Political Consultants and Campaigns

One Day to Sell

Jason Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429977848
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell examines the differences between how political science theory suggests campaigns should be run and how political consultants actually run campaigns. In the wake of consultants who effortlessly move from campaigners to policymakers, the dearth of knowledge about the attitudes, beliefs, and strategies of the consultants themselves is still a glaring absence in the analysis of American politics. How can we purport to know what is happening in American political campaigns if we don't know what is on the minds of the men and women who run them?

This book provides a clearer understanding of modern-day political campaigns by revealing what is on the minds of the people who run them. With original data from consultants, campaign managers, and professional campaign schools, author Jason Johnson examines consultant behavior on message formation, policy positioning, candidate recruitment, Internet strategy, and negative advertising and compares these practices to existing political science theory. This groundbreaking research makes Political Consultants and Campaigns: One Day to Sell a must-have resource for all students of American politics, campaign managers, or anyone interested in how political campaigns in America are run.

1

The Candidate

There was an old story about President Bill Clinton that used to circulate in Washington during the 1990s. It was said that Bill Clinton could enter a room of 300 people knowing full well that 299 of them adored him and supported everything he did and stood for. But Clinton would spend the entire evening working on changing the mind of that one person out of 300 who had not already come under his sway of charm. His ability to work a room, let alone be singularly focused on changing hearts and minds, represents a significant reason Bill Clinton was one of the most successful political candidates in American history over the past forty years.

The focus of this book is on political operatives from low-level campaign managers to highly paid political consultants and all the men and women in between. Although the experience level and campaign sophistication of the men and women in the sample of operatives may vary, they all have one thing in common: They are trying to get a candidate elected. Therefore, our journey into the world of political consultants begins with candidates, without whom political operatives would have nothing to do and no one to work for.

When you talk to campaigners in the field, you are always drawn back to that most basic of questions: What makes someone a good candidate? Or to delve deeper into the political jargon of the press, what makes a candidate “electable”? This chapter analyzes what makes someone an electable candidate in the minds of academics, pundits, and political consultants and what factors, such as race, class, or even the “post-9/11” world, impact whether someone has a good chance of moving from candidate to elected official. We will also look at the transition from being a candidate to an elected official. Are the traits needed for one role suitable to the other? Or are consultants promoting one product during the election that turns out to be something else once someone is sworn into office? Finally we will look at the extent to which consultants are making lemonade out of sour lemons. Very few campaign managers are influential enough and sought-after enough that they get a choice of for whom they work. Therefore, when we view these political operatives’ answers, we see what they view as the best traits in a candidate that, for better or worse, they are stuck with. That might give us a better reflection of what the elusive concept of the “electable candidate” is all about.

The Traits That Rate

Political candidates are a unique mixture of product and the “real thing.” They are men and women, black, white, Asian, and Latino, from all creeds and belief systems. Yet they have to make themselves fit in with an image of the “candidate” and “elected official” that voters want to pay attention to, donate money to, and vote for on election day. That is where their campaign managers, consultants, and other staffers come in, to help them in this process of becoming a candidate that the public wants to support in the general election. Despite what the television and radio pundits might want you to think, Americans want to like their politicians; there is a reason that people watched The West Wing and were heartbroken when President Palmer died on 24.¹ Candidates and elected officials hold both Americans’ dreams for the future and their concerns about power in one tight bundle.

Political science literature has focused on researching the four main traits on which voters evaluate candidates based on the American National Election Survey that is conducted during major election years in the United States (Iyengar and Kinder 1985; Funk 1996). These four traits are competence, integrity, empathy, and leadership. These traits carry a great deal of importance in understanding America’s political system, since voters weigh these traits differently depending on a host of factors yet still use them to make judgments about a candidate’s policies and fitness to serve. If you are a conservative Republican, what appeals to you in a candidate differs from what appeals to a liberal Democrat. But what happens if you are a liberal Democratic woman living in New York City who lived through 9/11? Or what if you are a conservative Republican man living in New Orleans who lived through Hurricane Katrina? Perhaps what appeals to you in a candidate has changed, and you might put more emphasis on one trait over another. Political scientists and academics have argued for decades about how different traits and characteristics influence how or why citizens perceive and evaluate candidates the way they do (Rapoport, Metcalf, and Hartman 1989; Pierce 1993; Hardy and Jamieson 2005). The majority of debates and discussions revolve around what value can be found in these candidate traits and how voters evaluate them under different circumstances (Keeter 1987; Alexander and Andersen 1993; Funk 1996, 1997, 1999; Fox and Smith 1998; Hayes 2005). No one, however, has examined how any of these factors, time, space, or place might influence how a campaign manager or consultant looks at the traits of their candidate. In this next section we will be taking a look at some of the existing theories on what factors influence how voters evaluate candidates, and we will use those theories to get a better idea as to how a consultant might be influenced by the same variables.

