Preface
★ ★ ★
viiiDONALD TRUMP’S GENERAL ELECTION victory was a shock, but winning the Republican nomination was even more unlikely. Trump didn’t run a single television ad until January 2016, when the primary season was well underway. Through February, he had spent only $10 million on advertising—a miniscule amount compared with “establishment” GOP rivals Jeb Bush ($82 million), Marco Rubio ($55 million), and less even than his fellow upstart Ted Cruz ($22 million) and John Kasich ($14 million) (Confessore and Yourish 2016). Trump was obsessed with his lead in the polls, but did almost no polling of his own. His staff combined youth with inexperience (his twenty-six-year-old press secretary had never worked on a political campaign). His “ground game” was minimal. He made shameful statements that offended many voters, including members of his own party.
Although Trump received an abundance of media coverage, much of it was negative. His nomination was opposed by many Republican party leaders and conservative columnists. Against entitlement spending cuts and free trade agreements, he advocated policy positions that ran counter to conservative Republican orthodoxy. The year 2016 was supposed to be the election of super political action committees (PACs) and big data, but Trump had neither. Not only did he break every nearly rule in the proverbial campaign playbook, he didn’t have copy of the book, nor did he seem interested in obtaining one.
By contrast, Trump’s top Republican rivals ran relatively conventional campaign operations. They spent millions of dollars on ads aired on television and online. They set up ambitious fundraising ixoperations and formed super PACs to pay for these ads. They opened field offices in key primary and caucus states. They sought endorsements from their fellow Republicans. Some of them employed sophisticated analytics to tailor their messages to targeted audiences. They participated in rigorous prep sessions before each debate. Yet they all lost to a candidate who did none of these things.
Trump’s Republican electoral success may prove to be an anomaly. As this book will show, candidates and their campaign organizations usually employ standard practices as they attempt to manage the race in their favor. Sometimes they innovate, but mostly they go with what they know and assume it will work. Yet this book also will show how fruitless these efforts can be. Campaign organizations have very little control over many—perhaps most—aspects of the election. An incumbent candidate can run a nearly flawless campaign operation, but then lose if the economy tanks. A strong challenger can hire energetic and well-trained staffers who employ innovative campaign techniques, but then lose because incumbents nearly always win. Early in the 2016 race for the Republican presidential nomination, Jeb Bush hired top Republican consultants to run his campaign, and his super PAC was flush with cash. He led early polls and secured endorsements from GOP officials. But then Trump entered the race and everything changed. Neither Bush nor any of the other GOP candidates could convert whatever strategic and resource advantages they possessed into a consistently strong showing in the primaries and caucuses. In different ways, all sixteen of them were shown that campaign operations are often more engaged in managing the chaos around them than exerting control over predictable events.
The purpose of this book is to provide readers with a comprehensive yet accessible overview of modern election campaign practices. The book is premised on the idea that all students (not just political science majors) and indeed all citizens (not just news junkies) need to understand how campaigns operate—how they collect information about voters; how they attempt to change what voters think about the candidates; and how they encourage voters to think and act in certain ways. The book’s analysis will be grounded in dozens of academic studies that assess what works and what does not. Readers will see that campaigns have become remarkably innovative in terms of technology, information management, messaging, communication strategy, and fundraising. But readers also will see that much of what campaigns do is only marginally effective. A campaign might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on clever, methodically targeted xadvertising, but their efforts may be matched and therefore cancelled out by their opponent’s similar investments. A campaign might build a sophisticated field operation informed by sophisticated analytics, but it cannot recruit enough volunteers who are enthusiastic about the candidate. A campaign might develop constructive relationships with various media outlets, but its candidate gets overwhelmingly negative coverage anyway. Deft campaigning never guarantees positive outcomes.
Outline of the Book
A campaign organization’s inability to control election dynamics will first become apparent in chapter 1, which analyzes the importance of the political landscape—or, what some call the “fundamentals,” the “political environment,” or the “campaign context.” The political landscape consists of the “givens” that the campaigns cannot control at all. Campaigns must plan around and adapt to the conditions that make up the landscape. These fundamentals include the composition of the electorate, especially the percentage of the electorate that identifies with each party. The electorate’s demographic composition—race and ethnicity, income and education levels, “religiosity”—also make up part of the landscape. Even more important may be the state of the economy, the mood of the electorate, major external events, and even such specific indicators such as the approval rating of the president. Campaigns also must account for the type of election in which they are running. General elections pitting the two parties against each other have fundamentally different campaign dynamics than intraparty primaries and caucuses. Midterm elections attract different voters than elections held during presidential years. Primaries attract different voters than caucuses. Other consequential “givens” include location-related characteristics such as state-specific election laws and procedures.
