Season 1 Episode 2  – Who is Claire Villareal?

As Samuels climbs in the polls, rumors about her past begin to hurt the campaign.

Candidates can cross from ‘some guy’ to real contender, it has happened before, but not very often and not typically in the span of a single election cycle.

Here are a few notes about what separates the real contenders from the ‘some guys’.  Not all conditions need to be true to make you a ‘some guy’ and not all conditions are false in a ‘contender’.

 Money: The most obvious indicator and the most unfortunate.  Our system shouldn’t be predicated on wealth or access to wealth dictating who can and cannot represent us in Congress.  But it does.  I only work with candidate who will commit to changing that by supporting public financing as part of campaign finance reform.

If you are running for US Congress, to compete you need to be able to raise six figures your first quarter out, ideally $100,000 in the first 30 days.  You should be able to write a list down before you do a day of campaigning, of people you already know, in the hundreds or thousands that you can reasonably expect to give you money.  You can learn more about campaign finance/fund raising here.

Regardless of when you start this campaign, by 3-4 months prior to your Primary election (with or without a serious opponent) you should have already raised better than $500,000.  In Florida, given the higher costs of doing so many things in most of our districts, you should be aiming for the $500,000 mark by mid-March or sooner.  Once you start, you need to pull in six figures every quarter, upwards of $3000/day or $4000/weekday.  Note that is a trajectory of roughly $250,000 a quarter, your race may dictate much more per quarter, particularly as you get closer to election day.  The quarterly number should get larger as the campaign goes on, significant drops will be perceived as a drop in support or ‘hitting a ceiling’.

In the end, to be a contender as a challenger for a regular (not Special Election) Congressional seat, you need to raise upwards of $1,000,000.  That puts you ‘in the game’, possibly as close as within the margin of error.  To actually be in a position to win, you likely need somewhere between $2 Million and $6 Million.  And in the end, if you spend it poorly, it doesn’t matter how much you raise.

Experience/Network/Credibility/Reach:  The next major separator between ‘some guys’ and contenders we will look at is the equivalent of Twitter’s Klout score.  This is how many people you know, how many people know you, how likely they are to listen to you, and how likely they are to repeat/share what you say.  It is also important what the people know you for, do they see you as an expert/fount of wisdom on political things?  Or are you just a person that they find funny from time to time.

When we (MPA Political, LLC) teach public speaking for candidates/campaigns, we talk about the credibility disconnect that occurs when you become a candidate.  In normal public speaking, when you are introduced as a rocket scientist, you are automatically given some credibility on the subject by the audience.  As a candidate, the opposite happens, everyone becomes skeptical about your qualifications and credibility.  The best way to combat that is to have long standing personal connections (and surrogates with credibility) to help carry that credibility beyond the ‘candidate’ threshold.

If you don’t have a network of people accessible to the district that can project credibility upon you, and you have not been a well-known member of the community for a significant period of time, it will be very hard to break through the ‘some guy’ shell without an absolute monster haul of fund raising.  The odds of you having that fund raising capacity without the network/credibility are obviously pretty slim.

 Campaign Understanding/Experience:  Far too many candidates think running for office is some mixture of the various campaign/political tv shows and movies they have seen.  Some spice in what they’ve gleaned from CNN, MSNBC, PoliticalWire.com, DailyKos.com, etc etc.  What ever picture those put in your head, it’s likely wrong.  It isn’t all fairs and speeches.  The biggest component of campaigning is phone to mouth.  Before you can do that, you need to have a coherent message and you need to know how to stay on message all the time.

A good start is attending a Democracy for America Campaign Academy.  The next step is hiring a professional who knows what they are doing.  Conveniently for those of you in Florida, there are two DFA Training Academies coming up in March: Miami and Gainesville.

This is a tricky hurdle for candidates, as the majority who have little experience with campaigns on this level won’t even know where to start the hiring process.  It isn’t unusual to see candidates with high potential fail from this step, blowing money on bad/opportunistic consultants/staff that provide them with little to show for the money spent.  Mistakes often include a perverse desire to ‘hire local’ in districts that haven’t been competitive in recent history.  If there was someone local who could make it competitive, they would have already.  You can learn more about hiring here.

