I often see posts saying Dem’s need to improve their messaging. But none get down to the nitty gritty, limiting themselves instead to generalities like, “We have to better understand who we’re talking to.” Or “We have to speak their language”. All of which is true but doesn’t really get down to it. (If you’ve seen anything that drills deeper, I’d love to get the links.)
Here I’m talking about opposing Trump’s agenda, building opposition to mass deportation, tax cuts for the rich, large scale tariffs, abortion bans, climate recidivism, etc.
Also, although I’m recommending we pick one issue to focus on, I don’t mean we ignore the others. All those issues need to be opposed, and I’m sure they will be.
But, for a concentrated effort, I’d choose an issue where support is weak among rank and file republicans. My suggestion is to go after tax cuts, for several reasons. One, unlike tariffs and deportations, Trump needs legislation passed for tax cuts. Secondly, most of the other issues have fairly strong constituencies among republicans, whereas tax cuts help only a small group. For the rest of republicans, it’s an abstract non-issue. Finally, of all the items in Trump’s agenda, tax cuts most impact the ongoing balance of power between the very rich and the rest of us. More money for the rich means more political power..
Whether you agree with this choice or not, the following is an example of how a systematic effort might work and how proven ad principles would support it.
Our strategy would be to get middle-of-the-road republican congress people, who might not be crazy about tax cuts, to hold fast and not cave at the last minute like they usually do. I mean Murkowski, Collins, and others in both the senate and the house.
It would be a two-pronged attack. First, get the best Dem debaters like Buttigieg, Newsome, Crockett, and others to go on Fox, Newsmax, Rogan, and other right wing podcasters to argue the issue. Otherwise we’d just have Dem congress folk and some liberal pundits railing against the cuts, but only the liberal-leaning channels and podcasters would carry it. Most republicans would never see it.
Second, advertise only in the states where these moderates reside, focusing on ad buys in the same channels we send our best debaters to.
The ad campaign should follow three time-proven principles.
1 The first is: ”Find the WIFMs”. Or the “What’s In It For Me’s”. In the ad biz, this is expressed by the old adage, “Talk about my lawn, not your grass seed.”
So, where do tax cuts impact the ordinary middle class or poorer Republicans?
The impact would come from cuts in the ACA (Medicaid) and social security, which republicans will need to offset their reduced taxes. If a middle class republican wouldn’t personally be affected by these program cuts, most will have relatives or friends that would.
2 The second principle is: pain motivates more than gain. An article or ad on “How to Save Money on your Advertising” will usually not draw as much attention as “Are You Wasting Your Ad Dollars?”. In our case, “Save Social Security” isn’t likely to do as well as “Ready to Lose Your Social Security?”
Dems already employ this principle consistently in fundraising efforts. Note that the subject lines of the fundraising emails you get rarely say things like, “We can win in Wisconsin”. Instead they say, “We’re about to lose this key house seat”. It’s just a fact of human motivation; negatives move us more than positives.
3 The third is testing, another tactic that Dems use when it comes to fundraising. Obama’s fundraisers started each day by mailing as many as nine different subject line emails to very small subsets of Dems. The top one or two in terms of “opens” were then rolled out to the greater list.
I know from experience (four decades in marketing) that even so-called ad pros can’t regularly predict which out of a series of ad headlines or email subject lines will work best. I’d guess the pros do somewhat better than amateurs, being right maybe 55% to 45% of the time over the amateurs. But I think that’s mainly because, given the choice, say, of five headlines, the pros would be able to rule out one or two as having no chance whatsoever. As for the other three or four choices, the pros probably do only marginally better than the amateurs.
One thing the pros do know is that their gut sense of “That would be a great headline” is BS. For example, the top-testing fundraising email subject line Obama’s team found one day was simply the word, “Hey”.
Now, testing online and news channel advertisements re tax cuts is harder than toting up opens for email campaigns or link clicks for online direct response ads. For news channel ads, we’d need to do major surveys before and after each one in order to, with luck, get an idea of their impact. All of which costs too much and takes forever. So, before rolling out online ads, we’d need to rent lists of registered republicans and send them three or four different email subject lines (following the WIFM and pain-over-gain principles) and see which ones get the most opens. We’d get results in a few days. Then we’d use that wording for the ad headlines, ad/social media video captions, and possibly for rolling out an email or even snail mail campaign to republican lists. Plus our debaters could echo that messaging. Our goal would be to popularize messaging that makes moderate republicans leery of caving.
Who would drive such a campaign? I’m guessing the best bet is a PAC run by folks who aren’t too full of themselves. It could even be a small-donor PAC, if we had the time to create it. (Hey, we’re good at fundraising.)