How important is the landscape? Political scientists argue that the fundamentals are far more predictive of the outcome than anything the campaigns can control. Models combining indicators of the fundamentals can be used to forecast the results of presidential elections weeks before the general election campaign is underway. These forecasts are accurate enough to prompt the question “Do campaigns matter?” (the title of a seminal political science book on the subject). The answer is yes, campaigns do matter, but usually at the margins, and not nearly as much as campaign operatives like to think, especially at the national level.
xiWe now know that the landscape favored Trump for both the Republican nomination and the general election. The nation’s economy had recovered from the 2008–2009 collapse, but income stagnation and sluggishness in the manufacturing sector fueled acute economic insecurity. Americans were in a sour mood, and many of them blamed politicians in general for the sorry state of things. Nontraditional, antiestablishment candidates such as Donald Trump were poised to benefit (as did Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side). Trump thus stood out in a crowded field of seventeen Republicans candidates running for the nomination. He was one of only two nonpoliticians in the bunch (the other was neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who eventually joined Trump’s cabinet), and he was by far the most famous. In addition, the composition of the Republican primary electorate favored Trump in a number of ways. Republican primary voters are overwhelmingly white, and in 2016 a sufficient number of them were anti-immigrant and more reactionary than they were conventionally conservative. These particular Republican voters were receptive to Trump’s list of antis: antipolitician, anti-immigrant, and antiestablishment, among others.
If the landscape determines so much of the election outcome, where do campaigns fit in? Mostly they plan around and adapt to the landscape; in essence, that is the primary purpose of a campaign operation. chapter 2 turns to key concepts that explain how campaigns adapt. In this chapter, readers are introduced to the concept of targeting as well as the processes of persuasion and mobilization. Electoral targeting is the practice of focusing precious campaign resources on particular people and tailoring messages to fit the relevant characteristics of these individuals. People who can be categorized as likely supporters are targeted with messages that are designed to reinforce their predispositions and then mobilize them to actually cast a vote for the candidate they are inclined to support. Undecided voters are targeted with messages aimed at persuading them to support one candidate over the other. Supporters of the candidate’s opponents are usually ignored unless the campaign determines that additional votes are needed. Ditto for nonvoters, who might be the targets of mobilization efforts but only if they are identified as likely supporters.
Campaigns target because it saves time and money by reducing wasteful outreach to voters who cannot be moved. It also reduces the likelihood that committed opponents will unintentionally receive the campaign’s messages. But as we will see in this chapter, electoral targeting poses serious challenges to a democracy’s ability to foster xiiwidespread participation and intraparty dialogue. In addition, targeting sometimes fails to meet its strategic objectives. Campaigns have less control over targeting outcomes than they would like to think. Surveys indicate that voters find targeting methods distasteful and they respond negatively when they see targeting in action. They are especially turned off when they accidently receive a mistargeted message—that is, a message aimed at a group to which they do not belong. Overall, voters may prefer broad appeals over narrowly targeted messages (Hersh and Shaffner 2013).
How do campaigns determine which potential voters to target and how to target them? Who is persuadable and who has made up their minds? How do campaigns distinguish between reliable voters and those who needed prodding? They collect data. chapter 3 focuses on campaigns’ information-gathering practices. For many campaigns, especially at the national level, the process of identifying voters has become quite sophisticated. Traditionally, campaigns lean heavily on public voter files, which include key indicators such as voting history, contact information, and—in some states—party affiliation and race. Public data can be augmented (for a price) with consumer data provided by private vendors. Volunteer canvassers can add to and update voters’ information in person or by phone. By election day, a well-funded campaigns can build a nearly complete database of politically relevant information about nearly every eligible voter. But as we will see, it turns out that much of that data is either inaccurate or missing. Some of the information is not very useful. And many voters are wrongly classified, resulting in “mistargets” that can backfire, waste the campaign’s time, and result in lost opportunities to reach potential supporters.
