It’s another Saturday, so for those who tune in, welcome to a diary discussing the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic Campaign. If you’ve missed out, you can catch up anytime: Just visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide. Every week I try to tackle issues I’ve been asked about, and with the help of other campaign workers and notes, we tackle subjects about how to improve and build better campaigns.
Finding ways to make writing easier certainly is something most writers think about now and again. Following the news? Quick reporting and just the facts. Entertainment? State your opinion. In politics: write a column about how the Democrats are in disarray. The reason that writing that article is so easy isn’t hard to guess — it’s because there are a ton of Democratic officials waiting in the wings to provide you quotes that will back your claim and make you feel as though the sky is falling.
As a group, Democratic party members have a tendency to wring our hands often, and too many find it pretty easy to doubt success all the way until it happens — that way, if something goes wrong, we knew it all along, and it just shows why other people should have listened to us, good old Eeyore.
Breaking out of this negative cycle is a big part of what gets Democratic candidates elected. Ready to stop being Eeyore and think a bit more like Tigger?
The Eeyore Problem — most likely lose it again anyway
Emerging from an adventure with his fellow friends, Eeyore chimed in about the recovery of his tail by saying: “It doesn’t matter, I’ll most likely lose it again anyway”. Sound familiar? Too often Democratic campaigns and leadership slip into pessimism as their default way of communication. It is sometimes difficult to remember that Democratic efforts have largely succeeded when we promoted optimism, not pessimism.
In 1932, FDR campaigned on his unwillingness to surrender to depression, he sold hope and optimism. IN 2008, in the face of economic crisis, Barack Obama sold the American public on optimism with a campaign message of “HOPE”.
Among Democratic campaigns, however, we too often sell disarray — and our own party does it. Find email that says “WE ARE DOOMED”? The more your campaign and advocates talk about doom and sell gloom, the harder it is for people to get involved, after all, who really wants to believe in doom and gloom? People largely want to believe in hope.
Tigger sells opportunity instead
I sometimes wish more campaigns and advocacy organizations could remember back to their childhoods and the lessons they learned as little kids. Optimists tend to be more successful, have more friends, build better relationships. I wish I could tell you the world was different, but that is how it always worked.
This was the key difference between Tigger and Eeyore. They could both see the same problem, and one saw an opportunity and the others saw failure. In some ways, we fight battles that can provide us a chance to promote hope & optimism, and too often we choose to sell fear.
For successful 2018 campaigns, we watched a lot of candidates talk about opposition to Trump, and successful candidates talk about what they thought they could accomplish with an optimistic view. Like it or not, Republicans sold the public on optimism: they would do this and that, the family would have a better life — and the voters bought optimism.
In 2018, Democratic campaigns sold optimism in races for Governor, state house and congress. Sure, some of that hope was that we could stop Trump, but there were also big ideas at stake.
Need a reason to be optimistic? Still a bit eeyore?
In 2016, Donald J Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in Michigan by 10,704 votes. IN 2017, 97,532 Michigan residents died. More new voters came on the rolls. In 2018, an estimated 102,000 in Michigan passed on. And so on.
This same trend occurs everywhere in the country. People are born. People die. People come to voting age. People vote. And things change.
Why bring this up? One of the reasons for the downbeat is that people argue to me: “Why aren’t we chasing the Trump voter from 2016 who we need to get” My answer: because the Trump voters who put him over the margin in those states, well, they are dead. Selling those voters on anything is a giant waste of time.
Instead, realize in every single election the electorate is different. New people are voting, people who voted before aren’t voting this time around. Go out and think to yourself it is a blank slate with a new set of voters and what they want to hear is an optimistic vision of the future. Trying to shape your message to appease people who are dead, well, that’s a great waste of time.
Next week on Nuts & Bolts: Picking good vendors