Stephen Aaron (00:00):
There's a severe lack of trust between low propensity voters and the whole electoral process.
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 Steven Aaron, founder of Perspective Strategies. He's also the founder of a voter turnout initiative in 2024 called Vote for America, that worked to activate social media influencers and podcasters. In this episode, we dig into the mechanics and strategy of working with social media influencers with an eye towards how everyone, not just presidential candidates, can incorporate this into their campaigns. So Steven, the Republican engagement with podcast was a major headline immediately following election night 2024. Certainly to me, but I think others, it wasn't entirely obvious that this would be a difference maker. What was the data that you were seeing that drove your strategy here?
Stephen Aaron (01:08):
Yeah, the biggest data point and the problem that we were attempting to solve in establishing Vote for America is roughly give or take a little more than 50% of age voters vote in a presidential election. So clearly there's an enormous amount of Americans who just sit out the electoral process. So if you think about it, the traditional methods have not been sufficient to engage those voters. Paid advertising isn't engaging them, news isn't engaging them, earned media isn't engaging them. So we wanted to engage those unregistered and low propensity voters. So how do you do that if the traditional tactics aren't working? Well, we wanted to talk to them through the people they trusted. One of the things that we had identified early in our research is that there was a severe lack of trust between low propensity voters and the whole electoral process. People do not trust the candidates for office. They'd feel like they've lied to them for years to get elected, and they get elected and they don't do what they say they were going to do. So what we wanted to do was engage these low propensity voters through authentic voices that they trusted, and to us that pointed directly to podcasts and social media. So that was just the very high level initial data that said, the key to turnout in this election is going to be engaging new low propensity voters through the platforms that they trust. So that's where we headed.
Eric Wilson (02:37):
Right, and I think that's the big highlight here. It's not so much the podcasts as it is the fragmentation and the disruption of media. Podcasts are probably the most prominent examples of that. But as listeners will know in our previous conversation with David Ksky from our post-election survey at the Center for Campaign Innovation, it is a media fragmentation problem. It's not that podcasts are taking over. They're one of the ways that people are getting more information now. And one of the key things is you mentioned trust that we also see that divided with news consumption, not just with politics
Stephen Aaron (03:15):
Big time. So yeah, so podcast, I mean, one of the things that steered us toward podcasts as well is you're correct. There is a fragmentation and no podcasts are not going to take over mainstream media because people want, mainstream media exists to produce for the purpose of getting people the news very quickly. But if you look at some of these podcasts, they will outperform a national news segment. You've got just the viewers on YouTube that will outperform ENN on any given night or Fox News on any given night. Even sometimes it'll outperform A-B-C-C-B-S and NBC on any given night. So again, that's what it kind of brought us back to. You've got these massive audiences on these alternative media platforms. Clearly these people are not sitting down and watching David Muir or they would be getting this advertisement, or if they are seeing the advertisement, they're disengaging for a very specific reason. They do not like the process. They do not like the ads. They don't like being involved. They don't like hearing about it. So that was what drove us back to social media and alternative media is getting to these people from the voices they trust.
Eric Wilson (04:22):
So we have the benefit of hindsight right now. It was not entirely obvious to me that the success for Trump in 2024 was going to come from influencers because the Biden campaign had been investing so heavily in these relationships. And then of course, you had Brat Summer with Kamala Harris. I'm curious, how did you identify the right podcasters who were also willing to get political? Some people call it the manosphere. This wasn't entirely obvious. How did you find them?
Stephen Aaron (04:50):
So what we did was a little bit unique. We did not ask these influencers or content creators to get political. What we went and did was we went and talked to them about the necessity of engaging their audience in the electoral process, not on behalf of any particular candidate. Again, there is enough content out there to where if any particular voter wants to engage in the process, there is plenty of content to engage with. So if they're not engaging the content, it's because they don't want to. So what we did is we went and worked through certain segments of the electorate. We worked through veterans, we worked through Second Amendment, we worked through the hunting community, we worked through a homeschool community. We worked through the Farm and ag community, a whole bunch of different communities. And we recruited in social media influencers, like I said, not to get political, but to encourage their audience to vote.
