ATLANTA — Whether it’s the antique boat show at Lake Hartwell or the carnival surrounding the Masters Tournament, the candidates have begun the visible phase of their primary campaigns.
The months of fundraising and phone calls to party bigwigs were supposed to lay the foundation for this new phase of ads, debates and canvasing. While the fundraising and schmoozing never really ends, it has to be sandwiched between public appearances and heightened volunteer activities, like leafleting parking lots and knocking on doors.
Campaign managers who had been losing sleep hoping their war chests would be full for this phase are now losing sleep hoping they have devised an effective message strategy and that their candidates will stick to it.
Those messages are aimed at the rank-and-file party members who are making their minds now with the intention of voting early. Independents who are the least engaged and tend to decide on a candidate at the last moment — often in the voting booth — are also a target audience, just not the main one yet.
Delivering those messages will be advertising, largely determined by budget. The richest candidates use broadcast television, the most expensive but also what experts consider among the most effective medium. At this stage, the ads will be around news broadcasts before shifting to the sitcoms and reality shows watched by the late-deciding independents — particularly women — who avoid the news.
Cable shows, online ads, direct mail, radio spots, web videos, yard signs, bumper stickers, billboards and printed nail files constitute the order of effectiveness, cost and sophistication of the other media. Candidates with enough money will use all of them, and the absence of any elements illustrates the limit of a campaign’s financial resources.
Missing from the list is newspaper advertising because campaign managers concluded long ago that newspaper readers aren’t swayed by ads but by facts objectively reported, which ensures the necessity of “earned media” in the form of news coverage and opposition research in the form of tips to reporters about opponents’ flaws. A classic tactic is to get some newspaper, even a small one with limited circulation, to produce a negative headline that can then be used in a TV ad to persuade the independents even if the story doesn’t change any minds among the newspaper’s own readers.
What aren’t visible in this phase of campaigns are efforts being made for the coming ground war critical to boosting turnout. Because so many voters who hate politics can’t avoid news about the president, they tend to only vote in presidential elections. Getting them to vote and to choose a particular candidate in an off year like 2014 requires considerable effort.
The Barack Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 developed stunningly effective techniques to reach these reluctant voters, largely through social media, email and precisely targeted canvasing. By their nature, these techniques are only obvious to the receiver rather than to outside observers like political reporters and rival campaigns, which is why Republicans were caught off guard by them both years Obama ran.
Staking yard signs on busy roads is a clear tipoff of a campaign’s activity. Blasting thousands of text messages to individual voters isn’t.
The question of get-out-the-vote tactics is also a mystery to pollsters because they don’t know how to adjust the raw results to match expected turnout. If the tactics are successful, there may be more young voters or women or blacks than in a typical off year, rendering a poll inaccurate if it is adjusted to account for the demographic mix of past elections in non-presidential years.
While political junkies can only speculate about what campaign is using which turnout techniques, they do have a front-row seat for watching the air war played out on their television screens. They’ll be making particular note of who has a coherent message and who switches to attack mode and whether the attacked candidates respond in a way that furthers their own message or that strays from it. There should be scorecards printed up for tracking the hits, strikeouts and errors.
For amateur scorekeepers, the first step is to isolate the core message from the trappings. Consider who the target is, such as a candidate talking about taxes or national defense is usually going after men while one talking about education or abortion rights is after younger voters and women.
Then, analyze future messages to see how closely they stick to that original message. It can actually make watching political ads fun, and it’s why diehard politicos are glad their wait is over for this visible phase to finally arrive.
Walter Jones is the Atlanta bureau chief for Morris News and has been covering Georgia politics since 1998. Follow him on Twitter @MorrisNews and Facebook or contact him at walter.jones@morris.com.
