Ron Nehring (00:00):
Okay, how many nonpolitical people are in the room and no hands go up. And I said, do you see the problem?
Eric Wilson (00:09):
Welcome to the Campaign Trend podcast where you are joining in on a conversation with the experts and professionals who make politics happen. I'm joined today by my friend Ron Nearing, director of international programs here at the Leadership Institute. Thanks for hosting us, by the way, in your wonderful leadership institute studios. Prior to joining Li Ron was the national spokesman for Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign. We try not to hold that against you. As you know, as a Rubio loyalist, we can't all be right. He was a 2014 Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in the state of California and was the chairman of the California Republican Party. Today we're digging into comments that Ron made at elect Tech in San Francisco recently, a great conference put on by Leadership Institute that I was privileged to attend. Where Ron, you issued a series of challenges. I think it would be fair to say, and it read to me as someone who works with entrepreneurs and invests in campaign tech startups, it felt to me like a roadmap of what do we need to be building. So I want to make sure we had that conversation for our listeners today, and so we're going to dive into all of those and discuss them in depth. So first up was assessing what's working, and you ask what does it look like to build a message testing machine for campaigns with just a few thousand dollars to work with. So what is that gap that you see there?
Ron Nehring (01:31):
Yeah, so I spent six years as a county Republican chairman in San Diego, four years as a California Republican party chairman. 99% of the elected offices in the country are at the local level and 99%. So when we talk about all these federal races or even state legislative races, it's a fraction of the race which are out there. So the vast majority of candidates who are out there are dealing with a very limited constituency and a very limited budget relative to what their counterparts say in a competitive congressional election. So for example, Michelle Steele, when she ran for reelection, unfortunately, was defeated in the last election. Her race cost a total of $34 million. I'll bet if you took all of the local level campaigns in Orange County of that year, maybe deleting the Orange County Board of Supervisors, but these hundreds of local offices, they would not even add up to that one congressional race. And so local candidates very often don't have the option of being able to commission a $15,000 poll or a benchmark poll, a tracking poll and so on. To the extent that campaigns can have a feedback mechanism to provide that type of information in terms of what's working, what's not in terms of messaging, communications, thematic, et cetera, that would be beneficial,
Eric Wilson (02:50):
Almost like we're working on the same team. I mean, I think that's probably the challenge because you see this internationally, well, there's such good party discipline where campaigns are run from the top down. We obviously run it differently, but it sure seems like we'd want to share polling from a congressional race to people that are relevant.
Ron Nehring (03:13):
And generally that does not happen. So let's say you have a congressional race that's being run that's highly competitive, which by the way, only about 10% of house races in any given year are competitive. So 90% of the country, this doesn't apply, but where you do have a competitive congressional race, in the vast majority of cases, the research that they are performing is not making it down to those candidates who might be running for a local office in an overlapping district where that might be beneficial. It won't be beneficial when it's candidate specific, but it might be when it comes to what type of reputation does your party have, what type of issues around people's minds, what type of mood are people in? Are they in the mood for a tough leader who's going to break things and move fast or more for someone who has a proven track record and is going to keep steer the ship in a steady direction.
Eric Wilson (04:05):
Second challenge that you issued is segmenting by engagement level, and this goes to this concept of core versus crowd, which you elaborate on in your talk. Give us just sort of the thumbnail sketch of core versus crowd and why you think it's important for campaigns to be able to segment on these lines.
Ron Nehring (04:23):
Yeah, this is a really important discovery. So in the field of social psychology, there is a model called the elaboration likelihood model sounds very complicated, it doesn't tell you anything, but this is a model that was developed by two social psychologists who were trying to gauge how people process persuasive information. And what they found is that highly engaged people and less engaged people process information differently. And that runs contrary to the kind of conventional wisdom in politics, which is more one dimensional. In politics, we often talked about purely in that one dimension, do you have to move to the left? Do you have to be a moderate? It pretends that everybody is on the same plane and is processing the same information in the same way, and you just have to find what the sweet spot is on some political spectrum. Well, that's not how the real world works.
