Alex White

Campaigner | Unionist | Strategist

Day -44: The Crossroads Muddle

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With only 44 days until the election, pundits in the USA are baffled by the lack of inroads made by the daisy-chain bombing of conservative advertising by the Republican Super PACs.

Republican super PACs are about to face a potentially existential test of their reach and impact as the 2012 election cycle comes to a close, with their spending being closely watched as a way of answering a central question at the core of modern American politics: can an avalanche of money from outside groups move the needle in the presidential race and Senate contests across the country.

Since the spring, Republicans and Democrats have braced for the juggernaut of super PAC spending, an advertising tidal wave that was expected to swamp the messaging from the other side and quite possibly play a determinative role in deciding who will hold the presidency. Democrats have not been nearly as effective in fundraising this cycle, and have been casting jittery glances across the partisan divide.

Yet so far, the results for Republicans are muddled – at best.

In fact, this muddle shouldn’t be too surprising.

There’s several truisms in marketing. Only half of advertising works — the problem is we don’t know which half. The second truism is that advertising is a weak force, more like a mist than a jet-stream. You can’t change people’s minds with advertising.

Advertising of the kind that American Crossroads and the other Republican Super PACs are spewing out at Obama is mostly ineffective because on Obama, most people have made up their minds. The small proportion of people who’s minds have not been made up probably are non-traditional media consumers and so don’t see much of the expensive television advertising.

Additionally, advertising is mostly effective in raising awareness of a person, product or idea. When awareness is the main barrier to consumption or purchase (e.g. a new product or good being sold by a company, or a new candidate running for office), then advertising can be effective in shaping how people perceive that new person or product.

In this regard, Romney was the victim of very successful advertising. Because he was largely an unknown in 2011/12 during the Republican primaries (even though he’d run in 2007/8), his image was very vulnerable to advertising. The ads run by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry in the primaries portrayed him as a vulture capitalist.

The Obama capitalised on this view in the electorate by running post-primary advertising early in the election cycle to solidify this perception of Romney. As an out of touch rich guy who made his money screwing over American workers.

Because Romney was “new” and most of the electorate didn’t know who he was or what he stood for, he was susceptible to this advertising.

(This is the same reason that the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry in 2004 were effective — because Kerry was a “new” candidate who was still being defined in the minds of many in the electorate.)

When people have made up their minds however, it’s very hard to change those views with advertising alone. In fact, people tend to filter out advertising that contradicts their existing views and only take on ads that reinforce their existing views.

For Romney and the Republicans, this is bad, for two reasons.

Firstly, it means it will be difficult for Romney to reshape the views about him held by voters.

Secondly, it means that most of the spending by the Republican Super PACs won’t be enormously effective in changing the established views of Obama.

This doesn’t mean that the onslaught of advertising by Karl Rove’s American Crossroads and its kin can’t influence the election. It may. When over $600 million has been spent with over a month until Election Day, it’s possible that the “tsunami” of television ads will change the views of enough people to win it for Romney.

But it also shows why the Obama campaign has pumped so much money and resources into field organising and face-to-face campaigning. (And there’s really only one pro-Republican group that can go toe-to-toe with Democratic field organising: evangelical churches.)

Because the research demonstrates that the most effective way to change someone’s view is through a person-to-person conversation.

I’ve got Obama’s back

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At the start of September, I’ll be embarking on a two month journey to campaign for Barack Obama as an Organising Fellow based in Boston.

There’s no doubt that supporting Obama’s re-election is the right thing to do. Despite the many failings of the Obama administration (as Maurice Blackburn lawyer Lizzie O’Shea pointed out to me recently, he’s let us down on Gitmo, drone assassinations, climate change, whistleblower protections, worker’s rights, etc), the alternative is so much worse.

Obama has also achieved some important milestones. The step forward to universal health care, albeit, in a compromised semi-privatised form is a big improvement over the previous system. Obama has started down the road to nuclear disarmament, a massive international achievement. The Obama administration, although unable to introduce an emissions trading system, has invested enormously in renewable energy technology and fuel efficiency — important for moving to a clean energy future.

In Boston, the Obama campaign is likely to win by double digits. However, there is an important Senate election in Massachusetts, with the liberal Democrat Elizabeth Warren fighting to win back Ted Kennedy’s seat against Tea Party candidate Scott Brown. Many of the political problems in the US are exacerbated by ultra-conservative politicians who block consensus and progressive legislative reform. Getting Elizabeth Warren in the Senate is an important step to increasing the number of progressives in law making roles. We’ve seen how destructive a Republican controlled Congress can be — and it would only be worse if the Republicans also had a majority in the Senate.

