Every other Tuesday, the team behind Civics 101 joins NHPR’s All Things Considered Host Julia Furukawa to talk about how our democratic institutions actually work.
Behind every political campaign are the consultants who tell candidates what they should say and do. How do they actually run campaigns and how effective are they? Civics 101 host Nick Capodice joined Julia to talk about the nebulous world of political consultants.
Transcript
First off, Nick, who gets to be a political consultant?
The people who get to run political campaigns are usually people who ran a campaign before and were successful. The term for this is “superstitious learning.” So if a team running a campaign wins an election, everyone believes they must be good at winning elections. There are famous campaign strategists who get interviewed dozens of times every election season just because they worked on a campaign 10 or 20 years ago. And this isn't anyone's fault, Julia. There is a very good reason we have no real good idea of what works and what doesn't in any presidential campaign. And that's because it only happens once every four years.
So if we think of a political consultant as a person who is selling a candidate to the American people, what sorts of techniques do they use to do that? Is it like advertising and marketing?
Yeah, the professor I talked to for our episode on this said it is a lot like marketing and advertising, with one massive difference. So think of it more like Coke versus Pepsi, right? Two parties, two sodas. But the difference is every American gets to buy one can of soda every four years. So play that out a little bit. If you're a marketer for Coke, are you going to spend your time trying to actually get someone to switch from Pepsi to Coke? Or maybe just make sure every Coke drinker in America actually goes out and buys that one can of soda every four years.
The truth is, there are lots of things campaign consultants do. They have focus groups. They develop messaging. They choose what to focus on in debates and speeches. But there is little to no evidence about how those choices actually affect an election outcome. Now, big things do affect election outcomes, for sure, but those are external factors like war, or COVID or the current price of oil—not to mention the media landscape is pretty much remade every four years. Would George W. Bush make a viral TikTok video? Does James Carville, who famously worked on Bill Clinton's campaign, understand how to promote something on Instagram? Julia, I do not know.
The discourse around who decides what presidential candidates say on the campaign trail ramped up a lot leading into the 2024 election. I'm thinking of the Democratic Party's use and subsequent lack of use of the term “weird.” Can you tell us a little about what happened there?
That was an interesting moment, Julia. Gov. Tim Walz was on a morning talk show, and he dropped this line about the GOP saying, “these guys are [just] weird.” And it blew up. Kamala Harris started saying it in speeches. Former President Barack Obama made jokes in the same vein, and it got a massive reaction. People like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Ben Shapiro, they reacted so quickly and so negatively to this word “weird.” But as soon as it started, it stopped.
So I spoke to a campaign consultant who said that this abrupt cessation of messaging only comes from testing. Consultants spoke to thousands of Americans and determined that the weird messaging wasn't working, so they stopped immediately. Now, would the election have gone a different way if that messaging had kept going? We don't know. We have no way of knowing. But what we do know is that in this last election, there really were two overarching messages, very powerful ones. One candidate said, everything is broken and only I can fix it, while the other said, the world is really complicated and we're going to just do the best we can to make it better. And when things aren't going too well in a country, that second message is far less appealing.