(05:12):
It turns out that highly engaged people respond to different forms of information. Highly engaged people are going to care about evidence and policy and specific issues and what we might call the hard part political communication. But your less engaged voters are not really following that. Nobody who is a less engaged voter. And by the way, most voters are less engaged. They're not going to the state party platform on the website and downloading it and looking at page 32 and seeing exactly what the party's position on ag policy is and so on. They're not doing that. They're going to be more responsive to cues and signals that include things like what type of stories are you telling? How are you communicating, connecting with people on an emotional level? What is the colors of the campaign, the brand and the design language, all of that is going to have a bigger impact, an outsize impact on your less engaged voters.
(06:05):
And so therefore, campaigns need the tools to be able to understand how are the more engaged people responding to my message? How are the less engaged people responding? And what you find is that a campaign needs to appeal to both the core, which is the highly engaged voters, the base and the crowd who are less engaged voters, but you don't do it through the same set of signals. You do it by making sure that the core feels that your campaign is a campaign of purpose and the crowd is looking for a different set of signals. And so you have to be sending the right set of signals to both simultaneously. And if we have tech tools to help us evaluate and do that better, that's going to be helpful.
Eric Wilson (06:46):
And it's such a challenge for us. Those of us who are political nerds who are living in and even on a campaign, you think that that's the center of the world because that's where you are. You're following it minute by minute. Most voters are not. And so I think this speaks to one of the things that I do in my trainings here at Leadership Institute is you've got to create evergreen content because people at the crowd are going to be plugging in later and at different times than your core. And so something that you may have done in a press release six months ago, it needs to be brought back up. But so much of that just across the campaign that we need to figure out where these people land.
Ron Nehring (07:27):
It requires a higher degree of sophistication on the part of the campaign, and it means you have to go a little bit further than what you might've been taught in Poli sci 1 0 1. And look, when I lecture at our campaign leadership college, at one point in my opening lecture, I asked the students this, I say, our competitive elections decided by political people or nonpolitical people, competitive general elections, political people, nonpolitical people, and everyone gets it. It takes 'em a second, but then they get it. It's like nonpolitical people. That's right. And then I ask, okay, how many non-political people are in the room and no hands go up? And I said, do you see the problem? And that is here we have political people who process information differently, having to create a message and curate a candidate reputation, things like that, that is going to resonate with people who don't think like us. So we need to, number one, be conscious of that. And number two, in the tech field, we need better tools in order to accomplish that. Exactly. And
Eric Wilson (08:24):
I was digging in some data from a Senate race and found that it was a competitive primary. And 20% of the people who voted in that primary had never voted in a primary before they'd voted only in general elections. Now, typically you would target who are your likely three of 4, 4, 4 primary voters. If you were doing that, you would've missed 20% one in five voters, and it's a huge blind spot for campaigns. So third, you say we need to translate digital insight into analog strategy. Why do you think this isn't happening right now? And give us an example of what this would look like.
Ron Nehring (08:59):
Well, I think that we have to take all the data that we gather and not only use it to create a better TikTok feed, we need to use that data in order to create a more impactful experience. When we go door to door, for example, we need to create a more impactful experience If we're tabling at the farmer's market on Saturday morning in a digital world, analog is king in that. Remember back during the beginning of COVID, everyone said, oh, well, that's it for business travel. No more conferences. The casinos are going to close up forever. No more, no more business meetings, et cetera. And what happened that lasted only so long? And then now everyone's back meeting in person. Why are people meeting in person? Because it's more impactful. People don't have the same level of persuasion, same love of impact on Zoom as they do in person. And so there is a little bit of a disconnect in terms of, oh, I got all my great analytics. I know what my click-through rate is. We did our AB testing. And so on the digital side, but then the analog part of the campaign, which is arguably the most impactful, is that being informed by the information that you're gathering about people? Or is that kind of siloed off in that? Well, we have the field people doing that and the digital people doing that, and they don't even talk to one another.
(10:18):
We're probably missing something there.