(05:44):
Because what we saw was that one low propensity voters don't like to be told what to do, but they do want to be guided in how to do things. So when we would see an ag influencer post about this regulation's driving me crazy, this is a problem on my farm. I'm sure it's a problem for you too. I've heard from all y'all about this. The only thing we can do about this is vote. That's what we were trying to do, is one of the things we saw early in our public opinion research as well, is that low propensity voters do not recognize that their personal anxieties are largely driven by politics for things that are very natural to us. If somebody is concerned about the border, they literally don't connect that those decisions are made by elected officials. Interesting. And so what we did was we wanted to use people who were talking to these different audiences, the Second Amendment community, and just tell them the anxieties that you're feeling are caused by elected officials.
(06:46):
So if you will vote, you can change the elected official. If you change the elected official, you can change this outcome. You can change this policy. You can actually make a difference in your own life. And what that actually is, is actually very, very traditional storytelling. Or what we did was we took these content creators who are storytellers, but we made the audience the hero of their own story. And there's a little bit nerdy storytelling, but that is how you engage an audience is you make the audience the hero. And that's actually one of the things that a lot of elected officials fundamentally get wrong, is they think to get people to vote for them, they need to be the hero.
Eric Wilson (07:22):
But
Stephen Aaron (07:22):
That's actually the exact opposite of how you tell a persuasive story. You tell a persuasive story by making the audience the hero of their story, just showing the audience how to get to the solution of their problem. And so that's very nerdy behind the scenes about what we did with these content creators.
Eric Wilson (07:41):
Well, so you worked with, what was it, like 379 different content? We were directly
Stephen Aaron (07:48):
With 479 contact writers.
Eric Wilson (07:50):
Wow, okay. 479. Got it. And so how do you manage all of those relationships? It was
Stephen Aaron (07:55):
Extremely difficult. It was very much a full-time job. We didn't engage every influencer on every issue. But what we did was we kind of created a platform where we could take the issues that were popping in culture during the week and communicate to them, Hey, if you'll create content that touches on this, it's going to do really well. And again, we didn't tell anybody what to post, how to post no endorsement of any candidate, but if a certain issue was popping, we would hit the creators in that community and say, Hey, here's an opportunity. Tell your audience that this is a reason to vote. And so they would then go create the content. And they were a little bit hesitant to do it at first because like I said, these are not political content creators. These are people who make their livelihood off of talking to veterans communities or homeschool communities.
(08:48):
So they're not used to talking about politics, and we didn't get them to talk about politics. If you're concerned about homeschool issues and regulation around homeschool issues and your ability to parent your child and teach your child the way you want to vote, that's a reason to go vote. And so the reason they were nervous at the outset is because they weren't used to communicating to their audience like this in this way. And so they weren't sure how it was going to resonate. But again, back to the traditional storytelling, what we ended up seeing was that the pieces of content that these creators would put out would far outperform their average pieces of content. The shares would be through the roof, the views would be through the roof. Because again, back to truist on storytelling, people want it to be led.
Eric Wilson (09:34):
And so obviously in more traditional forms of campaigning, we have a clear ROI or metric. We know that this many dollars is going to buy us this many points, and it's got this viewership. How do you measure the performance or ROI of podcast outreach from a campaign perspective of is this a worthwhile investment of our resources and time?
Stephen Aaron (10:01):
So I'm going to give you a very long-winded answer to that, but hopefully we'll have a digestible outcome at the end of it. First, I'm going to argue with the ROI of ad spending, meaning it's extremely difficult. The point in serving a digital ad, the point in placing a TV ad and the point in going on a podcast is to deliver content. It's to deliver a message. And in paid advertising, it is exactly that. You're buying someone's attention span, you're buying to play something in front of them. And so I could argue all day that it is very difficult to tie digital ad spend, TV spend, or any door knocking any other spend directly to a voter outcome. And podcasting is no different. It is very difficult to say this. Many people voted because a candidate went on a podcast and they heard someone vote.