Party

As I mentioned in the Introduction, party identification, or “partisanship,” influences how one looks at a political candidate (Stoker 1993; Goren 2002; Klein and Ahluwalia 2005). Of course, how that partisanship interacts with demographic traits about the voter and their environment is something subject to a great deal of discussion in political science. Some political scientists have focused on how party voters look at candidate traits in particular campaign years. Analyzing the 1996 presidential election, Alvarez and Glasgow found that Democrats evaluated Bill Clinton highest on his leadership skills and also found leadership to be the most important trait for someone running for office (1998, 148). Since Republican voters valued integrity as the most important trait in a candidate, conservatives rejected Bill Clinton because of his various extramarital affairs. In another analysis of the 1996 presidential election, other researchers found that Clinton received equally high marks from Republican and Democratic voters on empathy, but the two partisan groups parted ways regarding his intelligence. Democrats thought of him as a genius, whereas Republicans thought of him as well short of that mark (Klein and Ahluwalia 2005, 132).

Researchers Hansen and Otero found that not only is partisanship the best predictor of how people will vote, but it is also a stronger predictor of the weight placed on candidate traits (2007, 36). Leadership and compassion seemed to be the most important traits to both parties from 1988 to 2004, with the candidate rated highest in one or both of those categories by Democratic and Republican partisans usually winning the day. This suggests not only that partisanship might matter as an individual predictor for the candidates but that the partisan leanings of a district might come into play as well. Most researchers have found that campaign context—such as whether the district was leaning Republican or Democratic or if it was a “good” year for either party—influences how candidate traits are viewed (Funk 1999; see also Goren 2002; Doherty and Gimpel 1997; Kinder et al. 1980). In fact, one of the few researchers who posit that partisanship is not the most important factor in determining how a candidate is evaluated says this is the case because the voter’s race trumps partisanship in those evaluations (Colleau et al. 1990, 386).

What is most interesting about the partisan effect on candidate evaluation discussions is that it plays out in a very real way in most elections. Former president George W. Bush was a classic example of this partisan evaluation. Democrats, progressives, and left-leaning analysts and columnists remarked on the infamous “Bush smirk.” Huffington Post.com columnist Bob Cesca dedicated an entire article to this “smirk” and pulled no punches: “His uncomfortably ridiculous smirks and smiles illustrate his inadequacies as a leader: his fugacious attitude; his vacant stature; and, most strikingly, his apparent inability to grasp the reality of his decisions. It’s all right there on the screen—underlined by those tiny baby teeth” (2007). Yet at the Republican convention in 2004, when former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson narrated President Bush’s photo-essay introduction, some of those same pictures deemed as “smirks” by liberals and Democrats were said to demonstrate “his lack of pretension, a sincerity both of action and purpose…. There’s a sense of humor that’s natural. He’s even been known to kid around with folks.”²

Which was the real reflection of Bush’s infamous “smirk”? No academic or analyst can truly say; the truth was in the eye of the beholder, and the beholder saw a different truth whether they were Republican or Democrat.

Type of Race: Challenger, Open Seat, or Incumbent

There are three ways in which a candidate starts a race: He or she is either seeking an open seat, challenging the current seat holder, or the incumbent defending his or her seat. Depending on what position one is in, political science research shows that how traits are evaluated can change significantly. Carolyn L. Funk, one of the originators of modern candidate trait research in political science, argues against this theory, suggesting that evaluations are all about the specific candidates involved, and what type of race they are running really does not make a difference (1999, 2). Other researchers, however, have shown that incumbents and challengers are evaluated differently by voters and observers. Kinder et al. (1980) found that voters tended to judge incumbents on integrity and leadership first and then take a look at the challenger. Alvarez and Glasgow (1998) and Goren (2002) found that challengers are evaluated more harshly than incumbents on their competence, since voters do not know if they can truly get the job done. Trait evaluations in open-seat races tend to be more of a mixed bag, with most researchers not finding significant differences in voter evaluations of candidates when both parties are trying out for a new position (Kinder et al. 1980; Alvarez and Glasgow 1998; Goren 2002; Arnold and Hawkins 2002).

Finally, in addition to what kind of position a candidate is in at the beginning of the race, the position they seek, be it legislative or executive, can influence how their competence is viewed as well as their leadership ability (Nadeau et al. 1995; Burden 2002; Atkinson and Partin 2001; Arnold and Hawkins 2002). Atkinson and Partin find that voters view the responsibilities and competencies of gubernatorial and senatorial candidates differently (2001, 796). Whereas governors are seen as being more caring about and responsible for the poor, senators are seen as more likely to take strong leadership stands on international issues. Burden’s work discusses the difficulties Senate candidates face in their pursuit of the White House, in part because they are evaluated differently on traits and issues from those running for executive positions (2002, 82). There is evidence to suggest that because those seeking and serving in executive positions are viewed and evaluated differently from those serving in and seeking legislative positions, the traits upon which they are evaluated will differ as well.

Gender

Most political science research on gender and candidate traits looks at how the candidate’s gender and the gender of the voters influence how voters evaluate the candidate. Initially, many researchers suggested that there was not any real difference in how voters evaluated women compared to male candidates (Darcy and Schramm 1977; Eckstrand and Eckert 1981). However, since the late 1980s and the increase in women candidates running for higher office, especially executive positions, researchers have found that there was a fascinating mix of how gender and policy issues played off each other in female candidate evaluations. For example, Rosenwasser e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Candidate
• 2 The Message
• 3 The Issues
• 4 The Negative Ad
• 5 The Internet Campaign
• 6 Conclusion
• 7 Appendix
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index