Welcome back, Saturday Campaign D-I-Y’ers! For those who tune in, welcome to the Nuts & Bolts of a Democratic campaign. Each week, we discuss issues that help drive successful campaigns. If you’ve missed prior diaries, please visit our group or follow Nuts & Bolts Guide.
Candidates who launch campaigns are generally pretty well informed about what is going on in their school board, city offices, county offices, state house or even federal offices. Candidates decide to run in large part because they care about the political process and something has motivated them to seek out office.
That same drive and awareness aren’t always true of the people living inside of their districts who will be casting votes in their election. In order to determine what helps motivate the voters in your district, candidates often turn to issue briefs—documents, studies, polling data containing research about the opinions of voters in the district and the issues that motivate them.
Partner functions
Many of your best partners in a campaign make an effort to provide you with their point of view, and data to support their opinion. Organizations ranging from unions to issue advocates will provide you information about their issues and how they impact your district. These documents are generally available in public in some format, but can be broken down by advocates who hope to show you how their issue works in your district.
Organizations can provide you more than data, several groups offer their own campaign training programs, which help teach you as a candidate how to address their issues. These training programs take deep dives into the technical breakdowns of issues, your district, and voter breakdowns.
Knowing about an issue is important—but being able to combine that with information about how many known solid issue voters are inside your district helps provide you with information that can save time and help you fine-tune your message.
Strong parties exist to provide institutional data
At the local level, the state and local party can provide an invaluable resource in the form of institutional data. Parties are aware not just of the candidates that have run in your district, but the issues they ran on, the tactics they used, what worked and didn’t.
Your local and state party can help build you a different kind of issue brief, done through voter returns, that will help guide your campaign. Any campaign can look up the voter margins year after year in their district; but institutions can help inform you the issues those campaigns ran on, what resonated and didn’t.
Pro-tip for county and state organizations: If you’re part of a county or state organization, start building digital files on the campaign issues your candidates run on in a digital format that is easier to transfer campaign to campaign as inbuilt knowledge. This institutional knowledge can give your campaigns a big head start.
Do not value issue briefs equally
Even among our partners, you’re going to receive a lot of issue analysis and briefs about your district. Understand that even though issues themselves are important, not every issue is equal in the minds of voters. Some issues will be more important, some will be less important. It doesn’t mean that the issue itself gains or loses value to you as a potential elected official, but it does mean that you have to budget your time as to what you say to the voter.
Reviewing data provided by outside partners, polling entities, and state organizations cannot be done in a vacuum, and combining your partner functions with the institutional data from your state and county organizations can help your campaign build a priority list. This allows you to create your own internal priorities and plan your budget and events accordingly.
Data from your partners and institutional data from your party can make you a smarter candidate, but combining the two together to create a priority list for work in your campaign is the method that drives in votes.
Next week: Campaign hiring practices—campaigns that look like their districts.
Nuts & Bolts: Building Democratic Campaigns
Contact the Daily Kos group Nuts and Bolts by kosmail (members of Daily Kos only). You can also follow me on twitter: @tmservo433
Every Saturday this group will chronicle the ins and outs of campaigns, small and large. Issues to be covered: Campaign Staffing, Fundraising, Canvass, Field Work, Data Services, Earned Media, Spending and Budget Practices, How to Keep Your Mental Health, and on the last Saturday of the month: “Don’t Do This!” a diary on how you can learn from the mistakes of campaigns in the past.
You can follow prior installments in this series HERE.