« It Was in the Wheels of Airplane! | Main | Ten Things You may Not Want to Know »
September 25, 2007
A Comment About Elections
by Cliff W.
Jack, I have enjoyed reading the evolving story regarding your gearing up to run. As a political consultant who has run five to six political campaigns every election (that is primary AND general cycle) it is always interesting to me to observe those who chose to undertake a campaign without professional guidance. They typically express their concerns regarding costs or reservations about being "professionally managed." They go on to craft a rational for
proceeding based on the premise that they would prefer to save costs by running a "grass roots" or another favorite term is "home grown" campaign. All of which may sound like a gool old-fashioned campaign.
Their underlying assumption is that they can do the job of a trained, experienced professional. I stongly suggest that you resist the assumption that you or your committee is prepared to undertake this venture without professional guidance. Candidates who have done so generally share one thing in common... Failure. The bottom line is, if you don't succeed, you don't legislate. You may have the best of ideas and greatest intentions, but if you fail - what did they matter? Modern campaigns are not what they were 20 - 30 years ago. It would be foolhardy to undergo surgery without a medical professional doing the job. Most automobiles today are too complicated for the shade-tree mechanic. Don't let your campaign's success fall victim to the presumption that you can do this yourself or that you can get it done on the cheap.
Let's assume you are just doing a limited mail program as you have already outlined. You are going to need to target med-high propensity Republican voters in the seven counties of the 3rd AD. Do you presently own campaign software that will allow you to run demographic/propensity target universes or print phone sheets and walk sheets? If not, are you likewise going to shun purchasing "professional" campaign software? You can go "home grown" and get the data from the several counties in Excel or some other format, however, do you have the ability/background to normalize the data? Even if you do, can you code it for demographic sortation or geocoding?
The bottom line is, there are many elements to running a strong campaign, not the least of which is developing a strong campaign plan and budget that includes all message vehicles, Direct Mail, Email, Web presence, Radio, Broadcast TV, Cable and that does not even get us to ground operations. The one thing that I can guarantee is that if you take and amature approach - you are assured and amature result. You REALLY need to reevaluate your decision to make a go of this without a professional consultant.
Posted by Post Scripts at September 25, 2007 03:52 PM
Comments
Cliff somehow your comments were missed when you first sent them. When we were doing a clean up of unpublished comments it was found. So to make up for it I published it on page one. I appreciate what you have to say and I agree in spirit. However, as one who went to some of the same campaign schools as you, this campaign does a professional management just without the price tag. I have two part-time consultants who are pro bono and between the 3 of us we are doing a profession management. By the way, one year Bernie didn't spend a dime on his election and he made it. Granted he was an incumbent, but low budget elections are not automatically failures.
Posted by: Jack at September 25, 2007 04:07 PM