2018 Midterm Election Review with Luke Macias
From the Kavanaugh effect to Beto-Mania, lots of narratives came together in the 2018 midterm election last week. What mattered in the end? Luke Macias and I break down some of the early lessons that the Midterm has shown us!
This week we’re doing a post-election survey with Luke Macias of Macias Strategies. With the Midterm election a few days into the rear-view mirror, we’re trying to digest the results and begin to see what lessons we can glean.
Luke has been our guest a couple times over the last two years and has been a fan favorite. He’s one of the most prolific conservative consultants in Texas and has been a long time friend of mine. After any election, we believe in aggressively working to dissect what we did right and wrong, so we can do better next time. This year, we figured we’d make part of that back and forth into a podcast episode.
Voter contact doesn’t move the needle unless it’s targeted. When it is, it moves mountains.
One of the most important early steps involved in campaign startup is identifying your voter target universe. It’s a combination of art and science.
The reason it’s important to do this targeting is that not every house has registered votes in it and not every registered voter will cast a ballot. Once you know that, it’s easy to understand how knocking every door on a street, or even every registered voter’s door is a waste of time.
It’s possible to encourage these folks to register or turn out unlikely voters…but that’s not your top priority. The first thing your list should be to identify and persuade likely voters. These folks are the low hanging fruit. They’re GOING to vote. The only question is whether they’ll vote for your campaign.
Once you’ve done that effectively, you can turn your attention to less likely voters and unregistered citizens. I’ll be honest though, few campaigns do enough work on the likely voters that it’s worth spending voter contact time on the unlikely.
So what about wave elections? 2016 surprised many people, myself included, with the huge turnout in primary elections.
If I was to go back to that election, I wouldn’t change my voter targets, since no available information could have shown me which other doors to knock. Instead, I would have shifted more dollars into radio, TV and mail. These are less targeted means of contact but in a scenario where wave turnout is likely, they can have a positive impact on voters when targeted voter contact is impossible.
Never miss a chance to reminder voters how important their vote is to you.
I’m all about establishing vote goals and tracking metrics in campaigns. Failing to set the right activity goals, whether it’s fundraising, block walking or votes, will lose you the election. There’s a problem in becoming too goal focused though.
Often, candidates find themselves so focused on the quantitative goals that they forget that a person, an actual human is casting the vote. We can poll and aggregate data to understand it better, but at the end of election day, the results will be determined by a bunch of individual humans making a singular decision.
Why is this important, if you have the right goals and executive your activity well? The fact is that keeping people’s humanity in mind will both humble you and help you focus on the individual. When you’re talking to a voter or a donor, they should be your world. Making them so is both genuinely respecting of who they are AND makes it more likely that they’ll vote for you.
Politics is supposed to be about people, not power. Act Accordingly!
Are you involved in politics because of who you want to BE or what you want to DO?
People who are in politics to BE somebody are focused on power. If doing something, or service are your focus, you’re starting from the right place.
There’s something tricky about this question though. Human nature is such that we don’t stay at the same point across that spectrum over time. Even worse, we sometimes trick ourselves into believing that clinging on to or growing our power will be to the long-term betterment of the people we serve.
By the time an de observer could diagnose the narcissism that has led someone down the power-focused path, they’ve deadened the natural sensitivity of their conscience through repeated abuse. That means that protection against this slide towards selfishness requires aggressive self-review and a close group of confidants.