Polling also is a crucial element of the effort to gather information about prospective voters. In a campaign poll, a randomly selected subset of the population is questioned about candidate preferences, policy priorities, issue positions, and other relevant opinions and behaviors. But whereas a voter database represents an attempt to record and predict the behavior of each individual voter, polling provides an aggregated big picture of the voting population as a whole. Polls help a campaign answer the candidate’s favorite question: “How am I doing?” They also help campaigns determine where their strengths and weaknesses are. How is the candidate doing among independent women? Among young voters? Among voters who prioritize national security issues? Poll-supplied answers to these questions can help campaigns focus precious resources on areas of weakness. Polls also xiiican be used to assess the impact of key events such as major ad buys and debate performances.
In addition to collecting data about voters, a campaign also gathers information about the candidates—its opponents, of course, but also its own candidate. Opposition research—or “oppo”—is the systematic effort to collect information about opponents’ vulnerabilities and weaknesses. These may include unpopular legislative votes; controversial statements; unfavorable outcomes of policies supported by the candidate; business failures; and scandalous behavior—really, any verifiable documented fact that voters might find objectionable. Oppo usually culminates in a lengthy written report that not only reports the facts but also offers recommendations on how the information may be used by the campaign. Modern opposition research also might include video or links to video showing the opponent making controversial statements or behaving inappropriately. Oppo material is used in television spots and leaked to the media. Campaigns also conduct research on their own candidate to prepare for potential attacks by opponents and damaging news stories.
The media are where most voters experience the election. chapter 4 is about what campaign pros call “earned” or “free” media. That distinguishes earned from “paid” media—advertising and other forms of bought communication—which is the subject of chapter 5. Earned media include news outlets, talk shows, some forms of social media, and even entertainment programming—any media that might cover the election in some way. Campaigns have very little control over this aspect of election communication, despite their efforts to “manage the news.” On one hand, campaigns have become remarkably adept at influencing coverage of the campaign. They hold visually impressive rallies and other events that tend to lead to positive stories. They “spin” reporters’ assessment of debate performances and poll results. They selectively leak oppo to resource-starved news outlets. In some ways, increasingly understaffed media outlets are more vulnerable than ever to these news management strategies. Yet every campaign has at least one horror story about a press conference gone wrong, a half-empty rally with a listless crowd, a gaffe that creates a media “feeding frenzy,” or a disastrous interview with a reporter. The traditional role of news media as gatekeeper may have diminished, but that does not mean that the campaigns have any semblance of direct control over their media coverage. “Fake news” has only added to the chaos. Earned media can be the most frustrating aspect of the election because so much of it is out of the hands of the campaign. xivIt may be “free,” but there are serious costs in terms of time, aggravation, and relative position in the race.
Trump was a master of earned media. He was a perfect news story: a celebrity who made outrageous, unpredictable statements. He refused to follow the script of a typical politician. He inspired extreme reactions, positive and negative. He openly mocked certain journalists and columnists by name, yet—like one of his Republican opponents, Ted Cruz—he was unusually accessible to journalists for informal interviews. His media coverage was overwhelmingly negative, but the amount of coverage he garnered dwarfed that of his opponents. All this “free” media gave Trump a significant advantage in terms of exposure, and it cost him almost nothing financially.
Campaigns can exert far more control over communication when they buy time and space in the form of advertising. Paid media is the subject of chapter 5. This is where campaigns spend most of the money the raise. Advertising on television is particularly expensive, but online and radio spots also drain campaign coffers. Paid media seems worth the money in part because the campaign has complete control over content and production. As we will see in this chapter, advertising can sometimes fulfill its promise by persuading at least a few prospective voters to change their minds about the candidates. But sometimes ad buys fall short. In highly competitive races, both sides will saturate the airwaves with roughly equal amounts of advertising, giving neither side a paid media advantage. Campaigns may control the content and format of their own ads, but they cannot control the response to these ads. Indeed, paid media’s capacity may be overrated. After all, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination despite investing less than $20 million in advertising. Cruz and the independent groups supporting him spent twice that much. Both Trump and Cruz were far outspent by Rubio and Bush (Kurtzleben 2016). Rubio and Bush may have exerted more control over the commercial airwaves, but they did not win more votes.