 Common Pushback on ‘Some guy’ status:  ‘Some guy’ candidates and their supporters often push back on the label with arguments about the campaign finance system being broken and they are going to prove it is wrong by a) forgoing contributions over XYZ dollars, b) only taking donations from within the district, c) refusing PAC money, d) raising no more than X total dollars or (new this year) e) promising not to seek re-election because re-elections means spending the people’s time raising money rather than serving.  Many of these have good intent behind them, there is some honor in there.  But you can’t pay for direct mail, radio or TV with honor.  You can’t pay staff or consultants with honor.  Good intentions only matter if the roughly 200,000 voters you need are aware of them.  The system is this way, it is designed to protect incumbents, get over it, raise the money and change it.

Probably my least favorite ‘some guy’ money argument is candidates pointing at other challengers that raised tons of money and lost as indicators that the money doesn’t matter.  First of all, just because you raise the money doesn’t mean you spend it well.  Second, only one candidate gets to win, did the candidates opponent also raise serious money?  Is this particular losing candidate running for the seat of an entrenched and well liked incumbent?  Did they have a good message that resonated with their district?

Yes, you need the money to compete.  No, it isn’t going to show up because you have the right issue positions or because your opponent sucks that much.  Quit praying for a ‘Mark Foley’ and do the work.

 Summary:   It is very rare for challengers to win Congressional seats, period.  It is even more rare for first time candidates (for any office) to win Congressional seats.  The most common trait of winning Congressional challengers is having lost a campaign for Congress previously.

If you aren’t sure if you are a some guy or a contender, you are probably a ‘some guy’.  The most common path to changing that is through successful fund raising.  Put your comfy pants on, sit down (every day for 6-8 hours), and make a ton of phone calls.  Call Time is the most important task for candidates to master.

‘Some guy’ candidates are frequently brilliant on policy and push it out by the truck load.  None of the voters in their district read it or care, but they do it.  And these candidates believe this makes them ‘serious’.  It doesn’t.  Please stop.

Whining about the system, whining about the media, whining in general…is not going to win you significant support or generate your miracle fund raising.  Whining doesn’t reflect the strong leadership voters/donors want.  But it does occasionally generate something funny for the rest of us to giggle at.

MPA Political, LLC is a comprehensive campaign consulting firm working to elect intelligent, honorable and progressive Democrats to all levels of government.

MPA Political, LLC   904 345 0072   www.mpapolitical.com       web@mpapolitical.com

The most common mistake campaigns make when designing a yard sign is adding too much stuff. Your average voter doesn’t spend more than a few seconds looking over a direct mail piece, so imagine how little time that same voter spends on reading a campaign sign.

We typically don’t expect folks to get much out of a yard sign except for some increased name identification for the candidate, which brings us to the question of adding so-called Quick Response barcodes to campaign signage. Some strategists have suggested it’s time these black boxes become a requirement, just like having the candidate’s name and the office he’s running for.

More often than not, though, QR codes will simply add clutter and are not useful to the campaign. I will hedge a bit here and add that good designers can incorporate QR codes into the design of a sign in a way that doesn’t detract significantly from the candidate’s name and the office he’s seeking—the most critical elements of any campaign lawn sign.

Speaking generally, however, political campaigns are quickly adopting QR codes for good reason. The growth rate for the codes is astounding. In the summer of 2008, only 10 percent of the population had a smartphone. One presidential election later, the number of people using smartphones has quintupled to more than half of the U.S. population. Of smartphone users, a full one third of them have scanned QR codes.

When QR Codes Work: There are, as always, some cases where using QR codes on a lawn sign does make sense. For instance, there’s promise for their use in districts where voters will engage yard signs not from the inside of their vehicles but instead as pedestrians. While it goes without saying, voters passing by a yard sign on foot are much more likely to scan a QR code than someone who has to pull over the to the side of the road. Candidates who are running in districts with walkable communities will have the most success with QR codes on signs.

