Mark Harris (00:00):
We're thinking like old Republicans used to think the new Republican party, unregistered voters are our people.
Eric Wilson (00:09):
Welcome to the Campaign Trend podcast, where you are joining in on a conversation with the entrepreneurs, operatives, and experts who make professional politics happen. I'm your host, Eric Wilson. Our guest today is Mark Harris, managing partner of Cold Spark, a boutique advertising and public affairs firm that specializes in political campaigns and issue advocacy. In our conversation today, we discuss lessons Mark and his team learned from the successful 2024 Pennsylvania Senate campaign of Senator Dave McCormick. Now, mark, a key focus for Senate Republicans during the 2024 cycle was candidate recruitment and ensuring that the party avoided these messy, unproductive nomination battles, which have historically weakened our eventual nominees. We'll discuss tactics and strategies in just a moment, but those are really at the margins, whereas candidate recruitment kind of sets the table. How important do you think it was this time around that you were able to clear the field for McCormick and tell us a little bit about what that entailed?
Mark Harris (01:14):
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think it was really important, and it was not by accident, right? So we came out of a very messy primary. We lost by, in 22, lost by 900 votes, and Dave did not immediately make the decision to run again. He, I think, understandably, coming out of that process wanted to sort of see how things played out and make sure he could still make a difference on the playing field. But he did the right things as he was making a decision of maintaining relationships with the elected officials, maintaining relationships with the sort of party officials, the activists, et cetera. And I think people really appreciated that he was a team player after losing the primary, and he went out and built those relationships. And the one thing people need to know about Dave McCormick is that he is the hardest working candidate that you can imagine.
(02:06):
And he just went out and did the legwork, and we came up with a strategy about how we were going to tackle uniting the party. But it's really a testament to him and the hard work that he did to just, we worked really hard. The party, traditionally, they have an endorsement process. They don't do it. Usually it happens in the winter meeting, which is January or February, depending on the calendar, but in the bylaws, they can do it earlier if they want. And so we built a whole campaign to get them to do it sort of right after we announced. So we announced and then got endorsed pretty much right after that. And that was a lot of legwork with the party people, conversations Dave was having, et cetera, to win them over. And I think making the case that not only would he be the candidate who could beat Bob Casey, but he would support the issues and causes that were important to them. So it was a big, I think, a series of significant challenges. But it's a lot of hard work that Dave and the team put in to win people over.
Eric Wilson (03:11):
That is such a tricky part of, you've got to walk that fine line. You don't want to be so damaged in the primary that you're not going to win in the general, and you don't want to do too much to win the primary. It's a tough balancing act. One of the immediate headlines coming out of 2024, and you were running this campaign in a battleground state, a presidential battleground state, was that the reason that Republicans were so successful was because of influencers and podcasts and all of these things. But Senator McCormick put in some serious legwork in your case study. You mentioned that he made over 500 stops on the campaign trail. Why is it important to invest all of that time, energy, resources, money into doing on the ground events? In a state like Pennsylvania, which is really big,
Mark Harris (04:03):
Certainly we have to reach a broad, and particularly in a presidential election area of the highest turnout, you have a segment of people that are very hard to reach. They don't watch television. Ironically, we found out about 20% of 'em, they don't even consume streaming media, so a lot of them don't. They're hard to reach digitally. So we have this very hard to reach subgroup. We did a lot of research into how we could get to those folks, and one of the ways is the old fashioned ways. So I think we did, the bus tour was a huge asset for us. And I'll be honest, Dave loves when I tell this story, but I was against the bus tour initially. I knew how much work and logistical work and legwork went into it and how much time he would need to put into it, but he really pushed us.
(04:53):
He believed, and I think rightly, that this was a good way to not just tell he was a Pennsylvanian, but show he was a Pennsylvanian. The Democrats were trying to rerun the playbook they did against Oz about being a carpet bagger. But the truth is, I always felt that wasn't going to work because Dave grew up in Pennsylvania, went to West Point on a Pennsylvania commission, was the CEO of a Pennsylvania company. And just the fact pattern was not great for Democrats on that, but it was even worse when people just saw Dave everywhere and we could work in the wrestling stuff. We could work in the small town Pennsylvania stuff. We work in all that. And so those events were really important. And there were also great opportunities for us to grow and expand the volunteer and activist space, which was required for us to get the high, be able to knock the doors, make the phone calls, build the campaign momentum and movement that was needed to win in a very tough race against a guy who's been in public office for 30 years.
