"A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure.” - Henry Kissinger
There are various types of polls on campaigns. Tracking polls provide frequent snapshots of the actual horserace and serve to guide where resources such as media buys, direct mail and field should be diverted. Tracking polls are relatively inexpensive, and near the end of the campaign can be conducted on an almost daily basis.
Messaging polls are far more expensive and are conducted less frequently. Each messaging poll may cost a campaign tens of thousands of dollars. And for $20,000 or $40,000 or $60,000, you receive in return a sea of data, beautifully arranged in data sets, broken down every which way imaginable. The sheer weight of a poll briefing book in your hands gives comfort that the tens of thousands of dollars were worth it.
Beyond the cost incurred, it's not surprising that campaigns value message polling from a strategic perspective. Polling is elemental in campaigns, as it provides vital insight into large-scale trends. What often happens in politics, however, is that these polls are overvalued. Under the pressure of a campaign, the ordinary becomes extraordinary and a single data set that should be used as part of an overall strategy becomes the strategy itself. The result is a brilliant adherence to poll-tested talking points, no matter how ineffectual they may be in practice.
Democrats are often accused of lacking message discipline, but on the whole, Democratic campaigns are just as successful as their Republican counterparts at sticking to those poll-tested talking points or concepts. We often are slow in deciding which message to embrace, but once that item is settled, Democrats generally follow the political playbook of "rinse and repeat" talking points pretty well. Indeed, it's being too successful in following the polls that can lead to losses, large and small.
Talk to any pollster and they will likely tell you that polls are merely a snapshot of public opinion in a given instant. No more, no less. But when confronted with the pressure of falling behind, rather than use polls to determine how to change course, campaigns often use polls to solidify the status quo.
Take health care for example. Polling informs us of who is winning the debate at the current moment. Republicans dominated the debate on health care reform while Democrats struggled to react. Accordingly, support for "the President's health care plan" was low (even though support for the individual elements of the plan polled extraordinarily well, upwards of 70%). The polls reflected the fact that, in that snapshot of time, Republican tactics prevailed over Democratic ones.
Rather than looking at that data and devising a strategy to change tactics and defend health care reform in some other fashion, many Democrats cringed and avoided any talk of health care reform all together. Republican talking points about government takeover of healthcare received more air, and consequently, the next poll would confirm for Democrats that voters were sour on health care reform (this in turn validated Democratic inaction). The polls, in all their radiant data points, set the strategy in stone. Health care reform was dead as a campaign selling point. A landmark legislative achievement (flawed as it was) became a campaign liability in races across the country.
This is how poll addiction cripples campaigns. It causes strategists to be forever looking down into a poll book, down at the score at the moment rather than glancing up and looking forward to an innovative strategy ahead. It creates a shallowness in messaging where buzzwords that poll well become the solitary selling point without further explanation or execution. Any journalist will tell you that press releases read like a glitch in the Matrix, with the same phrases (i.e. "job-killing health care") repeated over and over and over again. PR flacks will obsess with including these phrases in press releases and speeches because if the message is good, message discipline generally works. But there is message discipline and then there is being a slave to the message, even if it's not working.
In August of 2009, I walked into the campaign headquarters of Alexi for Illinois as a new staffer on the campaign. I spent a great deal of time in the beginning analyzing online messaging, on both the left and the right. I pored through hundreds of websites for federal and state office, studying the messages used and how those messages were conveyed online. As I clicked through one sign up page after another, I quickly noticed that the prominent theme on Republican and Democratic websites was "moving forward."
Insert your state here. "Moving Illinois forward." "Moving Wisconsin forward." "Moving Florida forward." The same cropped yearbook-like photos of candidates always grinning back at me, the same phrase branded with such gusto on every page.
It was then that I began what quickly became known as "Georgia's List of Banned Words & Phrases." It was mainly a collection of bland, clearly poll-tested buzzwords that were devoid of meaning. They were overused platitudes slick with the banality of tired politics and stale ideas. I vowed to never use any of the phrases in my online work. The list stayed up on my wall from that summer until the very last day of the campaign.
A year later, in August of 2010, President Obama held a reception for the campaign in Chicago. He delivered his "car in the ditch" speech and had the crowd cheering. For the die hard Democrats in the room, the message was already familiar. The message worked.
By then, the national party had long chosen to take up the "moving forward" banner. The reason was obvious -- they chose to use it because, as any campaign could tell them, it polled well. If voters were asked if they preferred to go back to Bush policies or "move forward," they'd chose "moving forward" like a kid choosing to watch Glee instead of 60 Minutes.
It's no surprise then that "moving forward" was the Democratic crescendo. But even as I heard the President deliver the message, I was struck by how even Barack Obama couldn't execute the poll-tested phrase into a viable campaign strategy.
The problem with the "moving forward" campaign was that it begged the question -- moving forward to what? And instead of answering that question -- instead of communicating to voters a 21st century vision of America -- the speeches, rallies and debates described a litany of Republican malfeasance and then simply promised something better..."moving forward."
If we as a party were to adopt Toyota's "moving forward" brand, the least I had hoped was that we wouldn't adopt their flaw at the time of constantly moving forward, freewheeling and desperately trying to find some footing. But that's what happened.
Rather than stopping and explaining to voters what the Democratic Party could do for them moving forward, Democrats skated ahead, riding the fumes of the phrase "moving forward" on an endless messaging road with no real end in sight. Few Democrats expounded on the phrase as a campaign theme.
On the right, the execution of poll-tested phrases fared much better. The concept of "taking America back" lit a fire under the Republican base, and GOP leaders delivered a clear vision of what they meant by that phrase. Granted, it was about taking us decades or centuries back, but at the very least they presented a vision of their ideal America. No taxes, lots of guns, and a government shrunk so small you could barely see its shadow in your backyard. They created context for the poll-tested concepts. And across the country, they won.
Context is the bridge between phrases that poll well on paper and checkboxes next to a candidate's name on a ballot. The most successful candidates are those who study polling but at not blinded by it and who can translate a poll-tested concept into a deeper communication of ideals, policy and vision (see Harry Reid's campaign on jobs for a stunning example of this).
Polling is simultaneously expensive and priceless. It is indispensable, and its glittering data shines a light on the politics of the moment. But at the end of the day, no matter how much pollsters are paid, the information contained in polls is simply the gritty snapshot of public opinion at that instant. Public opinion is fickle and ever pliable, and the best campaigns are those that recognize that the real role of polls is to provide fuel for a more comprehensive strategy going forward.
This is Part 2 of a series analyzing political campaigns. You can read the introduction to the series here, and Part 1 ("Call Time") here.