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— The Editors |
The new permanent campaign
“It is my thesis [that] governing with public approval requires a continuing campaign.”
— Pat Caddell, initial working paper on political strategy, December 10, 1976
Jimmy Carter didn’t listen, but his consultant was right. Political campaigns have become ubiquitous and ongoing. There is no downtime between elections. Campaign managers continue to plan, fundraisers stay in close touch with donors, and opposition researchers remain in the background to track potential opponents’ every move. My business is a part of this, too. Pollsters and data scientists gather intelligence earlier than ever, ensuring that incumbents understand their standing and providing challengers with more insight on how they should beat them. Earned, paid, and social political media reinforce all of this with highly targeted messaging appeals that feel modern and personal. This past cycle, developers had been busily adding generative artificial intelligence to their offerings to finely tune everything a campaign does in between elections. As Kamala Harris learned during her campaign for president of the United States of America, there are no shortcuts through the permanent campaign. There are limits to what professionalism, technology, and speed can accomplish in 107 days.
Campaign strategy gets personal
Political parties used to organize the marketplace of ideas and candidates. Bosses planned behind the scenes to win elections, keeping a thumb on the pulse of their constituents’ political and material needs and connecting with voters where they were. The strength of the relationship between voter and party was so strong that an entire science—political science—was built upon it. This was the first wave of what campaigns were to become: political broadcasting.
Candidate-centered campaigns were the second wave, moving voters to choose individuals over party. Diverse cities devolved into more cohesive suburbs, while consumer and media choices gave candidates direct lines to voters. But this narrowcasting of elections came at a price. Over time, voters became less satisfied with their prepackaged, almost too-perfect candidates. While attempting to reflect what the electorate wanted, candidates became less authentic, reinforcing our preexisting cynicism about politics. Campaigns didn’t work when they were all about the candidate.
We are now in the third wave, a new permanent campaign. Our pro-style, tech-infused, always-on society now has the campaigns that best reflect our times. This is a revolution of politics putting us back at the center of elections, a small-d democratic shift that has wide-ranging consequences. Political professionals now have enough research, data, and media tools to give us the campaigns we want, based on what we say in focus groups, what we tell pollsters, our online interest patterns, and how we behave politically. Where campaigns were party-driven broadcasts before becoming candidate focused narrowcasts, we have reached the natural conclusion of all this: voter-centric targets.
We live in a world of weak ties, and yet they can have a strong impact on political perceptions and voting behavior. Why does it work? According to Babajide Osatuyi and Alan R. Dennis, you tend to discount the opinions of people who are closest to you because you understand their priors, and there is a lack of novelty. Outside information gets disproportionately weighted because it is coming from outside your network and is more likely to bring a new insight. This is why social media is so powerful, and why negative information and disinformation campaigns are as well. It answers the question, “That’s interesting, but did you hear this?”
With the addition of generative AI tools, campaign professionalism was upgraded down ballot. Purchasing the latest campaign technology used to take two or three cycles to become affordable by state and local campaigns. Today’s AI models are cheap enough for every candidate’s budget—from mosquito control commissioner to president of the United States. Moreover, some of the same tools campaigns have always used are now powered by generative AI models.
This has supercharged a distinct shift in strategy. Parties were built on a core strategy of base-plus: winning elections requires base supporters plus voters who can be influenced. Candidate-centered campaign strategies were also base-plus because of a belief that individual voters might form emotional connections that could transcend issue differences. Voter-centered campaigns are now base dominant because deeply held values and strongly held issue preferences are what drive election behavior. Intensity leads to polarization, and it is both mirrored and reinforced by campaign strategy.
Voter polarization increases
In interviews with consultants of both parties, this surprised me. I thought they would at least pay some lip service to the notion that coalitions needed to be built. One reason is that the definition of who an independent voter is has become more refined over the past decade. In an April 2024 poll, Pew Research found that U.S. adults identifying as independent or “something else” was the largest bloc of potential voters at 35 percent. Thirty-three percent said they were Democrats while 32 percent said they were Republicans.
The shift that has moved campaign strategy, however, was understanding that independents lean one way or another and that there are very few “truly independent” voters. In that same Pew Research poll, considering those who lean one way or another among independents, the parties split almost evenly (49 percent Democrats versus 48 percent Republicans). With homogenous communities and gerrymandered districts, there is little incentive to reach out beyond the dark or light reds and blues. We remain a polarized electorate.
Another reason is demographics. With leaners included, younger voters are more likely to identify as Democrats, while voters in other cohorts are more closely contested. Among voters aged eighteen to twenty-four, 66 percent identify as Democrats, and that party holds the edge through age thirty-nine. Middle age appears to be the pivot point, where the Democrats’ gap is +3, which is within the margin of error. Voters aged fifty and over skew Republican. Moreover, older voters are more likely to identify with their political party, while younger voters lean to theirs. While this is standard political science theory, it holds up in practice. This age-driven trend over the past ten years has raised eyebrows, particularly on the right.
The generational warning for Republicans raised by Kristen Soltis Anderson in The Selfie Vote extends to other demographics. The share of women who identify as Democrats or lean that way increased from 48 percent in 1994 to 51 percent in 2014. Through the mid-2010s, Republicans made inroads only on the margins into diverse communities as Black, Hispanic, and Asian voters remain overwhelmingly Democratic (83, 56, and 63 percent, respectively). The only demographic group the GOP held strongly is white voters (56 percent) and those who did not attend college (54 percent), increasingly smaller shares of the eligible voter population.
