Chapter Nine: The General Election Campaign
After winning the Republican Party’s nomination in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency without ever leaving his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and without making a single speech. One hundred years later, Republican nominee Richard Nixon traveled 65,000 miles, made 212 speeches, visited all fifty states—and lost. The day of the “front-porch” presidential campaign that was the custom during Lincoln’s time is long gone. Today’s general election contest is an elaborate production, with the candidates and their supporters crisscrossing the country and blanketing the airwaves with poll-tested political commercials.
With the primaries and the conventions behind them, the goal of the presidential candidates during the fall is to appeal to as many different kinds of people in as many different ways as possible. To accomplish this in a country where more than 200 million individuals are eligible to vote is a staggering task. It requires an effective national organization, enormous discipline on the part of the candidates and their campaigns, and large numbers of staff and volunteers, not to mention a great deal of money.
Campaign Strategy, Part I: A Shift to the Center
The fall brings with it a number of strategic decisions for the candidates and their campaign organizations. But perhaps the most important decision facing the candidates as they approach the general election season is how to refine their message so it resonates with a majority of the American electorate.
Why tinker with a message that worked fine in the primaries? Because in the primaries the candidates were appealing to voters of their own parties, but now they are trying to connect with a much larger audience. This means they need to adopt a more mainstream message, a message with broad appeal, beyond the party faithful.
“Shifting to the center,” as it is called, is often a tightrope walk for the candidates, because they don’t want to offend their primary supporters or make it appear as though they are abandoning their earlier commitments. In 2000, for example, George W. Bush had appealed to the Republican Party’s religious conservatives in successfully fending off the challenge of a more centrist and reformist candidate, Senator John McCain. In the fall election, his slogan “compassionate conservatism” and his proposal for a limited prescription drug plan for seniors helped him make the case to moderate voters that he was not a hard-line right-winger.
Campaign Strategy, Part II: Targeting a Candidate’s Appeal
At the same time that the candidates have to reach out to a broad cross section of the American electorate, they must also decide how to target their campaigning for maximum effect. Because of the limited amounts of time and money available to candidates, it simply isn’t possible for them to wage a full-fledged campaign in every state or among all voters. This means that the candidates have to focus on specific states and regions that they feel will be decisive in determining the winner of the election. For a well-run campaign, that means keeping your eye on the Electoral College votes required to win the election. It also means that the candidates have to target their appearances and their advertising to specific groups of voters. To help cover the many places they can’t visit, candidates rely on state and local party organizations to generate interest in the campaign and turn out the vote.
Campaign Tactics, Part III: Four Campaigns at Once
Today’s presidential candidates essentially wage four campaigns at the same time. The first is the grassroots campaign. While the candidates themselves have little direct involvement in it, national campaign staff help to give it direction. It includes hundreds of local campaign headquarters and party organizations, from which volunteers and a few paid staff reach out into local communities. They register voters, make phone calls, send out mail, help friendly voters apply for absentee ballots, put up signs, do door-to-door canvassing, and get out the vote on Election Day. While each of these activities is small in scale, when multiplied by thousands, their combined impact can carry a state.
The second level of campaigning is “on the ground,” and includes all of the candidate’s appearances and speeches, as well as the appearances throughout the country of key supporters, from the candidate’s spouse and children to the vice presidential nominee, Hollywood celebrities, and prominent party leaders. The on-the-ground campaign is tightly controlled by the candidate’s campaign organization, with advance teams scoping out locations, rounding up enthusiastic, cheering crowds, and creating compelling visuals for television by placing the candidate before a dramatic backdrop and distributing truckloads of banners, signs, and American flags among the crowd.
The primary goal of this ground campaign is to attract media attention—more specifically, to get the candidate and surrogates on the local television news. Unless it is an enormous event, more people will see the event on the news than in person, and if the television coverage presents the candidate in a favorable light, then the campaign has done its job. The ground campaign does serve other functions as well: It helps energize the candidate’s supporters, build the organization, and turn out voters on Election Day.
The third campaign in which the candidates are engaged is an on-the-air battle of radio and television commercials. This advertising is the most expensive line item in the campaign budget—an estimated one-third of the more than $1.2 billion spent on the 2004 presidential campaign. Much of this money is spent through media consultants. The advertising gives the candidates massive nationwide exposure that they couldn’t possibly achieve on the ground. It takes the campaign directly into voters’ living rooms and allows the candidates to project a fine-tuned, poll-tested image.
The fourth and newest arena consists of the fast-evolving world of the Internet. This includes candidate Web sites and their presence on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, as well as campaign blogs (which also means monitoring the flow of messages in the blogosphere and responding quickly to them). One big challenge here is finding staffers who are both politically savvy and who understand the norms of Web communities well enough to win “friends” for their candidates and generally make their bosses look cool.
The Debates: A Viewer’s Guide
Some suggestions on what a savvy observer might look for in the fall debates between the major candidates.
• Identify the candidate’s debate strategy. Does the candidate speak directly to the issues, provide specifics, and present new policies or information? Or is the candidate being more cautious, perhaps seeking to protect a lead in the opinion polls? Is the candidate spending more time attacking the opponent(s) than explaining his or her own views?
• Pay close attention when the candidates talk about how to solve problems. How detailed are their policy prescriptions, or are they trying to keep things vague?
• Think about what issues concern you most. Listen carefully to the candidates’ answers on the issues you care most about. How do they compare with your own views on those issues? Does it sound like those issues are a priority for the candidates?
• Don’t let appearances guide your reactions. A common criticism of debates is that they are driven by image and appearances. Try to listen for the substance of the speakers’ answers.
From the book, Choosing the President 20008: A Citizen’s Guide to the Electoral Process.Copyright 2008 by the League of Women Voters
Used by permission of Globe Pequot Press, www.globepequot.com