Eric Wilson (10:20):
That's why one of the things that, especially when you're training candidates who are from a non-digital native generation, we have to remind them that for a lot of people, online life is real life and there is an overlap there, and it has to flow back and forth. That's why I think it's just as important for those field people to have an online presence and the online people to have an offline presence. It does get siloed and you lose something in that. You're listening to the Campaign Trend podcast. I'm speaking with Ron Nearing, director of international programs here at the Leadership Institute. We're talking about some challenges for campaign tech, especially the world of campaigns down the ballot. So let's dig into number four here. We need better feedback loops. What's it going to take to replace polling as the ground source of truth on these campaigns?
Ron Nehring (11:08):
Well, there has to be an evolution in terms of how campaigns are gathering data. So just yesterday we held our conservative campaign exchange, which is an online program that we do with our international friends. So the liberal party of Australia, which is the center right party in Australia, just had an election. It didn't go very well for them, unfortunately. And it turns out that one of the problems in hindsight turns out that their polling data was off. And what appears to have happened is that the polling data showed that some of their incumbents were safer than they really were. In other words, they were not as safe as the polling data suggested. And it showed that there were marginal seats, which they didn't hold, which appeared to be more attainable than they really were. So what happened, you can guess is that resources, which should have gone to protect your incumbents, moved away to support challenger candidates who didn't have a shot, and they lost both. And so it wasn't a good result. We continued to see this problem with the polling, look at the 2016 election, for example, New York
Eric Wilson (12:12):
City mayor.
Ron Nehring (12:12):
Yeah, right. It's off. And so we need better tools to get feedback from people because the tools that we have in total right now in many cases are not working. And many of those tools are not accessible to down ticket candidates. So for example, we need for candidates for mayor of a small city or a small town to be able to use an app and go door to door and provide feedback and have that feedback from those door to door encounters. Number one, be accurate. You can't just have people phoning it in, not legitimately. And then you have to have the ability, and you need the brain power, whether it's AI generated or campaign manager generated to interpret that data and understand when a signal is a false alarm versus when there's a signal that, Hey, we have an opportunity here on a new issue that's come up, or something like that.
Eric Wilson (13:05):
So I was at the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers Conference this year, which as you can imagine was thrilling, but it was pollsters, so pollsters politically, but with academics and media institutions, and to your point actually about the core versus crowd, there's one experiment where they asked respondents, they said, Hey, we're doing a poll. Would you like to take a poll about politics or entertainment? About half the people chose to do a question about politics and half chose entertainment. The entertainment was, what do you think about Kim Ashian? What's your favorite TV show? That kind of stuff. And then at the end they asked, who are you going to vote for and do you plan to vote? And the people who chose entertainment were more accurate in terms of the ballot and turnout because you basically screen for the political people. And it was really fascinating. And it just shows that we have so much room to improve in our technique of polling. But also I think we've got to look at what are those other data sources that we have, like conversations at the doorstep or social media feedback, the idea that this live interview poll is our gold standard. We just can't hold onto that much longer.
Ron Nehring (14:19):
First. I think that's a fascinating study you just said is really interesting, but it backs up what we've seen and what we've discovered. I think a related problem on the part of candidates is, and very often in a candidate campaign, you have a bunch of political people sitting around trying to figure out what non-political people think, and the tools that they have are not as sharp as they might've been in the past because no one's answering their phone and so on. But then there's also this matter of what about the culture that political people are living in versus the culture of what non-political people are living in?
(14:56):
How many political people read the National Enquirer? How many non-political people read the National Enquirer? National Enquirer still, or it's equivalent or Weekly World News or whatever's reporting on Elvis and UFOs. But think about how many political people read those supermarket tabloids. Probably not many, right? Probably not. A lot of people listen to this podcast do. I could name them, right? But those publications are still profitable, somebody's reading them, and many of those people are voters. And so there's also that cultural question of what's a credible news source and what's a meaningful story and what's an interesting story and so on. These are important questions for us to look for, tech tools to help us work through.