Other examples of districts where signs are well suited for QR codes include those with large populations of younger voters and where the technology sector is a large employer. Still, I recommending testing the assumption. Try putting a QR code on a flyer or on an introductory mail piece and track how many voters scan the code. Based on the results of your test, you will be able to base your decision to put QR codes on the candidate’s yard signs on data, not conjecture.

The QR Code Call to Action: If your test confirms that using a QR code on your campaign yard sign is worthwhile, make sure you’re getting the most out of the QR code by sending the voter to appropriate content. Just linking to the campaign website isn’t effective. Some of the best uses of QR codes on campaign yard signs:

• Connecting the voter to the candidate’s social media networks on Facebook or Twitter.
• Signing up the voter for text message or email alerts from the campaign.
• Asking the voter to indicate whether he is a supporter or not.
• Sending the voter to a biographical or issue-based video of the candidate or a mobile optimized landing page with similar content.

It’s also important to note that whatever content the QR code is linking to should be relevant to voters whether it’s three days or three months before Election Day.

Other High Tech Options for Campaign Signs: In addition to QR codes, you can make the humble yard sign high tech in other ways. Simply putting a pound sign before the candidates name turns it into a Twitter hashtag and signals to Twitter users they should use it in their tweets. If you add social media buttons, such as Facebook’s like button, to the yard signs without detracting from the candidate’s name and desired office in a way that voters will be able to see, that’s an element that will also increase awareness of the candidate’s social media presence.

Originally posted on Campaigns and Elections

Ben Donahower is the founder of Campaign Trail Yard Signs, which cuts through the campaign yard sign confusion. What do lawn signs do well? When are they more trouble than they are worth? Just honest answers, so that you order useful political yard signs in the quantity your campaign needs. Ben is an authority on marketing for political organizations and has worked on campaigns from borough council to President
Follow Ben on Twitter  @iapprovethismsg

Usually, when they are over budget it’s for two reasons: they forgot to budget for an expense more generally, or they didn’t stick to their budget by hiring a professional contractor when they originally anticipated doing it themselves or up, using more expensive materials than they budgeted for, or adding a completely new element to the project.

Your campaign faces the same, two potential pitfalls. You solve the second problem with discipline or by justifying the additional expenses in light of new information. You can avoid the first, not budgeting for an expense, by reading on. Below are some of the most common and largest expenses that your campaign will encounter over the course of the election season:

Voter contact: if you look at all of the ways that you contact voters, precious few of them are free. Take social media. It’s free to set up a Facebook page, Twitter account, and a Google+ page, but depending upon how critical your social media strategy is to the campaign or the scope of your campaign, you should consider augmenting these tools with paid tools or staff.

Here are some of the areas this includes:

• Television
• Radio
• Direct mail
• Advertisements online and off

Volunteers: campaigns often don’t budget for volunteers and they should. Pizza, something to drink, and other refreshmensts are a must to recruit and retain volunteers. Also, factor in your volunteer recruitment goals into your office expenses. Do you need to order a few extra yard signs or bumper sticks to make sure that volunteers get some? If you have a lot of volunteers who will canvass, how many leaflets should you order?

Staff: I’m a big believer in staff, so long as they are put to good use. If your campaign requires that you recruit volunteers or raise money having someone who can recruit volunteers all day long or keep you accountable to make fundraising calls is well worth it. You can also use staff to save your campaign money if you are creative. While it’s logistically more difficult, it’s often cheaper to hire someone to deliver your campaign literature than it is to send to send it in the mail.

Visibility: think yard signs and billboards. Don’t buy the latter and buy the former if you have low candidate name recognition or if your supporters demand them.

Logistics: a campaign office, a campaign bus, office supplies, phones or other similar expenses.
Materials: direct mail and leaflets are only part of this expense. Don’t skimp on design or copywriting. Your mail pieces and handouts are only as effective as the message and the design. You’re better off sending less than sending an ineffective piece that doesn’t communicate a compelling message or has a design that will bring in voters.

