As lax as America’s campaign finance laws are, there’s at least one bright red line that no political operative can cross without fear of legal consequences: candidates and the PACs that support them are forbidden to coordinate their efforts.
Among many other things, that means that candidates can’t tell their PAC friends (called ‘independent expenditure groups,’ or ‘IEs’ in the lingo) what messaging the campaign would like them to transmit in their ‘independent’ advertising efforts. Similarly, campaigns can’t produce content (such as video of the candidate) for their IEs’ use.
Fortunately or unfortunately, that bright red line is child’s play to sidestep, with the aid of a simple red box.
Think of the ‘red box’ as the political equivalent of spycraft’s ‘dead drop:’ a means of surreptitiously passing communications or materials between conspirators without requiring them to interact directly, thus conferring plausible deniability.
The graphic above summarizes how red-boxing works. A campaign that wishes to share something with its IE friends (typically strategically significant b-roll footage) simply links to that shareable thing via a plain red box on the campaign’s web site. Friendly PACs, in turn, keep an eye out for a red box appearing on their favored candidate’s web site, and consider its contents to be communications or hand-offs of materials to them. To avoid confusion, professionally managed campaigns avoid boxing in red anything on their web site that isn’t a communication to PACs.
Political observers read the red boxes of candidates they favor, as well as those they oppose, the way some other folks read the news: voraciously, every morning, afternoon, and evening, fearful lest they miss something. A well-managed red box’s content is dynamic, with new material appearing in it, and old material disappearing, to signal the campaign’s request for PACs to change course in their messaging.
That dynamism makes red-boxing a two-edged sword. Foes of the candidate can glean insight into what his campaign is thinking, where it’s going next, and what its self-perceived weaknesses are by reading between the lines of what comes and goes from his red box: what’s there and what’s not there. Is the campaign ready for its friends to go negative? Should they focus on his primary opponent, or on his likely opponent in the general? Or should they just stick to talking about what a swell guy he is? His red box will tell them.
Reading red box tea leaves is a guilty pleasure I’ll admit to being somewhat addicted to myself.
For instance: as I write, NC-Sen primary candidate Cal Cunningham’s red box is brimming with b-roll footage of Cal nodding and listening attentively to reg’lar folk, set to the tune of sleep-inducing elevator music. Casual observers will find this vaguely odd but otherwise unnoteworthy.
Yet to NC’s knowledgeable political observers it communicates that Cal’s campaign views its famously leaked windowless basement strategy as a negative for him that needs to be addressed right now please, by friends pushing out images of Cal raptly attentive to the people — and particularly to people of demographic persuasions the campaign feels a bit shaky about, preferably beside bright sunny definitely-not-basement windows.
Not every candidate uses the red box. Those who are ethically opposed to gaming campaign finance laws rigorously eschew it...as do those who simply don’t have an ice cube’s chance in hell of winning any PAC support, or those who are wealthy enough to be free to ignore PACs. Similarly, not every red box is a red-box (this can lead to particularly amusing consequences when a campaign’s volunteer webmaster is ignorant of what red boxes mean in contemporary American politics).
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But a cigar in a red box is special.