Eric Wilson (15:38):
Yeah, I think that's one of the big difficulties with this proliferation of streaming and social media and all of the fragmentation. Can we really get a representative sample anymore? So the idea that we were all watching the same tv, reading the same newspapers, and so our opinions would be the same. Well, I really
Ron Nehring (15:58):
Think campaigning has come full circle. I think campaigning has gone through four phases. I think you add traditional campaigning leading up until the 1960s, that was all at the local level, all in person. The parties were strongest at the local level, not the national level. That moved to distance campaigning with the rise of television. Then you had Carl Rove Bush campaign 2000, 2004, really rediscover the importance of voter targeting, matching voters to the issues that matter to them. But then by then the grassroots base wasn't as strong as it was before. People don't go to political meetings as much anymore. It's hard to get those volunteers engaged. So that led to AstroTurf campaigning where a lot of campaigns would hire people to go door to door on their behalf. I don't think that's particularly effective. It's far more effective to have a volunteer committed to the cause going door to door than someone who's hired through a temp agency.
(16:56):
And so now we've literally come full circle where the important point of interaction is an in-person contact between a volunteer. But the question is, how can we now use digital tools to make sure that that analog real life person is having that analog real life exchange on the right doorstep, talking about the right issue at the right time during the campaign, not just the right time of day, but is it two weeks before has that voter cast or ballot, et cetera. So I think the premium has to be on physical contact when you're dealing with the voter, but then use your digital tools to organize, target, amplify, and track that experience. And
Eric Wilson (17:36):
Just a quick plug for our Leadership institute training here. So we just launched a new one online called Relational Organizing and Influencer Marketing. You're familiar with relational organizing, but for those who don't know, it's using technology to facilitate one-to-one connections. And I was doing some research for it because it really is back to the future. This is what we used to do. 64 bc, Cicero is running for senate in Rome. His brother wrote him a letter that said, go out into the market and call everyone by name and make sure that they're your friends and you'll win. And it's just like, we've known this for 2000 years. It just took us to sort of get past the broadcast era to get back to it. Alright, fifth challenge. Fifth and finally, tools that generate useful analyses and recommendations that don't fit the prevailing narrative. Elaborate on that and give us an example of how a campaign would put something like this to use. Very
Ron Nehring (18:32):
Often the prevailing narrative is wrong, and there's a tendency, Rory Sutherland, who's the vice chair of Ogilvy, and you could find him a great deal of what he has to say on social media. He makes the point that his entire book, alchemy, which is a great read, I've read it a couple of months ago, loads of notes. I filled the whole book up with notes. His whole shtick to use a technical term is about the non-quantifiable side of communications and the non-quantifiable side of people's decision making. And he makes the point that in the military, if everyone just follows the metrics and the logical route that everyone winds up at the same place at the same time. And then that creates a benefit for someone who's an outlier. And that it creates an opportunity because everyone followed the rule and was over here. But it turns out we're over here.
(19:28):
Donald Trump benefited from that in 2016. So in 2016, you and I did our best, right? Look, I was on the Ted Cruz campaign and so on, and the Cruz campaign had a very methodical approach that would've been deadly accurate, had Donald Trump not run. But it turned out that there was a category of candidate that we hadn't accounted for, which was a celebrity candidate. And many voters evaluated Donald Trump, not as a politician, but as a celebrity. And celebrities get away with more than politicians do. Politicians are held to a higher standard than celebrities are. So all of the things that many of us thought would be disqualifying for Donald Trump didn't matter. And so because the prevailing view in political circles was not correct, and everybody suffered from that Rubio campaign, got that wrong cruise campaign, got that wrong, et cetera. Now we all see that in hindsight.
(20:26):
So likewise, how do you have tools that help to show you an opportunity, which no one's thought of yet. Let me give one other example. When I was state party chairman and there was election going on for mayor of San Diego, there was a fellow who was running, he was a former Republican, became a Democrat, and he was running. And when he was a Republican, he was in the legislature. And so he was a Republican member of the minority in the legislature. And he had a very low rate of turning out for votes because he was spending all of his time out raising money. All the political people thought, yeah, no big deal because he's in the minority. His vote doesn't matter. Who cares if he wasn't in the chamber voting? That's not an issue, right? Because we were all looking at that from a political standpoint.