A base-dominant strategy was limiting. The nation is getting younger and more diverse, and the 2024 Donald Trump campaign recognized this, shifting its strategy to expand the base to natural constituencies of young, diverse men and working-class whites. Anderson’s colleague Patrick Ruffini convincingly argued that the new MAGA GOP had opportunities to expand its base to these groups in Party of the People. Kamala Harris’s campaign went all in on women and attempted to pull in Never Trump Republican voters to expand its coalition but were swept in the battleground states. The country remains polarized, but the constituencies within the poles are shifting.
Campaigns between elections
The new permanent campaign goes well beyond preparing for elections. It now includes a well-funded industry of mini-campaigns focused on issues and public affairs. This began during the first full year of Bill Clinton’s presidency after the passage of his economic recovery package. The campaign for health care reform began with a flourish: the appointment of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to lead a task force to make recommendations to Congress.
What the Clintons did not anticipate was that interest groups might try to compete for attention as well. A relatively small investment of advertising in key states helped undermine the effort, delaying Senate action and eroding public support. President Clinton didn’t realize that while television and his voice remained dominant, others could grab attention as well, to his detriment. Bill Clinton lost the first permanent campaign ad war. It would not be the last. Today, every major legislative or regulatory effort has a public advertising component. Clinton Health Care Reform, ironically, is patient zero in the growth of public affairs public outreach.
Advertising is just one component of campaigns that now look very familiar. For example, pharmaceutical companies hire opposition research firms to help them understand their vulnerabilities as well as those of groups trying to block FDA approvals. The social media companies—vendors to campaigns—now hire their own lobbyists and public affairs communications teams. Polling firms help pretest public affairs messaging by credit card companies before the press releases are written and earned media events are scheduled. Data on members of independent groups and corporate customers are shared to create voter contact campaigns. Grassroots campaigns are waged on issues ranging from pipeline builds to pro sports stadium construction. All these activities offer political campaigning professionals work in between elections to move public policy.
There is an underlying sense of burnout in campaigns, but working with the private sector and nonprofits by applying techniques learned during elections keeps these teams firmly in the arena. In dozens of conversations with campaigners over the years, I have found that it has become work that most firms grow into and appreciate not only for the business. For many, this is what drew those who would become professionals into politics in the first place: to make a difference. With this cycle’s investments in generative AI, grassroots and grasstops campaigns have become even more effective. Modern political campaigns never end; they just continue in the policy arena in between elections.
The future of modern political campaigns
The devolution of campaigns from parties to candidates and now to voters has flipped the Founders’ expectations of our system of government. The intent was to provide a system where the public will could be checked through elections, but representatives would then take the baton to city councils, to state capitols, and to Washington to make decisions in the public interest. The permanent campaign and all we’ve covered in this book has broken the republican system and brought us to a more democratic baseline of governing. I know it is good business for political campaign professionals, but I’m not sure it’s good for us as a country, particularly when the growth down ballot is fueled by generative AI and not experienced professionals.
Collective decision making has become more contentious over the past three decades. It seems that the more we know about voters, the easier it is to separate them into winnable groups. Not enough work is being done on the persuasion side of campaigns, and I am bothered by the notion that because it is difficult, it is not worth the time or money. Voters are now mobilized, but not led. Both parties have become so good that we now have campaigns fought on the margins, at a higher intensity because there are fewer competitive races. Leaders represent, but do not bring us together. There is no going back to a time when campaigns were less professional, when technology was less a part of our lives, and when speed was less valued in favor of patient, collegial deliberation. I get that.
I am nervous about the latest advances and misuses of generative artificial intelligence tools. From a professionalism standpoint, my concern is that campaigners will default to the AI models, which lack the humanity of intuition and the experience of knowing how to reach individual voters. The technology is also leading to a rise of misinformation in the United States and around the world, ably reported by Sasha Issenberg. The speed of all of this is dizzying. Now that Election Day is basically Election Month (or more), there is more time to mislead voters.
Still, at some point, campaign professionals—all of us—need to look in the mirror and decide that this is not what we want our elections to devolve into and run the campaigns we envisioned when we entered this business: bringing people together under a set of ideals and persuading those who can be reached because it’s the right thing to do, not just politically profitable. The same AI being weaponized to produce misinformation could also lead us to more hopeful campaigns. One of the themes of this book is that the tools are always double-edged, for or against your candidate. A broader view might see them as for or against democracy as well. I know this sounds like a bit out of an episode of the West Wing given our polarization, but experimentation is at the heart of America and now we have the tools to do it.
There remains a core majority of Americans who want more from our leaders. Based on my work with No Labels and others, I am convinced the road map exists, and based on how both parties ran their campaigns in 2024, they are beginning to see it. Permanent campaigns do not have to mean perpetual paralysis or polarization. Base coalitions can evolve and expand. Modern political campaigns have the fundraising, research, communications, grassroots, and generative AI tools to move us toward greater unity and progress. I am a part of this ecosystem in the fields of education, research, and mobile technology and remain committed to doing everything I can to help us get closer to that ideal.