Eric Wilson (05:48):
Yeah, I'm just a huge believer, even though I am a big believer in digital marketing and technology, this is still fundamentally an on the ground activity. You need people to go out and vote, and you need them to knock on doors. And there are physical aspects to this. And as someone who has driven a campaign bus a time or two, I admire your commitment to that. And obviously Pennsylvania was the battleground for Republican efforts to address voter registration, absentee ballot, early voting. You had the McCormick campaign, you had other outside groups really investing heavily on voter registration. And I want to make sure I get these numbers. You narrowed the 2020 advantage for the Democrats from 650,000 registered Dems to under 300,000,
Mark Harris (06:36):
Under 300.
Eric Wilson (06:37):
I think it was like 2 99. It was really close. I remember that number being really
Mark Harris (06:40):
Important. I'm a big fan of under 300. Okay.
Eric Wilson (06:43):
Yeah. And so what unique challenges did this objective create? Because normally a campaign isn't taking on voter reg.
Mark Harris (06:51):
We made two very important decisions early on about trying to change the structural framework of the electorate. The first is voter registration, and the second was encouraging Republicans to participate and vote by mail. And so from a voter reg standpoint, we had a lot of great partners. There are a lot of people on the ground who are working at a lot of different groups, but we really honed in on pulling in these new unregistered voters into the electorate. And one of the things, I remember Governor Shapiro when he first came in, so that would've been early 23, he introduced automatic voter registration, which basically when you register or when you do a driver's license update or a new driver's license in pa, it used to be it would ask you if you wanted to register, and you'd have to say, yes, in this system you have to opt out.
(07:42):
If you don't opt out, then you register. And the Republicans and the legislature went crazy about it. They were very upset against it. And look, they have an argument about executive power and the government are not having the legal ability to do that. I'm not addressing that. They may very well be right. They probably are right about that aspect. But my point was no, no, no. We're thinking like old Republicans used to think the new Republican party unregistered voters are our people, right? And sure enough, the state has been producing reports on who gets in through a VR and it's plus 20 points Republican. And so we have to think differently. These, we have traded upper income educated college grad, et cetera, for non-college educated lower information voters. And Trump has really built a multi-ethnic working class party. Patrick Rafini is great on making this point, but that means we tactically need to approach things differently. So one of, we invest a lot of time, energy, effort, and money into making sure those people were registered to vote. And for the first time ever as far and I ever, because as far as there are records back, this is the first even year election where more Republicans than Democrats voted read by registration. Were a very high party red state where Republicans out voted Democrats first time ever. And it's not the Trump team deserves 85, 90% of the credit, but we definitely did everything we could to help.
Eric Wilson (09:17):
It is a big mental shift for us in the business where we are now. The Republicans are now the party of high voter turnout, voter reg getting more. It's just a big tactical shift even in our own careers. And so it's a big adjustment.
Mark Harris (09:32):
I was laughing. I saw a Democrat being interviewed a couple of weeks ago on, I don't know, CNN or M-S-N-E-C, one of those, and was like, we win when everyone votes. And I was thinking they haven't adjusted to the new world either. That's totally not true. They win when everyone doesn't vote.
Eric Wilson (09:50):
Exactly. Dave McCormick was running and is now the senator for Pennsylvania. You mentioned that there were some concerns about criticisms about where his residence was, and you addressed those pretty handily, but your first and last TV digital video ads were shot at West Point, which for those keeping score at home is in New York. What was the thinking and how did you take into consideration the risks of this unorthodox choice?
Mark Harris (10:27):
So the opening spot, there's a great story on the closing spot, but the opening spot was we really believed that West Point was a huge inoculator for a lot of the criticisms on Dave, whether it was Wall Street, whether it was carpet bagger, et cetera. Because again, he goes there on a commission, a Pennsylvania Commission, he goes and serves our country. The military veteran credential is the most important credential in politics, in my opinion. It is one that across the aisle everyone respects. And so we had to drive that point home. So that made the opening pretty easy. There honestly was not much debate about the opening. The close was much more debated. So the close, we did a focus group, we got into early to mid-October, and there was a stubborn like eight to 10% of the electorate that was undecided. And so I called up Gene Om, who was our pollster, and I said, can we do a focus group of undecided voters?
