Hi everyone,
After this election, I thought it might be fun to talk about my time in politics. I used to work for a political campaign firm, about 8-9 years ago. My boss was a consultant for the Republican party, but I later found out that he also used to be a lobbyist and ran a separate business where he taught political hopefuls how to win elections (with a focus on winning a Republican position in a traditionally blue state).
I worked as a designer there on 16 different campaigns (14 candidates and 2 measures), and part of my job was taking an InDesign file that got deleted and recreating it from scratch from a hard copy of a book my boss wrote called "How to Win Elections."
It was about 300 pages long and this was long before I woke up, but having to read and hand-type this entire book was a big part of my process of waking up.
I wish I still had the book laying around, but I'll talk about some of the biggest eye openers to me at the time:
• The book contained a "Mad Libs" section of press releases for every possible thing your candidate might do or say wrong. So, if your candidate was caught cheating on his wife, the Mad Lib had blank spots for his name _______ and then the alleged woman he was cheating with _______.
The press release went something along the lines of:
"There has been an allegation against [candidate]. When we talked to [candidate], he was completely shocked and denies any claims that he ever had an affair with [woman] and says it's completely false. Reporters talked to [candidate]'s campaign manager and he said, "Look, I've known [candidate] for years. He's a good guy, he would never do something like this. I know him and his wife, they are close, and she's standing by him during the election."
The instructions were to send this out to all the newspaper and media outlets that we "had a hand in" and then work to find any dirt on the woman bringing up the allegations.
We had press releases for all sorts of things, affairs, attempted murder or assault charges, money laundering, etc.
• One of the interesting things I learned when re-typing up the book is that a politician, according to this book spends 90% of their elected time fundraising for NEXT election. Because of this, the book stressed the importance of developing a strong cabinet of advisors and workers that will do the actual political work for you while you, the candidate, smile, wave and be the trusted face of your organization.
• The letters-to-the-editor section was interesting. Back when I was a kid, my parents would read letters to the editor of newspapers and form their political opinions on them. They would usually be written by trusted people in our local community or someone you might have heard of, like the principal of the school your kids went to.
This book taught you to form your political talking points with your campaign manager, then hire a ghost writer to write a letter in a personal voice, as if it was a hardworking American and not a polished article in a magazine. Then, you'd find people in battleground communities that would support you, either with kickbacks from your campaign funds or for shared political gain. You run the ghost-written letter past the trusted community leader, have them read it and get them to sign it and send it into the newspaper.
• There was a section for all the ways to find possible dirt on your opponent and it got extremely detailed, I think this section was 20 pages long. Ways to contact the state bar association if the opponent was a lawyer for any bad cases or cases the opponent represented that you could use to discredit them or bring them down. Ways to check for malpractice or negligence if the opponent was a doctor, ways to look up former employers and interview form co-workers for dirt, etc.
• There was a section on wedge issues and how to slice up statistics to support your cause. The wedge issue they used as an example was abortion. According to this book, abortion as a whole didn't change much year-by-year over the last 20 years, but there were slices of the stat that did according to who was in office. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe it showed 2nd term abortions by teen moms having their 1st abortion as being a statistic that went down when George HW Bush was president, but went up when Bill Clinton was president. This way you could quickly flash this stat up on a TV commercial to get people that might not care about the election to come out and vote, because they believed that they were causing change in that issue. The wedge issues were a BIG deal, because they push people in the middle to either the left or the right.
• For some reason, the book was obsessed with Irish Democrats, saying they were the most likely swing-voters and talked about ways to persuade them to vote Republican. I really wish I could remember some of the techniques, but I can't off the top of my head.
• The book frequently referred back to Striking the Responsive Chord, I've linked to a PDF of it I found online.
http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/brader.pdf
There were several conversations I had with people there that worked in politics, one of the most interesting being that candidates base their talking points on the demographics that they called "active voters" which were people that had voted 4 out of the last 4 elections for their party. This is why some politicians refuse to address issues concerning younger voters, the biggest demographic still tends to be baby boomers and older voters that are consistent and vote in every major and non-major election.
When I was designing palm flyer cards, those mini posters that people take door-to-door I didn't actually know a lot about veterans and what issues they face. I talked to my boss, several people I worked with, and our candidates about that issue, and nobody could give me an honest answer. One candidate literally said, "Well you should know what my position is, it's whatever will get me the win. Just write some stuff down there that will get veterans to vote for me."
My boss was obsessed with candidates last names. He said the most important thing about a political poster is the last name and to make it "as big as possible" because most people honestly forget about the issues with some of the smaller candidates, the ones that aren't running for governor or senate, so if people just see a certain name a bunch on the road, studies show they are most likely to vote for that person, regardless of party affiliation.
Anyway, I got fired after a short period of time, no reason given, but I'm pretty sure it's because my boss started to realize that I had a conscience. I worked there for about 6 months, didn't get to work on an entire election cycle end-to-end but it was eye opening, enough that I fully swung to Democrat before resting in an Independent position several years later.
I've never really told anyone about all these details because every time I started to, nobody believed me or wanted to listen, but I figured y'all might actually be the right group to hear it.