Fundraising: campaigns, rightfully, think about fundraising as a way to generate money, but there are expenses that go along with it that you should budget for including refreshments and other costs centering on campaign events, thank you notes for contributions, service fees for online contributions, and other costs.

Essentially, if you got through each element of your campaign plan and brainstorm the expenses associated with every part of it, you should be able to create a budget that won’t leave you penniless weeks before the election or leaves money on the table that you are spending haphazardly in a desperate attempt to get some value from it the weekend before Election Day.

Ben Donahower is the founder of Campaign Trail Yard Signs, which cuts through the campaign yard sign confusion. What do lawn signs do well? When are they more trouble than they are worth? Just honest answers, so that you order useful political yard signs in the quantity your campaign needs. Ben is an authority on marketing for political organizations and has worked on campaigns from borough council to President
Follow Ben on Twitter  @iapprovethismsg

If they could just get access to the “real” list–you know, the “right” list: that targeted distillation of the people that will make a difference and none of the hoi-polloi–then all their political dreams would come true. Of course, once they get some coveted list, comes the snark about data quality (bad phone numbers, emails, addresses, “should have been targeted better”, “too many saying ‘no’”, “big waste of time”, “this isn’t THE list”, grumble grumble grumble).

Too few professional operatives are willing to call out that kind of talk for what it is when they hear it.

There’s no great, “magic” list out there. That kind of talk is just a carryover from the way campaigns used to work. Or worse, it’s the words of a skilled manipulator implicitly trying to negotiate or renegotiate the terms of influence trading—sometimes parroted by wannabees.

Anything like perfect data quality in politics is a waste of resources since the process of campaigning generates information that is more valuable than the data on any list.

But the process of campaigning is hard. And most folks would prefer an easy way out of doing the hard work. I get that. I waste a lot of time wishing things could be easier, too. Generally, that kind of wishing doesn’t accomplish much beyond distracting me from the things that matter most.

A simple fact of the world we actually live in today is that there is so much data openly available and of far superior quality to anything anyone in politics has locked away in any proprietary database that no political organization could hope to have the resources to digest it all.

Still, any campaign, on almost any budget, should be able to combine right-scale data research and a systematic communication strategy to build an in-house list (or better, an audience) that’s far more meaningful than any list they could acquire. That doesn’t mean that acquiring proprietary lists shouldn’t play a role in good campaign strategies; it’s just that list acquisition is of little value without good research and a rock-solid communication strategy.

So if you are an elected official, or you think you might want to be one someday, and you plan to hire any political operative because of the list you think they have (or even worse, buy any list outright) stop it, stop it right now. You are wasting your donor’s money. You would be far better off investing in building your own relationships with voters, donors, opinion leaders, prospective voters, and prospective donors (you know, people).

If you are a political operative making, or hoping to make, a living by getting people to pay you for access to any list or group, stop doing that. Go MAKE SOMETHING: build a campaign operation to help candidates and electeds contact and build genuine relationships with voters, donors, opinion leaders, prospective voters, and prospective donors (you know, people).

If you are political club keeping yourself alive by making candidates and elected officials jump through hoops to get your endorsement in exchange for them driving attendance and paid membership, you should stop, too. Instead, BUILD SOMETHING. Create an environment where people can find and relate to serious candidates and office-holders, make it genuine and not contrived, and lay it all bare so that the fakes and the phonies have nowhere to hide.

A list (what used to be called a rolodex) seems a lot like a political asset, but it’s not really. A strong network of relationships, a ready audience, is far more valuable . . . but, when it comes right down to it, calling that audience a political asset or a thing of value really misses the point. To the extent that you think of a network of relationships as an asset, you actually undermine its strength. Build an audience, and RESPECT it–do that and you will be doing better than anyone doing politics.

Scott Garrison is head of Research & Analysis at Swash Labs, a digital creative agency focused on emerging media, social business and brand development. In the last 18 years, Scott has advised more than 35 campaigns on fundraising, audience-building, and data management. 

www.garrisonpoliticalstrategy.com      sgarrison@sgarrison.com     512.522.2341

Some people say because they’re volunteers you can’t set high expectations.  I disagree.  I think you want to set high expectations.  Good people will have pride in what they’re doing and don’t like it if somebody next to them is not doing good work.  It creates a positive cycle when you’re bringing the best people together for the project.