Trump was far more active on social media, particularly Twitter. In chapter 6, we will examine how campaigns use Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms to compensate for some of the shortcomings of earned and paid media. A growing number of voters experience elections through their newsfeeds. For younger voters, social media dwarf other platforms for election-related information. Campaigns know that. Social media enable campaigns to microtarget the kinds of digital advertising in ways that television cannot. Campaigns also use social media to enlist supporters to advocate on their behalf. xvThey use Facebook status updates and tweets to communicate directly with prospective voters at no cost. Trump, for example, had more than eight million Twitter followers by the end of the Republican nomination campaign. His frequent tweets—he often posted several times a day—potentially reached all of these followers directly, at no cost to the campaign. Yet sometimes his tweets got him in trouble, such as when he posted a pair of photographs: one an unflattering image of Cruz’s wife, Heidi, the other an attractive image of his own wife, Melania, with the caption “A picture is worth a thousand words.” In response, Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward” and told him to “leave Heidi the hell alone.” Pundits seemed to side with Cruz on this one. For at least one news cycle, Trump had lost control of the story.
Trump was far less invested in the “ground game”—the subject of chapter 7. Also called fieldwork or just “field,” this is in many ways the most old-fashioned aspect of the campaign. That is because so much of fieldwork entails one-on-one interaction with potential voters. Field workers spend much of their time canvassing—that is, knocking on doors and talking to citizens in person or on the phone. By outward appearances, the ground game is a low-tech operation.
Looks are deceiving. Actually, the ground game has been at the center of much of the data-driven innovation employed by campaigns since the early 2000s. Advances in fieldwork were triggered in part by political science research showing that door-to-door canvassing actually works—that citizens are more likely to vote if, for example, they are encouraged to do so by a campaign volunteer who encourages them to do so. Intrigued by this evidence, Republicans enhanced traditional canvassing efforts with data that helped them more accurately predict the political orientation of the person answering the door. Democrats caught up and then surpassed Republicans by 2008, when the Obama campaign experimented with a variety of microtargeted voter outreach efforts. These practices have since been employed by many campaigns at the national, state, and even local level.
Even so, a top-notch field operation does not guarantee success. Ted Cruz, for example, led the crowded 2016 GOP field with a state-of-the-art ground game that aimed to identify all likely voters in key primary and caucus states. His campaign’s fieldwork may have propelled Cruz to the top tier of candidates in 2016, beyond where he would have stood otherwise. Yet Cruz won only eleven states. Trump wasn’t even familiar with the term “ground game” until the February, xviand his skeletal field operation reflected that. Yet he won the nomination anyway.
How do campaigns pay for all of this? Campaign finance is the subject of chapter 8. Television advertising in particular can quickly drain campaign coffers. So will the expense of hiring paid consultants, polling, staffing field offices, phone banks, and direct mail. Candidates pay for most of their own expenses by raising campaign contributions from individual donors and PACs. This “hard money” aspect of campaign finance is controlled by the campaigns themselves and is regulated by federal and state agencies. Less regulated are outside groups, which absorb some expenditures. But campaigns are prevented from coordinating their efforts with outside groups. And while candidates can count on at least some support from their political party, they first must secure the party’s nomination, then hope the party deems the race sufficiently winnable to warrant serious investment. The campaign can control neither the amount of support from the party nor the content of support by outside groups. As we will see, parties and outside groups are sometimes less than helpful. Even campaigns with highly successful fundraising operations can be disappointed by the end result. After all, as we will see in chapter 5, the most expensive aspect of the campaign—television advertising—sometimes has minimal/measurable impact on voters’ candidate preferences.
Of course, Trump won both the nomination and the general election without spending much on advertising, field operations, data, or polling. He did not bother raising money because his default strategy—making news by holding massive rallies and saying outrageous things—cost so little. This reality baffled his Republican opponents and their campaigns. Jeb Bush and his super PAC raised tens of millions of dollars and spent much of it on advertising. Ted Cruz built a state-of-the-art field operation. Like Cruz, Marco Rubio possessed strong debate and public speaking skills. Scott Walker’s strength as a popular governor in a key state helped him attract a top-notch staff of experts. None of these strategic assets were enough to beat Trump. Trump caused chaos and his opponents were unable to manage it.
