We Massachusetts voters who watched the Brown-Coakley match may have a different impression of the race than what the Villagers along the Potomac think. It was a perfect storm: Brown ran a marvelous campaign, and Coakley ran a wretched one. The easiest way to win an election, then, is to run against Martha Coakley. But absent getting the Republicans to clone her, that's not much of a lesson.
But Democrats can learn by seeing what worked for Brown, and by not doing what didn't work for him. Triangulating on the issues isn't the issue. Real voters do not see the world as a left-right continuum. Tacking left or right is not helpful. Connecting with the right voters? That does it every time.
Lesson one: Triage of the electorate. It was clear that Brown's campaign understood that there were three types of voters:
- Maybe 40% of Massachusetts voters are yellow-dog Democrats and not accessible to him. So ignore them. It was up to Coakley to bring out her vote, not his to be visible to them.
- Maybe 25% of Massachusetts voters are Republicans. They're his base. They were enthusiastic. And he didn't have to worry about winning them over. So he didn't waste an effort on them. He dogwhistled some issues to them, and made sure they knew he was their guy, but he didn't overtly run as one of them.
- The rest of the voters were potentially in play. THAT's who he focused on. And his team used modern marketing techniques to target them.
So who were the swing voters? In Massachusetts, the largest group could be characterized as lower-middle-class white Catholics. They tend to live in the outer suburbs, where housing is cheaper than the inner suburbs. Seriously rural Western Massachusetts went for Coakley (she's from there, but it's heavily Democratic), but the middle of the state, outside of the City of Worcester, was Brown country.
Lesson two: Fit in personally with your voters.
So how do you win those voters? You talk to them with respect and act like you're listening. So Brown stumped all over the place, getting press attention for visits to diners and other establishments where targeted voters gathered. He did this in an old GMC pickup truck. That's a symbol! This isn't Texas. Pickup trucks aren't common, due to snow! SUVs are the enclosed trucks that play the same role in snow country. Pickups are more macho, though.
The main people here with pickup trucks are those who need them for work, like carpenters. Those are swing voters. The construction industry has collapsed, of course, and that means lots of guys with trucks are angry. So Brown's nearly incessant early-campaign TV commercials featured his truck. He pratically made love to his truck on TV. He's really a rich lawyer with a rich TV reporter wife, but he looked like a foreman.
You can't pull this off if your image is already established. Mike Dukakis or John Kerry in a pickup? Might as well be that tank! But Brown was a newcomer. His team, not ours, created his image. It worked.
One of his most effective ads was to put up a picture of President Kennedy and quote him on calling for a tax cut. This faded to Brown asking for a "Kennedy tax cut". Eisenhower-era income tax rates were very high, up to 91%! There was a mild recession in 1960 and lower taxes would have helped. Congress did not pass Kennedy's tax cut; Johnson got it passed in 1964, when it wasn't needed, and Johnson's war, not paid for by taxes, created an inflation monster. But Brown just pretended that he was a JFK-loving independent who just wanted to create jobs the way JFK would. This tactic helped neutralize his party identity among independents.
Lesson three: Be fuzzy on the issues, strong on the mood.
Brown didn't propose a health care plan of his own, but he knew that the last plan to pass in Washington, the Senate plan, was unpopular. Massachusetts already has HCR with a very similar plan, but without a "Cadillac tax". Since Massachusetts insurance rates are very high, a high percentage of his voters (who tended to old) would be hit by it. So he had a target. Still, his campaign did not dwell on HCR!
He tried to channel generic voter anger, without looking too hateful. In 1978, Edward "Jet" King defeated Gov. Dukakis with a campaign tactic he described as "We put all of the hate groups into a pot and let it boil". Brown looked much more level-headed than one-termer King.
He mostly talked about "listening to the voters". His greatest line was "it's the people's seat". This was his retort to the press description of it as the Kennedy seat. Of course the "people" he had in mind were the virtual people called corporations, but hey... that's an unpopular detail. He talked about creating jobs, but had no real answer other than tax cuts. He talked about "getting attention". He got that!
He did get some attention by coming out in favor of torture. That certainly offended Coakley's Democratic base. But his team no doubt tested the message on his targeted voters, and they liked it. This made him look tough. Working class white voters like toughness. And they don't like Muslims. Dukakis got creamed in 1988 when he fumbled a debate question about capital punishment, a major wedge issue. Brown ran with it. Torture is not going to create jobs; it was about portraying image.
Lesson four: Attack negative campaigning while practicing it
Brown's official campaign did not start out negative. His "I approve" ads were about making himself look friendly. But third-party ads running on his behalf were strongly negative about Coakley. Coakley's side then ran negative ads about Brown, noting in particular his position against giving emergency contraception to rape victims. Brown did not do a full Glenn Beck: Crying is not macho. But he did the macho equivalent, a serious and indignant-looking retort that he was being maligned. He loudly declared that SHE was going negative.
Negative advertising is tricky. It works, especially in the American system of two-candidate death-match tournaments. But people say they don't like it. So Brown carefully had it both ways. Coakley had no idea how to react. During her two-week campaign, third parties ran negative ads against Brown, but most focused on issues like abortion and the environment that targeted the Democratic base, not the swing voters. See Lesson One. This was a wasted effort. It made Coakley look negative without weakening Brown.
You don't have to be Republican to run a smart campaign like Brown's. Democrats can play too. We need professional media people who know how to identify the swing voters and craft the right messages. Democrats have positions that can help almost everyone; only the very rich really have much to lose from our positions. But Republicans have been better at marketing themselves. Let's turn that around. And let's do it by this November!