(10:54):
But what is so tangibly different is that we implemented some of these strategies, not through Vote for America, but directly with some candidates for Office. And as soon as we started placing them on podcasts, their entire campaign apparatus changed. Their small dollar fundraising changed, their web traffic changed, their media outreach changed. Their conversations in public, changed everything changed for the single reason that they came across as a normal human being. You hear this about candidates. Every day somebody will meet a candidate that'll just say, man, I wish the public could see that side of this candidate. Right? Well, that's exactly what a podcast allows for someone who is trained on how to do it, you actually get to see Behind the Veil because these candidates for so long have been taught to get their guard up to go on. When you're going on Fox News, you're going on CNN or you're going on your local radio show, get your guard up.
(11:49):
You're going into an interview. Don't say anything stupid, don't cause damage. And what happens is you become very inauthentic to the people that you're trying to appeal to. And what Donald Trump did really well was he could go on these podcasts and just be himself. And so we worked with several candidates last cycle to just teach them to do this. How do you go on a podcast and be authentic? How do you carry a conversation for two hours? And so when you get some of these strategies down and some of these tactics down, and retrain yourself to actually be more open and to let the public see more of who you are and to let your guard down, it becomes very, very appealing to the public. And we could actually go put some data behind, especially Trump, how much podcasting changed the outcome of his election. And I mean, I can personally tell you, it's a little bit anecdotal, but I had a number of conversations with people who said that they became comfortable voting for Donald Trump because they saw JD Vance as a normal human being.
(13:01):
JD Vance's entire reputation with the general public change because of podcasts. Trump was a very known entity, but Sean Ryan show, Theo Vaughn, Joe Rogan and others, gave him the opportunity to kind of talk to larger, low propensity audiences. But he has generally known entity, JD Vance's brand with the general public, and a largely been painted by the mainstream media. And so when he got to go on these podcasts and the general public got to see how smart he is, how eloquent he is, how thoughtful he is, and how he's not a monster or a crazy person or weird, they liked it. And so for people who were hesitant to vote for Trump, it kind of gave him this like, oh, I can do this. I like jd. If something bad happens, I like jd. We're good. I got it. We're good. So that's the power of podcasting.
Eric Wilson (13:52):
You're listening to the Campaign Trend podcast. I'm speaking with Steven Aaron about his work with Vote for America and Influencer Podcaster Outreach. So Steven, everyone is looking at how they integrate podcasts into their own strategy. Now, what do they need to know about podcasts? How are they different than booking on cable news or something like that?
Stephen Aaron (14:15):
Well, the actual process of getting booked is not too entirely different. You got to find a hook. You got to be relevant to what the host wants to talk about. You got to have somebody to reach out to the hosts and make the pitch on why this is a good use of their time.
Eric Wilson (14:28):
I get so many bad pitches for this podcast. It's clear that people have not even looked at my Twitter bio, for example.
Stephen Aaron (14:35):
Yeah, exactly. And so the actual tactical process of getting on a podcast is not too dissimilar from getting on fricking Sean Hannity or your local news network. But the process of performing well on a podcast is entirely, this is a perfect example of it. One is you have to be able to carry on a normal conversation. One of the things that I highlighted earlier in the cycle was this is the 1960 Nixon Kennedy TV debate year where Nixon got crushed by Kennedy on tv, and it changed elections for the next 60 years. If you could not perform on tv, your career was capped. Podcasting is going to be the exact same thing. If you cannot come on to a podcast, even if it's a small podcast with 500 listeners in a hometown, your career is going to be capped because this is how people are absorbing information now.