After this election, I thought it might be fun to talk about my time in politics. I used to work for a political campaign firm, about 8-9 years ago. My boss was a consultant for the Republican party, but I later found out that he also used to be a lobbyist and ran a separate business where he taught political hopefuls how to win elections (with a focus on winning a Republican position in a traditionally blue state).
I worked as a designer there on 16 different campaigns (14 candidates and 2 measures), and part of my job was taking an InDesign file that got deleted and recreating it from scratch from a hard copy of a book my boss wrote called "How to Win Elections."
It was about 300 pages long and this was long before I woke up, but having to read and hand-type this entire book was a big part of my process of waking up.
I wish I still had the book laying around, but I'll talk about some of the biggest eye openers to me at the time:
• The book contained a "Mad Libs" section of press releases for every possible thing your candidate might do or say wrong. So, if your candidate was caught cheating on his wife, the Mad Lib had blank spots for his name _______ and then the alleged woman he was cheating with _______.
The press release went something along the lines of:
"There has been an allegation against [candidate]. When we talked to [candidate], he was completely shocked and denies any claims that he ever had an affair with [woman] and says it's completely false. Reporters talked to [candidate]'s campaign manager and he said, "Look, I've known [candidate] for years. He's a good guy, he would never do something like this. I know him and his wife, they are close, and she's standing by him during the election."
The instructions were to send this out to all the newspaper and media outlets that we "had a hand in" and then work to find any dirt on the woman bringing up the allegations.
We had press releases for all sorts of things, affairs, attempted murder or assault charges, money laundering, etc.
• One of the interesting things I learned when re-typing up the book is that a politician, according to this book spends 90% of their elected time fundraising for NEXT election. Because of this, the book stressed the importance of developing a strong cabinet of advisors and workers that will do the actual political work for you while you, the candidate, smile, wave and be the trusted face of your organization.
• The letters-to-the-editor section was interesting. Back when I was a kid, my parents would read letters to the editor of newspapers and form their political opinions on them. They would usually be written by trusted people in our local community or someone you might have heard of, like the principal of the school your kids went to.
This book taught you to form your political talking points with your campaign manager, then hire a ghost writer to write a letter in a personal voice, as if it was a hardworking American and not a polished article in a magazine. Then, you'd find people in battleground communities that would support you, either with kickbacks from your campaign funds or for shared political gain. You run the ghost-written letter past the trusted community leader, have them read it and get them to sign it and send it into the newspaper.
• There was a section for all the ways to find possible dirt on your opponent and it got extremely detailed, I think this section was 20 pages long. Ways to contact the state bar association if the opponent was a lawyer for any bad cases or cases the opponent represented that you could use to discredit them or bring them down. Ways to check for malpractice or negligence if the opponent was a doctor, ways to look up former employers and interview form co-workers for dirt, etc.
• There was a section on wedge issues and how to slice up statistics to support your cause. The wedge issue they used as an example was abortion. According to this book, abortion as a whole didn't change much year-by-year over the last 20 years, but there were slices of the stat that did according to who was in office. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe it showed 2nd term abortions by teen moms having their 1st abortion as being a statistic that went down when George HW Bush was president, but went up when Bill Clinton was president. This way you could quickly flash this stat up on a TV commercial to get people that might not care about the election to come out and vote, because they believed that they were causing change in that issue. The wedge issues were a BIG deal, because they push people in the middle to either the left or the right.
• For some reason, the book was obsessed with Irish Democrats, saying they were the most likely swing-voters and talked about ways to persuade them to vote Republican. I really wish I could remember some of the techniques, but I can't off the top of my head.
• The book frequently referred back to Striking the Responsive Chord, I've linked to a PDF of it I found online.
http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/brader.pdf
There were several conversations I had with people there that worked in politics, one of the most interesting being that candidates base their talking points on the demographics that they called "active voters" which were people that had voted 4 out of the last 4 elections for their party. This is why some politicians refuse to address issues concerning younger voters, the biggest demographic still tends to be baby boomers and older voters that are consistent and vote in every major and non-major election.
When I was designing palm flyer cards, those mini posters that people take door-to-door I didn't actually know a lot about veterans and what issues they face. I talked to my boss, several people I worked with, and our candidates about that issue, and nobody could give me an honest answer. One candidate literally said, "Well you should know what my position is, it's whatever will get me the win. Just write some stuff down there that will get veterans to vote for me."
My boss was obsessed with candidates last names. He said the most important thing about a political poster is the last name and to make it "as big as possible" because most people honestly forget about the issues with some of the smaller candidates, the ones that aren't running for governor or senate, so if people just see a certain name a bunch on the road, studies show they are most likely to vote for that person, regardless of party affiliation.
Anyway, I got fired after a short period of time, no reason given, but I'm pretty sure it's because my boss started to realize that I had a conscience. I worked there for about 6 months, didn't get to work on an entire election cycle end-to-end but it was eye opening, enough that I fully swung to Democrat before resting in an Independent position several years later.
I've never really told anyone about all these details because every time I started to, nobody believed me or wanted to listen, but I figured y'all might actually be the right group to hear it.
