America's 'New' Permanent Campaigns
This is the era of the "new" permanent campaign, says author and pollster Michael D. Cohen. The idea comes from a term coined by Jimmy Carter's pollster (and later Trump whisperer) Pat Caddell. Weeks after helping guide Carter to victory in the 1976 presidential election, Caddell drafted a memorandum to the president-elect on the subject of how to govern once in the White House. He advised Carter that "governing with public approval requires a continuing campaign." This meant giving off the kinds of signals that voters expected from the one-term Georgia Governor, using television and radio to convey what the president was doing while staying ahead of the news cycle and always making his case for the next election. Carter approved of Caddell's advice, writing "Excellent" on the memo's cover page.
With the explosion of social media and 24-hour political news, it's become more important than ever "to keep all aspects of campaigns in play, including fundraising, grassroots, and paid media to remain relevant while the world moves," Cohen told us from his home in Virginia. Speed kills, and it's making it "more difficult to govern, let alone run campaigns with strategic, focused messaging." In his new book Modern Political Campaigns, Cohen lays out in plain language what it takes to run for public office, describing field operations, campaign planning and management, and, of course, focus groups and polling. It's an accessible-yet-enlightening book for aspiring political professionals, but also for any reader who wants to go deeper into the methods used by political experts to get an edge in the competition for voters' affections. The author took a break from various projects to speak with us about mail-in voting, trust in elections, and 2024. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
More mail-in voting will be one of the enduring legacies of the pandemic 2020 election. While there is cross-partisan desire for more mail-in voting, the issue does have significant political ramifications. Unpack mail-in voting for readers. If "election day" becomes "election week,” how does that change the work of campaigns?
In many areas Election Day has already become Election Week, and it has changed how campaigns approach their Get-Out-The-Vote activities. Where five years ago you would put together a campaign plan with the big day in mind and plan backwards, now you have less time in a campaign and more of a sustained effort at the end of campaigns. As I said in the book, political campaigns are exhausting and keeping people involved at the end is super difficult. Now that Election Days have become Election Weeks, the amount of mail, broadcast and social media, and turnout field staff makes the endgame of campaigns harder on both the teams and the voters. It places a premium on being able to identify and track voters as they vote so you do not inadvertently annoy voters who already made their choices. It’s a database problem, a management challenge, a volunteer burnout issue, and a voter identification needle-in-a-haystack game all in one.
Polling obviously has value to candidates, which you cover in detail along with focus groups and other modeling. But we saw polling in 2020 and 2016 that was plain wrong. What are differences in usefulness and precision between internal polling and public-facing polling?
Let me gently take issue with the premise for a moment. The 2016 and 2020 polling was within the margin of survey error for national polling in both cases. Where it was off, it was in specific states where the level of expertise varies and the sample sizes are generally smaller. Now, to be fair, that really matters in our electoral system. So, the quality of polling in Florida, Arizona, or Pennsylvania is crucial to understanding if it’s going to be a short or a long night for either party’s candidates. Some of those organizations polling in states do not use the voter rolls for sampling survey respondents and even fewer do the kind of modeling that national pollsters do to evaluate who intends to vote. These are under-the-hood decisions that greatly impact the quality of data you see in your RealClearPolitics averages.
Now, internal polling is there for two main reasons. First, to give candidates a strategic view of the field, what issues are interesting and motivating to voters, and what positive and negative messages are impactful. This helps set all aspects of the campaign plan. Second, tracking allows campaigns to understand if any of those pieces are moving and if tactical changes need to be made in message, delivery, or audience. All of this is much more interesting than the topline of who is winning and who is losing. The internal polls generally are of much higher quality because they know exactly how many votes they need to win, where, and under what conditions, and sample accordingly. This is both an art and a science.
Finally, I make the argument in the book that pollsters would be best served to be more transparent when they release their surveys to the public. Show the crosstabs. Show the questionnaires. Explain when the survey was conducted and if there were adjustment and assumptions in the data. All of this would lead to greater confidence in the results because, as we know, home telephones are gone and much of this research is done with either mobile lines, through text messages to the web, or email to web, or a combination of all of these, which is recommended because you can cover different members of the voter population.