(15:33):
And so the process of actually performing on a podcast, it's a very different skill that people have to be trained on to do. And then as I was mentioning with your podcast, there's lots of different ways to do a podcast and do it well. You're integrating and upgrading your podcast. You've now got video. The reason I assume you have video is so that you can clip it. The shorts sometimes will outperform the actual episode itself. And so then having, coming back, grabbing the right clips, it has to be the right clips, bad clips don't perform. Got to grab the right segments. They got to be edited. They got to be produced. They got to be put out properly. And if you're doing it right, there's ways to even boost those clips. And when you're boosting the clips, it boosts the candidate itself. It boosts the episode of the podcast. It boosts the whole ecosystem. And so there's a lot of minutiae into a proper podcast performance.
Eric Wilson (16:26):
So the candidate has to do some things differently. This is not a soundbite thing. You're not trying to beat the clock. I mean, I think that's a lot of traditional media training is, look, you've only got through your five minutes on a segment. You need to hit these points and repeat them over and over again. Don't sound natural. Don't tell stories. And the advice for a podcast is the complete opposite of that. I was like, your goal is to get people to like you, not to score points or make arguments.
Stephen Aaron (16:54):
Podcasting is a storytelling platform at its core. I mean, that's it. And so the best advice that I give anybody that I'm training to go on a podcast is this is not an interview. It's a conversation. People want to feel like they're sitting at a table with you, listening in on a conversation, and you do a great job of that. Even the way you introduce the podcast, there is no, Hey, great, thanks for having me on. This is wonderful. No, it's literally injecting yourself into a conversation. And so it's immediately engaging. And so yeah, it is vast acqui from how you would do a immediate hit because you want to come on, you want to be natural, you want to be relaxed. You want people to see what it feels like to have a real normal conversation with you.
Eric Wilson (17:40):
That again, goes back to the lesson of there's always the correlation or causation. So countries that are happier have more TVs. So the lesson can't be, let's go give a bunch of TVs to poor countries because they don't have anything to plug them into. And so the same thing is like, yes, we need to do more podcasts, but it is creating the content, it's being personal that we're trying to do, and a real change from what people are doing. And I think that was the key. Donald Trump has been in the public eye going back to the 1980s. We didn't think there was anything new we could learn about him, but you got to see just a different side of him in those conversations with the Yvonne, for example, and it really personalized him.
Stephen Aaron (18:26):
I found Theo Vaughn's interview with him fascinating. And there's a lot of things that you could find fascinating about that interview. But the thing that stuck out to me was Donald Trump started asking him questions. I've never seen Trump turn and be like, wait, you're really interesting. Let me ask you questions about this. And part of that is probably because he's never been on a platform that really allows that, and so we haven't got to see it. But he's just such a large personality that it was stark, and it was really interesting to see him interested. Then you get to see what he's interested in, not just what Theon is asking him about. You get to see him reacting to it, be like, no, I'm interested in this. What does it mean to be addicted to something like that? That was fascinating.
Eric Wilson (19:17):
It was like you were sitting at the table at Mar-a-Lago and you were just listening to the president talk to someone. And I think part of that too comes from you're not having to ask the questions that the Press Corps is expecting you to ask. You can take the conversation in different ways. And
Stephen Aaron (19:38):
I mean, that's again, talk about bass wards from mainstream media. You don't get a chance to turn to Pamela Brown or Kaitlyn Collins and say, wait a minute. Let me ask you about this. This is interesting. Talk to me about that and have a real conversation. This is a completely one-sided conversation about whatever the interviewer wants to talk about. The podcasting allows exactly this. It allows the back and forth. It allows the conversation to move, and you really get to see these candidates. And so it's a really fascinating platform. And candidates and especially already elected officials are always hesitant to be like, well, man, do I really need to dedicate an hour to this? Do I really need to dedicate two hours to this understanding that their time is precious? But there's two things that come out of this, and one of them is you get a month of content from doing one podcast because you can take those clips, you can spread 'em out over time. You can share 'em on Instagram, you can share 'em on Twitter, you can send 'em out over your email blast. You can use them as responses to policy questions that people send out because you go on some podcast, talk about a policy, next time somebody asks you about a policy, you get to send 'em a video clip. It takes zero time, much more interactive than some letter from an lc. You get so much content that comes out of podcasts. So it is just an extremely valuable platform.