(21:14):
And then somebody threw in a polling question and asked voters, do you think it's important if a legislator is in the minority and his vote will not affect the outcome, do you still believe it's important that he show up for votes? And it popped more than anything else. And it was one of those rare issues that popped among Republicans, Democrats, and Independence. So that was just by dumb luck or somebody thought to ask the oddball question that all the political people had dismissed. And when the results came back, all the mail was for the Republican candidate was junk and new mail had to be produced hitting on that particular issue. And the Republican won over the former Republican, but it was only because someone had asked a question that was outside of the prevailing narrative because the political people naturally thought, well, of course big deal. His vote doesn't matter. Voters will think the same way. No many voters do not think the same way. We're
Eric Wilson (22:15):
Really good at pattern recognition on campaigns, right? We've seen this before and we can write the plan and it's that disruption or the asymmetric gorilla warfare style tactics that are going to disrupt us and we need to figure out how to spot those. And I think step one is being aware of our blind spots. I think one thing that we need to address in our conversation here, so as you know, we've worked on these larger campaigns. A challenge with technology is the distribution. So with larger national campaigns, we know who the consultants are. We can go to them and say, here, buy my software solution. It gets very difficult when you're trying to go down the ballot because it's every state, every county. What can we do within our movement to do a better job of distributing these innovations, this software, which is a real challenge for technologists when they come into our space.
Ron Nehring (23:11):
Remember, 99% of candidates of elected offices are at the local level. So if you're in the tech sector and you're trying to market a product, you have to go after 99% of the market. And that's not where I think there was a bias there, because if you can get one can get the NRCC as a client or the RNC is a client, or you can get a competitive congressional candidate as a client, that's one invoice. You're going to make a lot of money. You're dealing with one person. If you're dealing with a hundred local candidates, the amount of effort you have to put in to manage a hundred clients is going to be a hundred times greater. However, that's where most of the campaigns are. And most of the technology which is being made available for federal or state candidates is simply not. It's not getting through to your local candidates.
(24:06):
And so that requires, I think, stronger party structures that are more technologically brought up to speed. If you're a vendor, when's the last time you invited all of the county Republican chairman or all the county Democratic chairman in the state to come to a meeting to learn about your stuff and to talk about what can happen? Now, you tend to want to try to sell the state party, and you're going to hope that that filters down. I'm telling you it doesn't. In many cases it doesn't. So those local candidates who are going to have a powerful impact on the direction of their city or their town or their county commission or county courthouse, et cetera, they have no idea who you are. And I think the market is still immature. I think there's a lot of vendors out there who won't be around at some point 10 years from now, there'll be industry consolidation, et cetera.
(24:52):
It's not fully mature, but there is an opportunity to penetrate through. And I think that has to be done through the party structure, but without allowing it to become a choke point. And that is that if you're a vendor, if you're in the tech sector, you can look up who are all the county party leaders in your state in Iowa is 99 of them in California. There's 58 of them. And find a way to connect with those people. And the first step has to be asking questions of them, what do you need? What are the challenges you face? And so on. And I think sometimes in the tech sector, it starts with an offer rather than with a question. And I think when you're dealing with political people, when tech people deal with political people, you have to start with asking questions. You can start with, here's the cool thing I want to sell. Because I think many of the political people at the local level are instantly going to say, I have no use for this and I dunno what the state party is doing and I dunno what the candidates are doing. And it gets confusing. But if you start with a question, you're more likely to get engagement and you're more likely to learn more and then you can take the conversation the right direction from there. Yeah, that's a really good
Eric Wilson (26:02):
Point. And it's also incumbent on those local leaders to learn what's going on and through training with Leadership Institute and other groups and encouraging their state party to do that. So my thanks to Ron nearing for a great conversation today. You can learn more about Ron in the link in our show notes, and I'll provide a link to all of the book recommendations, all the articles we discussed. And I also want to say thank you again to the Leadership Institute Studios. They've got great world-class facilities here. And be sure to visit leadership institute.org/training for a full list of upcoming events and trainings. Lots of great stuff. There's one happening upstairs right now that I wish I could be at. 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 friend or colleague. You look smarter in the process, more people hear about the show. It's a win-win all around. You can subscribe to the Campaign Trend Podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and please be sure to visit our website, campaign trend.com. With that, I'll say thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. The Campaign Trend Podcast is produced by Advocacy Content Kitchen, a media production studio.
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