The US political situation is a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” dilemma. It is a matter of choosing the lesser evil. I‘ve previously defended parliamentarism. Despite the dire situation, and Obama’s failings as a progressive candidate (he’s decidedly centrist), no progressive activist can sit idly by and let the likes of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan win.

Update

Thanks to Don Sutherland, for pointing me to this interesting article about Obama and the progressive left in the USA. Here’s an excerpt:

Unfortunately what too few leftists and progressives have been prepared to accept is that the polarization is to a great extent centered on a revenge-seeking white supremacy; on race and the racial implications of the moves to the right in the US political system. It is also focused on a re-subjugation of women, harsh burdens on youth and the elderly, increased war dangers, and reaction all along the line for labor and the working class. No one on the left with any good sense should remain indifferent or stand idly by in the critical need to defeat Republicans this year.

U.S. Presidential elections are not what progressives want them to be

A large segment  of what we will call the ‘progressive forces’ in US politics approach US elections generally, and Presidential elections in particular, as if: (1) we have more power on the ground than we actually possess, and (2) the elections are about expressing our political outrage at the system. Both get us off on the wrong foot.

I think the author, Bill Fletcher, makes some good points (especially the point that Obama is a “corporate liberal” and mediator rather than a transformer of society), but the repeated references to the “irrationalism” of the extreme right misses the point that George Lakoff was trying to make.

The larger point though from Fletcher is that just because Obama and the US political process is not particularly progressive and does not align with left-wing principles of democracy, etc, does not excuse progressives and lefties from actively participating in the electoral process. There’s no doubt that Romney and the Tea Party would be worse.

NationBuilder picks a side; progressives should stop using it

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If you haven’t heard, Nation Builder is an online content management system, donation platform and volunteer admin system all rolled into one. It has grown rapidly, due to its focus on serving political, advocacy and non-profit campaigns. Several unions in Australia (particularly in QLD) have started to use it for campaign sites.

Two days ago, they announced that they had struck an exclusive deal with the Republican Party:

NationBuilder, a service that provides state-of-the-art digital organizing technology to almost any political campaign, has made what the company’s president called “probably the largest deal ever struck in political technology” in terms of the number of elections it can potentially impact.

The deal? NationBuilder will be the exclusive campaign technology of the Republican State Leadership Committee, whose mission is to elect Republican candidates running for office at the state level across the U.S.

Through the arrangement, Republican candidates running for about 7,500 different offices will get greatly discounted access to the service. NationBuilder will provide those candidates with websites, digital organizing tools and training, access to voter data and a mechanism to share data between Republican campaigns.

There’s no doubt that the feature list of Nation Builder is impressive. However, it is clear with this exclusive deal, that Nation Builder has stopped being just a platform, and has picked a side.

While Nation Builder argues that they are non-partisan, the question remains whether progressive organisations, particularly those in Australia, would want anything to do with an organisation that has signed up to help such a reactionary, extreme conservative party.

Executive Director of Netroots Nation Raven Brooks (a progressive online organising group) says:

“This isn’t Google Docs, where anyone can sign up for free,” he said. “This is a specific set of tools that draws on a body of knowledge that’s been built up on the progressive side primarily over a number of years.”

Brooks was echoing concerns that have been fueling a growing debate in the online progressive community about whether software for political organizing can be treated as a commodity, the way organizers consider more general-purpose and ubiquitous software like Facebook or Google Docs.

… “This is like saying Blue State Digital saying: ‘Here Mitt Romney, you can have Obama’s technology,” Brooks said. “It’s an advantage for Democratic campaigns — we’ve had a technology advantage that we’ve built up over the years, and to just hand that off to the Republican party — it could be the difference-maker in some elections. If it allows even one of these candidates to win over someone else, then you’ve chosen a side there.”

Brooks says that he won’t be recommending NationBuilder to people who ask him which tools to use and will instead point them to other products such as those from Salsa Labs in Washington, D.C.

Other progressive organisations, such as Jason Rosenbaum, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee‘s senior online campaign director, has also criticised Nation Builder:

“As it stands now, progressives should think carefully about who they’re helping when they use NationBuilder — every dollar you spend directly aids your opponents,” he told techPresident in an email. “The [RSLC] are the folks who helped pass Scott Walker’s agenda, who want to give transvaginal ultrasounds to women, who want to disenfranchise the minorities, who want to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. Helping them win elections is pretty evil,” he said. “Fortunately, there are competitive toolsets at competitive prices available to campaigns, especially on the new media side. Progressives don’t have to work with a company like NationBuilder that’s now the ‘technology [behind] the bulk of the nationwide Republican races,’ in the words of NationBuilder’s own President Joe Green.”