The money raised by one candidate might end up funding the party, another candidate, or a nonprofit group. To what degree is one candidate's campaign serving the interests of a party, another politician, or an idea or interest group?
This has been a major shift over the past 25 years. Campaign accounts are more often to stay open as elected officials simply refill after Election Day. Sharing money from that account with parties or other candidates is mainly for folks who are pursuing leadership positions because nothing says "I love you” in politics like a campaign check from your account to another candidate or party. This is a key component of the New Permanent Campaign, and it led to a professionalism of fundraising because after the day after the race is over, the next one begins for reelection or leadership.
Politicians lacking a reserve of public trust are always putting their finger into the air, testing the political winds. Politicians with trust are more likely to act on a guiding principle than seek to pre-test every decision with focus groups or data. Tell me about the relationship between the boom in modeling/analytics and declining social trust in politicians.
The boom in modeling and analytics has had a perverse impact on declining social trust in politics and candidates for office. As I argue in the book, knowing more about your audience should result in a more respectful environment where messaging is more individualistic and meets you where you are. It should lead to more voter engagement during campaigns and higher turnout. Instead, campaigns have used these tools to identify and maximize their own bases, pushing messages further left and right, and meeting people where they are at their angriest. This may drive up turnout but it makes the entire experience less engaging and miserable. As both parties max out in their ability to reach their bases, they are going to find that there are a lot of people closer to the middle who are dropping out of campaigns, turning away from political media, not donating as much money, and in some cases not voting as much. That won’t matter in primaries and gerrymandered districts but it will in non-partisan local races and statewide contests. There is a reckoning coming for both parties and I think the campaign that sees the opportunity will use the data in a different way, to build from the center out rather than the edges inward. It will take only one high-profile and unexpected win for this to move the whole field and I’m looking forward to it. The plateau is here. Someone else is going to see this and win a big race and it may prove transformative.
Finally, campaigns are shaped by issues and the political environment. Looking at the environment, what do you believe is the Great Social Crisis of our time, the crisis to which campaigns must respond?
The Great Social Crisis of our time is confidence. Our nation has lost confidence in itself, its institutions, and each other. Again, some of this is government performance or lack thereof, but it’s also about how we’ve chosen to run our campaigns. We are much more likely now to believe that something has gone wrong than celebrate something that has gone well. Two examples: Trump’s Operation Warp Speed was a remarkable success. The vaccines we have now are a result of national action that was successful. What we talk about now though is the roughly 1/3 of the country who don’t want them, ironically, Trump’s base. It makes no sense. Biden recently passed a bipartisan transportation and infrastructure package that his predecessors attempted to do but failed. Again, a remarkable success that will result in more resilient bridges, a wider electric car network, and so much more. But what are we talking about today? How Biden didn’t pick the “moderate” candidate for the Supreme Court from South Carolina that Senators Graham and Manchin supported.
How should campaigns respond? First, parties need to pick more positive candidates. It would be helpful to start with people who are not fundamentally angry but are more optimistic in themselves, their voters, and the nation. The weirdest thing we’ve seen lately are negative on negative candidate campaigns where they’re both dark on everything including their opponents. The best leaders see over the horizon, paint a picture for us, and encourage us to join them on the journey. Positive leaders like Reagan and Obama were able to hold onto their offices mainly because they were viewed as more optimistic than their opponents. We need our leaders to bring us home to the essence of America: a confident, positive, nation of people who believe we can do anything if we stick together. You can win a lot of races with negativity. People will respond to that more than positivity in the short-term. But if campaigns are going to serve democracy, they need to be led by candidates who are confident and optimistic.
Todd Carney is a lawyer and frequent contributor to RealClear Policy. He earned a juris doctorate from Harvard Law School and a bachelor’s degree from American University. The views in this piece are his alone and do not reflect the views of his employer.
John Waters is a writer in Nebraska.