A lot of research has been done lately, group A vs. group B, with a lot of testing.  What was the turnout; what was the measurement these are five message points that have been tested to work.  Some of them are the opposite of what we used to think.

One of them is to remind voters that their records are public. On way to do this is to say “We appreciate your voting last year. Thank you for doing that.” The psychology kicks in that somebody knows whether I’m voting or not.

The second interesting one is to help them visualize voting as you talk to them.  “Oh, we can count on your vote for Democrats?  Were you planning on early voting or Election Day?  Do you drive? Where’s your polling place?”  It gets them through the practical steps and obstacles that maybe they didn’t think about.  It’s also visualization–new age stuff.  They visualize voting and they’re more likely to do it.

Remind them of their previous commitment, assuming this is GOTV and you already made a voter ID call.  Thanks for your commitment and we want to remind you of what you already promised to do.

Now this is one counter to what I had been taught before. Emphasize high expected turnout. I had been told before you want to say “Oh the election is close. There aren’t a lot of people coming out. We need to get our side going.”  But people don’t like supporting a loser. If you’re going there and projecting weakness, it backfires.  So, what you want to do is not to say we’re going to win or to lie.   But that there’s a high turnout. There’s a social psychology that kicks in, “Well if everybody else is doing it…”  You don’t want to be out there broadcasting turnout is going to be 5% or something. Its “Everybody’s voting. Everybody’s out there. You’re going to be the only one if you don’t vote.

And finally your message is “I’m local here. I’m not calling from some call center in Minnesota.”

Once you have the script, you demand script adherence.  People always kick back, but no I’m not telling you to read it like a robot.  That’s not what I mean.  You follow the script because it was written for a certain reason. When you get beginners in, they’ll all have the same resistance to it.  We tell them politely, yeah we thought of that and here’s why we wrote it this way.

Here’s the other thing:  dialing pace.  With all the best intentions, if there’s not a structure they make a call and if its good they want to tell everybody about it.  So everybody else is stopped.  At the end of the night, “How many calls did you all make?”  Nobody was counting, but not a lot of calls got made.  So that’s where to have the pride in accomplishment you have to act like a manager.  Say here’s how many dials everybody needs to make every hour.

To make it fun, have a little bit of a contest.  Keep a tally.  How many positive outcomes? Yard signs?  Oh Betty got three yard signs; she wins. So measure all that.

And another reason to measure is for the campaign–to have some accountability and goals,  How many people do we want to call?  What are our goals for this week?  If we’re running behind we need to change something.  Don’t just randomly set up phones and desks and whoever comes in over the course of the next six months will be ok.

Make sure the data doesn’t just go into a black hole and never get used. The whole point of it is to have this feedback loop of using what you’re getting from canvassing and phone calls and making decisions on it.  Whatever system you’re using, make sure somebody in your organization can step up and make pie charts out of it, so that you can use it to get your high level understanding.  And the individual level of who’s getting follow up, who’s getting a yard sign, who needs more information sent out.  Have a system for that.

Be professional and have professional standards in what you do with volunteers.  Pay attention to the script.  In both of these areas, draw in other expertise among the people who may do this for their day job.  Set high expectations of the volunteers and don’t be afraid to reassign somebody if it’s not a good fit.  I promise you in the projects I’ve worked, we more than make up for that from the positive energy in the high performers who are part of this group.  And track the performance, the measurements.  And choose the technology that fits your budget.

Condensed from a webinar on Frontrunner 2020.

Ron Turner is Founder and CEO of People Calling People; a state-of-the-art telecommunications practices in the political and non-profit arena.  Ron provides strategic advice, project management, and telecom services for clients to communicate with their constituencies.  In 2011, Ron launched frontrunner2020; to support and encourage those on the journey towards elected office.

People Calling People   3948 Legacy Drive, Ste 106   Plano TX  75023       214 295 9553 www.peoplecallingpeople.com  www.frontrunner2020.com