(11:32):
How expensive hard is that going to be? Because generally I'm skeptical of focus groups. I find that it's more anecdotes than real direction. But sometimes you run into problems where you really don't have much. You need to explore a complex issue. And I think this is one of them. Sometimes you do groups and you come out and it's sort of like there's no clear outcome. This is one where all of us got smacked in the face. We did them in Wilkesboro screen and in Pittsburgh. And the overwhelming message was none of the details mattered. All that mattered was who was the change candidate. So we were like, oh, do we need to go harder on immigration? Do we need to double down on this? Do we need to meet none of that mattered? Abortion, et cetera. None of the details. They mattered for the voters who had decided to help us get to three or four points, but to get from three or four points to winning was it different?
(12:30):
This was just a different group of people. These people, all they cared about, they hated dc, they hated the direction of the country. They hated Biden. And so it was just like, who is the change candidate? And so Brad, Todd, our TV guy came up and Jared Dobkin who worked with him came up with basically a bookend spot. So we opened with West Point and we closed with West Point. But the main gist of that closing West Point spot was, I am change. And it was using West Point to make the point of change, but it really was, I am change. And there was a line in there that we fought a lot about. I don't remember entirely off the top of my head, but it's something like, when I make a mistake, I'll admit it. And when Brad wrote it in there, both Dave and I were like, oh, I dunno that that's the right thing to do.
(13:18):
But Brad prevailed upon us, and I think he was right that look, part of what people really hate about Biden and Kamala Harris right now is that neither of them are willing to admit that we made any mistakes. And so this was a way to further drive home the change narrative that we were something different. We were not a creature of DC and we had to scramble. I mean, we had to get on a plane at like, oh gosh, like four 30 or five in the morning and fly from Pit because we had an event fly from Pittsburgh to West Point, record the spot, get back on the plane, fly back to Pittsburgh, and then Dave was at an event at noon or 1230. Wow. So it was a wild 72 hours. But I think that spot was really impactful and important in US winning.
Eric Wilson (14:10):
I don't even want to know about the permitting process for shooting
Mark Harris (14:14):
Jared. I mean, God bless Jared Dobkin and the production team.
Eric Wilson (14:18):
Yeah. You're listening to the Campaign Trend podcast. I'm speaking with Mark Harris, managing partner of Cold Spark about the Dave McCormick for Senate campaign in Pennsylvania. And Mark, as you know and are writing about in your Substack voters media consumption and platform usage is so fragmented now, but TV advertising is still incredibly important for campaigns. What was the McCormick campaign's approach to paid media across traditional linear TV and streaming?
Mark Harris (14:55):
Yeah, I mean, this was the most, and then kudos to national media and Adam Wise over there for quarterbacking it. This is the most complex media plan I've ever dealt with. I mean, I was telling someone the other day, I think I went back and looked my 2010 when I managed tomy, our media plan was 18 or 19 line items. So it was a different world. We were at 300 some line items in this media plan.
Eric Wilson (15:20):
Sounds like Adam.
Mark Harris (15:22):
Yeah, a couple things. One, rural radio, it's been years since I've bought so much terrestrial rural radio, but it was one of our findings was for the low information Trump voter, we needed to reach terrestrial rural radio was a key aspect. And that's not easy. If you're a media buyer, you can call Philadelphia A B, C and spend a million dollars with them. And it's like one phone call. They have to make a hundred phone calls to mom and pop stations, and they're sending them checks. They're like, here's $500 here and $800 here. And logistically it's a more difficult thing to manage. So that would be, I'd say one of my major takeaways was just the value of rural Radio two football. I mean isn't, I'm not saying anything that's sort of probably shocking, but there's a huge group of people who watch no television except football.
(16:10):
And so the problem is football TV advertising doesn't start until the back end of the campaign. So I mean, if there were two high school teams playing and it was being televised, we were buying advertising. It didn't matter NFL on down to peewee. We were buying every piece of football we could buy because there were just a segment of the electorate that sort of 15 to 20% we were talking about that that's the only way that you could reach them and look again, C-T-V-O-T-T, I'm increasingly skeptical of cable. We really dialed cable down and pushed that frankly more into broadcast and other things. So it felt a little bit going backwards in time. But I'm increasingly skeptical of cable as a delivery mechanism in these sort of races.
Eric Wilson (16:56):
So obviously in a high pressure race like this, you've got to be careful, or I think there's probably a tension between doing what everyone sort of recognizes as the right thing to do or the right decisions to make versus being innovative and taking some risks, particularly with new campaign tactics or technologies. How did you balance that and walk that tightrope?
