we actually know about their effectiveness (we can only estimate views, look at ratings, and establish correlation with changes in polling or turnout). We do know that the observable effects of adds deteriorate within a couple of weeks of putting them on the air. Intuitively, we know that voters are inundated by political noise in the weeks leading up to an election, and it’s getting harder and harder to create a signal that can be heard above the din. Campaign managers are often bullied into spending on television by their consultants (who have a financial incentives to sell as much air time as possible), and Democratic committees pushing a conventional approach that commits 80% of a campaign budget to paid media. Congressional candidates are paying millions of dollars to be up on TV for months, when they would probably do better to spend half as much, make better ads, and run them for the final three weeks of the election cycle. The effects of direct mail are much clearer, and the good news is mail can make a significant difference if it contains the right messaging. However, our use of direct mail is tied to some similar problems. Meta-analysis of direct mail research has shown that the effects of a mail piece begin to deteriorate dramatically after a voter has received four or five pieces. The sixth piece has negligible effects. You need look no further than your own mailbox to know that campaigns are sending a lot more than four or five pieces. Last year, I coached a campaign manager in Virginia whose mail firm was trying to sell him a 30-piece plan. He had asked that they send fewer pieces to a larger number of voters, so they sent him back a 22-piece plan. Mail shares an incentive structure with television — the vendors’ profit depends on volume.
We must win in 2020. The future of our country depends on it. We must also lay the track for progressives to continue to win for generations to come, and that will require making some big changes.
In the meantime, we’ve got less than two weeks left until Election Day, so we’d all be well advised to knock some doors, send some texts, and make sure our friends and family have a plan to vote.