Eric Wilson (21:01):
What are some other practical tips for podcasts? So I heard this pushback a lot with social media in general of like, well, what if my candidate says something stupid? And I always point out that that is a candidate problem, not a social media problem. And so these podcasts are open-ended. Some of them go for two hours, three hours, probably not many candidates or elected officials are sitting down for that long, but it is longer than that five minute TV hit and you got to prepare for stuff. So what are some other practicalities around doing podcasts?
Stephen Aaron (21:38):
Yeah, there is a whole training mechanism that we go through to help people really dial into how to perform on a podcast, but a big part of that training is getting people to actually stop being scared of screwing up, saying the wrong thing. Shame is not, probably not completely divorced from politics now, but we have divorced a lot of shame out of politics. Looking back at the 2024 cycle, I don't think I can point to any one candidate who lost their race because they said something stupid in a media interview or in a podcast interview. And so when you kind of get past like, all right, there's room for mistakes. This is not a one shot deal. I'm not getting run out of town on a rail for having one mistake or saying one phraseology wrong, or even just saying something about my past that nobody knew before.
(22:30):
That just isn't a part of the equation anymore. But I'd also say, you don't have to prepare for a podcast interview the way you do a mainstream media interview, especially on the center, they feel like a mainstream media interview is going to be antagonistic. And so you go in one with your guard up, so the public isn't going to get to know you, but you're also ready for shots to be fired at you. But you go into a podcast and it's not that very rarely. I'm sure there's one somewhere, but I don't really remember an antagonistic podcast interview because the whole point of a podcast is to have a conversation. I've listened to plenty of podcasts where people disagree, but I've never seen a back and forth on a podcast the way you see on a panel on Fox News or CNM where people are just shouting at each other. I've never seen it.
Eric Wilson (23:19):
Yeah, it really is. I think it's a new form and people are going to have to adapt to it. I mean, there's this, it's not quite talk radio. It's not quite cable news. It's something new and different, and as you point out, you just get a ton of different stuff from it. You get clips, you get social media. I mean, it's huge value for the investment of your time.
Stephen Aaron (23:41):
Even if candidates and elected officials started doing one a month, which is probably a lot, so let's call it one every two months, you're going to get, like I said, a month of content from sitting down for one hour, and it'll get used in multiple different ways. The clips are going to get shared across all different platforms if you do the clipping and the production and the distribution of them properly, which is a whole thing unto itself. But yeah, these podcasts have a dragon tail that far surpasses immediate clip. That's a point that I hadn't made yet. Like a media clip is done that day. Maybe the next, nobody ever sees it again. Just ask. Oh, you don't have to ask anybody. You see it yourself, your podcast episodes, they have a dragon tail to 'em. They stay evergreen for a long time because they'll show up in a search engine. People will find them. People will be looking back for different resources and they'll see it. That's why YouTube exists. That's why it monetizes is because the content stays up and people keep coming back to it for sometimes years. So it's much, much more effective than just a three minute media hit.
Eric Wilson (24:49):
Well, my thanks to Steven Aaron for a great conversation. You can learn more about him in our show notes. He's got some interviews and op-eds he's done about podcasting and the work he did. It's very instructive on how you can incorporate this. If this episode made you a little bit smarter or gave you something to think about, all we ask is that you share it with a friend or colleague. You look smarter in the process. More people learn about the podcast. It's a win-win all around. You could subscribe to the Campaign Trend podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode, and visit our website@campaigntrend.com. With that, we'll say thanks for listening. See you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Content Kitchen, a media production studio.
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