Mark Harris (17:20):
We really were heavy on innovation. I think it starts at the top. Dave pushed us to do that. I think both Brad and I felt empowered. I don't want to speak for him, but I certainly felt empowered to try more adventurous stuff. I think anytime we came to the table with the same old stuff, Dave was extremely skeptical and we did some of it. But yeah, I mean, this was a campaign that was hungry for innovation. And also, look, people ask me, oh, isn't it fun to do slam dunk races? I'm like, yeah, don't get me wrong. It wins a win. But when you're the underdog, it forces you to do stuff differently. If I just run the same old campaign, I'm going to lose, right? I got to do something different. And so that forces you to try new things, to innovate, to test, to optimize. And so this was a campaign where I felt like we were really empowered to do that. We went about working on that.
Eric Wilson (18:22):
Talk to us about how you integrated data into your decision making and what role did that play? Obviously with a very complex media plan like that, you're going to be relying on significant data, but did that come up in other places as well?
Mark Harris (18:36):
Modeling is good for targeting. I have never found it great for progress measuring. I think Tim Sailor would probably disagree with me on that, and that would be a fun conversation. But I'm a big believer in large and statewide sample surveys so that we have, they're shorter for budgetary reasons. You got to make 'em shorter, but having it so we have hundreds of interviews in media markets is really helpful. And we can really dig into the tab that I'm definitely a cross tab diver, and so I want as many interviews as possible. So we were in the field a lot. Jean Om at POS did a lot of stuff for us. We did some surveys with Jimmy McLaughlin, and then we did also a fair amount of text to web track, just basically tracking at the end to sort of monitor images and stuff. And so all of that fed back in. The other thing we did, which I don't know, I mean it wasn't as actionable, but it was very helpful in sort of team and principal management, is we got a lot of people sending us their numbers at the state ledge level, at the state senate level. So we built a Google Doc that sort of tracked and extrapolated all those
Eric Wilson (19:48):
Your own real clear politics
Mark Harris (19:50):
In essence, so we could, and it really, it showed just a constant trend of the race getting closer, closer, closer, closer across all. So I think at the end, we had 72 data points of private surveys that we were aware of between our own plus what other allies, state legislators or other congressmen or whatever were doing. And it was definitely helpful in sort of monitoring progress. It was kind of cool. I had never built one of those Google sheets before, so it was cool to sort of see that when a plan comes together. And I think that one of the other, I was just having this conversation with, I don't know how many cycles we have to go through for people to understand that between the start of the election and September, the public polling is going to be massively biased against Republicans, and it will get better in September and October as response rates sort of normalized.
(20:49):
But I did a thing in August. Donors were, I forget when we were back in real clear, we were back five or six points. I did this thing, the average Republican Senate candidates in the Trump era. So from 2016 to 2024, well, we didn't have the 24 final data yet, but the 22 cycle, the average Senate candidate, Republican Senate candidate gains like 6.4 points on the RCP average as of August 1st through election day. So some of that is the race generally closing, but a lot of it's just the fact that there is this response bias issue in public survey work that's so persistent and pervasive. And I don't know how many times I have to scream at reporters about it,
Eric Wilson (21:34):
But
Mark Harris (21:35):
Still no one understands, unfortunately.
Eric Wilson (21:37):
Well, the people are just hungry for whatever data they can get their hands on, it seems
Mark Harris (21:41):
Like. Amen. Yeah,
Eric Wilson (21:42):
Regardless of the quality. Well, mark, before we wrap up, I want to hear from you, what's a big takeaway or lesson learned from the McCormick campaign that you're going to take forward into future races and maybe our listeners can learn from as well?
Mark Harris (21:56):
Look, I think it's for Republicans, the world is changing. And we used to in our advertising plans kill off anyone 29 and under. We can't do that anymore. There's a bunch of new, the good news is there's New horizons, young voters, African-Americans, Hispanics, et cetera. I'm involved in the Virginia Governor's race, and I think that's going to be a good proving ground for a lot of this. But we have as a party, just phenomenal opportunities to grow the tent, but we got to go out and actually talk to these folks. And that has not been a strength of our consultant class previously. And I would just encourage all of us to rethink our suppositions because just because in 2018 or 16 or whatever, we did things a certain way, that shouldn't be the way that we do it moving forward. Trump, to his credit, has changed the party and the coalition and all the rest of us need to follow suit.
Eric Wilson (22:49):
Alright, well my thanks to Mark Harris for a great conversation. I'll link to that case study in our show notes so you can go read it. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something new to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend. You look smarter in the process, more people learn about the show. It's a win-win all around. Remember to subscribe to the Campaign Trend podcast wherever you get your podcast, so you'll never miss an episode. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. See you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Content Kitchen, a media production studio. I.
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