In response to my post yesterday, a Republican friend wrote that Democratic claims might have worked if they had not been exaggerated. He also said that “low information, late breaking swing voters don’t believe it is logically possible to raise everybody’s taxes AND slash education.” His observations reflect an important aspect to messaging: credibility. Republicans believe that Democrats lost it with the voters who paid the least attention to the year-long campaign and made their decisions in late October.
I don’t know if they are right or not but I suspect there is some truth to what they believe. I also think that the political environment got increasingly difficult for Democrats throughout the last month of the election. A confluence of factors shifted voters away from Democrats and toward Republicans in the final weeks. Easy access to fact checks was one of those factors.
That said, there are several relevant points. Voters are increasingly going to the internet to get their information about campaigns. Meanwhile, campaigns are still using the same communication tactics to reach voters that they’ve been using for the past thirty years. The internet allows average voters to scrutinize ads and messages in a way that they haven’t in the past. Campaigns need to adapt to the new realities.
But Democrats, or maybe campaigns of both parties, have bigger problems. The political infrastructure has lost touch with the voters they need to persuade. Nationalized campaigns have led to centralized messaging and groupthink. While both parties need a national message, political realities vary from state to state. Campaign messages should reflect the concerns of the voters they are trying to reach, not introduce new concerns that voters don’t already have.
Campaigns need to retool. Television may still be the most powerful medium to drive a message, but it’s reaching a diminishing audience. With $100 million ad campaigns, voters no longer trust the messages being delivered by the campaigns and their allied interest groups. Now, they have the tools to quickly and easily check the veracity of the thirty second ads. And Republicans, at least, believe they are doing it.
Finally, communication today is more two-way than one-way. The days of force-feeding voters information are pretty much over. Campaigns need to join the conversation. They need to be more forthright in their claims and more substantive in their messages. Voters aren’t stupid and, if campaigns are, voters will call them on it.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
So,here is the bottom line folks. Voters have gotten into the horrible habit of voting party line instead of for the candidate. I have been around a long time.(My first Presidential vote was in 1948) As time has passed,I have noticed one thing. More and more Republicans assume that voters are apathetic,naive,forgetful,and just plain stupid. In fact they count on it,since it is the only way they can win.
I don’t understand why any Democrat would exaggerate anything. The statistical reality is already so favorable to Democratic candidates that voters assume it is already exaggerated when they hear it. For example, ever since 1930, the economy has grown at an average rate of 5.2% when Democrats have controlled the entire federal government, but only 1.2% when Republicans have and 2.3% when control has been divided- http://politicsthatwork.com/graphs/gdp-growth-by-party
The economy performs more than twice as well under Democrats. Hardly anybody out there that isn’t familiar with the numbers would believe that if a Democrat said it, but it is objectively true. If anything, Democrat should probably be toning down reality to make it sound more plausible…
First I am so glad I found your site…your blog seemed to be the only voice of reason I could find during this past election. It helped me tremendously, so thank you. I am one of those people who gets most of their news from shows like the Daily Show or Cobert Report. I am always blown away by anyone who tries to use FOX news as a reference for anything. They are the number one source for why people don’t trust news anymore and because of them people actually now think it is okay to blatently lie and say this is fact. But I do see that people that cling to those right wing news and talk shows have strong opinions that can’t be persuaded by the truth. As for the average person that wants to know the truth, I wish there was an easier way to find the facts. A credible website I could go to that presents the facts without all the hype and drama. I am just as turned off by Democrates who try and use that drama filled mentality to sway me as I am the Republicans. I watch the new and read your stories and know that people on the inside are better able to understand what is truly happening, but I am not able to read between those lines to figure out what is really going on. It can’t be that difficult to have a place to go to like that, especially before the next election. If we could use only a fraction of the money that was wasted on those awful media ads to set up an impartial site that presented facts and data for the average person to understand, now that could be revolutionary.
This is a new Republican meme being trotted out. If it works, that’s great for them. If it doesn’t – well, they’ll try out something else. It’s disappointing to read it here, as if it were serious. It’s a typical, cynical Karl Rove-inspired attack on Democrats. Rove’s strategy is always the same – hit them where they’re the strongest. Democrats are strong on facts, and on being open minded in considering those facts. The strategy is to undermine Democrats by implying that they don’t base their campaigns on facts.
There is no evidence that somehow people are now ignoring $100 million in publicity battles, and somehow digging deep to discern and analyze. It might be good if it happened, but it’s not what’s happening.
It won’t advance things much for Democrats if they are distracted by this fantasy.
Thanks for responding, Kevin, but I think you’re missing the point. People are getting information differently than they have in the past. Karl Rove didn’t say the ads were false, WRAL, the N&O, Politifact and the Washington Post did. And that’s what showed up in people’s Facebook feeds, emails and google searches. And the news organizations have more credibility with the voters than the campaigns of either party do. They didn’t have to do much research. The information was shared either in sponsored posts or through friends. Democrats could have said the same things without exaggerating and not had those headlines floating around. Instead of repeating the same $500 million cut to education accusation, they could have made the same point by saying teacher pay fell to 48th in the nation, per pupil spending dropped to 49th and that thousands of teachers assistants had been kicked out of the classroom. Instead, they doubled down on $500 million despite every fact checker finding it a dubious claim. It’s not about truth in advertising. It’s about how people are gathering information in the age of the internet.
I fear that Brother Price here may be more right than wrong. But perhaps it’s not as much about the intelligence of the electorate as a dearth of motivation. Seems to me that we Americans have reached a point wherein we simply cannot abide being inconvenienced. Researching the veracity of campaigns/ads obviously involves time and effort at a level that presupposes a genuine interest in the quality of government, along with a desire to elect the best people. Today, the capacity to get the “true facts, as Brother Mills intimates, is easier than ever. Yet, seemingly, too few of us want to go to the trouble, or at least no further than those sources that tend to prop up our own perceptions and/or misperceptions of the facts. It also occurs to me that developments such as the Citizens United ruling contribute to the rising lethargy of political self-education and effectual indifference. Indeed, why does it even matter, if, in the end, it really is all about the money?
I don’t see a lot of evidence that the average voter is all that intelligent. A young man in Virginia said that he voted for the Tea Party candidate because he was tired of the gridlock in Washington. Really, did he think that would help? An exit poll showed that two thirds of voters said they were most concerned about the increasing gap between the wealthy and the rest of us, so most of them voted Republican. Really, is that the party to solve that problem? Maybe some people get their information from fact check sites, but I’ve seen first hand that my right wing friends get their facts from Fox and right wing talk shows. Google searches would destroy their strongly held beliefs, so they don’t bother.