As a former coder and developer himself, Brooks notes that campaigns continually provide feedback to software providers in order to improve their product, which means that progressive campaigns that use NationBuilder to provide feedback are ultimately improving the product for their opponents as well.

If you’re a progressive Australian organisation looking at Nation Builder, think again.

Tony Abbott and the debt ceiling playbook

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The Government should be forced to specifically justify this, not to just sweep it under the carpet and allow it to go through in the appropriations because by convention the Opposition doesn’t oppose the appropriations. I think we do need to take a very, very seriously critical look at this question of the debt ceiling. I’m not saying that, having looked at it critically, we would necessarily oppose it, but the Government has to justify this. Our money, our future, is too important to be mortgaged like this without the Government giving us the strongest possible arguments for it, because every dollar that they borrow has got to be repaid.

Tony Abbott on 2GB with Alan Jones, 11 May

Tony Abbott had decided that he is not going to just copy the extreme Republican tactics of opposition and obstruction, but he is also going to import their disastrous tactic of targeting the debt ceiling.

The debt ceiling stand-off in the USA was a disaster — it removed the US’s Triple A credit rating for the first time in history, and delayed and diverted the attention of Congress and the President from the real task of creating jobs and getting the US out of the recession.

In Australia, Abbott is testing the waters in preparation for the upcoming election. With every economic measure showing favourably for the Labor government — low debt, low interest-rates, high employment, rising productivity, ad nauseam — Abbott desperately needs to tie the culture/values war to an economic issue.

(If you want to know the reason why the debt ceiling rises, here’s a link to the budget papers.)

The debt ceiling, a relatively obscure and esoteric part of the budget, is just that issue. And Abbott has a play book to follow.

Over in the USA, it looks like the Republicans are taking a second look at the debt ceiling debate:

…in the run-up to the election, it will help clarify for voters what the Republican agenda is: low taxes, deep cuts to domestic spending programs, and a take-no-prisoners approach to achieving it. To this end, Boehner plans to pass a full extension of the Bush tax cuts later this year and blame Dems for their looming expiration.

If they run on this and lose, they’d be testing the limits of democratic accountability to press ahead with the debt-limit strategy anyhow — especially in a lame duck session. But if they run on it and win then they’ll have a fair claim to make dramatic changes to how the federal government collects and spends money.

So, basically the debt ceiling debate is a war drum for the Republicans to beat, sounding the mantra of low-tax, small government. For Abbott, it’s the same. Although in Australia, the debt ceiling expands with the size of the economy, Abbott is simply using it as a short-hand for the conservative, small government types — and to create a differentiation between himself and the government.

It may be clever politics, but it is terrible policy.

 

Social media and political news reporting

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If you haven’t heard about Mitt Romney’s $10,000 bet, chances are you weren’t on Twitter during the Iowa GOP Candidates Debate on 10 December and the days following.

Mitt’s bet is a good example of how social media is changing political news reporting. Since the dawn of time, political reports have listened hard for good (“gotcha”) quotes and sound bites that sum up a debate, announcement or interview. Now, social media is changing the way journalists pick their sound bites, by amplifying certain quotes and giving journalists a real-time gauge of public sentiment.

Blake Hounshell - Mitt Romney 10k
Tweet via @blakehounshell – managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine.

Within minutes of the fated bet, Twitter started buzzing. While analysts mostly ignored it, the social media response was strong. The Twitter hashtag #What10kbuys was added alongside a lot of the #IowaDebate and #GOPDebate posts. Eventually, it started trending in its own right.

Social media amplifies

The Mitt Romney #What10kbuys debacle shows that social media can amplify your message to all corners. A few years ago, Romney’s comment would have gone reported in a nfew newspapers, for a single day. The social media reaction to Romney has shown that what you say as a candidate will get widely promoted — and most of it is outside your control.

The amplification is not what you say about your campaign, it’s what everyone else is saying. It allows an undercurrent of sentiment to become mainstream — like the strong response that was appalled by the cavalier way that Romeny made a $10,000 bet as though it were a dollar-bet.

Another good example is the video of Rick Perry appearing to be drunk at while giving a speech. This video went viral, although the speech and event itself was fairly minor and uninteresting.

Social media scrutinises

After  the debate, the Democrats tweeted:

DNC: We want to know #what10Kbuys for you and your family. #IowaDebate

This helped not only to spread Romney’s comments further, but helped ensure that even people who weren’t watching the debate or following the GOP primaries have heard of it. What’s more, Romney’s defenders on Twitter have kept the hashtag going by trying to use it to attack Obama and the Democrats — leaving confused people days later to try to find out what it is all about.