Other candidates and their campaign operations are more successful at managing the unpredictable ebbs and flows of modern election dynamics. This book will describe how they do it. By the end, readers will gain an understanding of how campaigns operate and the implications of their practices for representative democracy.
xviiNational versus State and Local Elections
Most of the examples used in this book refer to federal elections. Presidential campaigns get more attention than races for the U.S. House and Senate, and all three dwarf the book’s treatment of state and local elections. This book draws heavily upon academic research, and the overwhelming majority of election studies center on federal campaigns. I also suspect that students are more familiar with—and interested in—presidential elections.
That said, it is important to acknowledge meaningful differences between the operations of federal campaigns and those for down-ballot candidates. Some of those differences will emerge in the pages that follow. Not surprisingly, presidential campaigns attract the lion’s share of campaign contributions, media coverage, and volunteer energy. U.S. House and Senate races also fare well in these areas, but only if they are competitive. Ditto for governor’s races. But other state-level and local races will struggle to garner resources and attention. Outside of big cities, mayoral candidates will lack the funds to hire a pollster, conduct opposition research, and build a database. Candidates running for a state legislative seat will rely more on candidate-hosted events than paid media and sophisticated social media operations. Canvassing operations will be more improvisational than the ones described in chapter 7. That said, even local and state campaigns apply the core concepts described in this book, even if the terminology is different and the applications are less elaborate. These campaign operations can be remarkably sophisticated, especially when a race is competitive enough to attract the attention of donors, the media, party organizations, and outside groups.
Campaign-Centered Analysis
This book is written from the point of view of the campaign organization, which consists of the advisers, staffers, and volunteers who report to a candidate. To use the terminology of social science, the campaign organization is the book’s unit of analysis, which means it is the entity that frames the investigation. This approach makes sense because the people who work for the campaign are charged with carrying out the core functions described in this book. They interact with the media. They work with media consultants to produce and air advertising. They oversee social media outreach. They add to and xviiimaintain a voter database, hire pollsters, and sponsor opposition research. They raise money to fund their operations.
The approach reflects the reality that elections have long been more candidate-centered than party-centered. Whereas parties once selected their nominees and actually did much of the campaigning, candidates now typically form their own campaign operations before the party gets publicly involved. This is not to say that parties do not matter. Parties play a variety of crucial roles that will be referenced throughout the book. As we will see, parties are responsible for candidate recruitment. Candidates who get their party’s support are more likely to win the nomination. They are the most important source of voter data. And once a candidate secures the nomination, party organizations and affiliated groups play more active supporting roles by spending money on advertising and mobilizing voters to participate. Interest groups carry out many of the same functions. Their support—and the work they do—can be essential. Indeed, it is more useful to think of parties and groups as part of a complex network of organizations that work together to nominate desirable candidates and help them win elections (Masket 2014).
Even so, most of the major strategic decisions are made by the leadership of the campaign organization: the candidate, the campaign manager, various communication staffers, and however many field directors a campaign might need. Their work is the focus of this book. For the most part, they are the campaign. The word “campaign” is commonly used as a shortcut for campaign organization and I have done so here.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank those who have assisted with production of the book, especially Executive Editor Traci Crowell and Assistant Editor Deni Remsberg. Particularly helpful have been former students who have shared their insights over the years as campaign professionals, including Jane Hughes, Jamie Lockhart, Matt Oczkowski, Eric Payne, Gina Hwang, and Adam Zuckerman. The author also wishes to thank the reviewers of this book: Ryan LaRochelle (University of Maine), Laura Sudulich (University of Kent), Rusty Hills (University of Michigan), Brian J. Brox (Tulane University), Annemarie Walter (University of Nottingham), Nicholas Goedert (Virginia Tech), and Todd L. Belt (University of Hawaii at Hilo).
xixREFERENCES
Confessore, Nicholas, and Karen Yourish. 2016. “$2 Billion Worth of Free Media for Donald Trump.” New York Times, March 15: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html.
Hersh, Eitan D., and Brian F. Schaffner. 2013. “Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity.” Journal of Politics 75: 520–534.
Kurtzleben, Danielle. 2016. “CHARTS: Sanders Has Spent the Most on Ads, But Trump Has Spent Best.” NPR, May 19: http://www.npr.org/2016/05/19/ 478384978/on-ads-sanders-has-spent-most-but-trump-has-spent-best.
Masket, Seth. 2014. “Our Political Parties Are Networked, Not Fragmented.” Washington Post (Feb. 14): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/14/our-political-parties-are-networked-not-fragmented/.