Today we explore the nebulous world of political consultants.
These are the people who run political campaigns. They use a mixture of science and gut-feeling to determine what a candidate should say and do, and in one particular instance, what they should NOT say and do.
How do they do it? How effective are they? What actually moves the needle in a campaign? Talking to us today are two campaign experts; David Karpf from the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, and Rasheida Smith, political consultant at Dunton Consulting.
Transcript
Note: this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors
Consultants final d1.mp3
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we're talking about something that's a little weird.
Archival: Democrats have kind of organically settled on a new attack line against Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Basically, these guys are just plain weird.
Archival: Well, it's true. These guys are just weird. And, you know, they're running for He-Man women Hater's club or something.
Archival: It's not just a weird style that he brings. It's that this leads to weird policies. [00:00:30]
Nick Capodice: Do you know what I'm talking about here, McCarthy?
Hannah McCarthy: I think I do. This was the quote unquote GOP is weird talking point slash strategy. I guess that the Harris Wallace campaign started to use in the 2024 election.
Nick Capodice: It was. And while I will be talking about how that word was used in the campaign a little bit later, that is not what this episode is about. But when it started happening, I thought, wow, this is a bit odd. It's kind of [00:01:00] a unique attack. And then like that, it's gone. And it got me thinking. Hannah, who decided that did the so-called weird thing come out unprompted from Governor Tim Walz's mouth? Does that even happen in politics anymore? And who decided to stop saying it? And come to think of it. Who decides anything in political campaigns? Who decides? We're gonna have two town halls, 92nd opens, but the moderators can't fact check. [00:01:30] And the candidate should wear a blue tie until at least one story about hearing their parents talk about money at the kitchen table.
Archival: At kitchen tables across our country, there is a concern about our economic future.
Archival: Somewhere in America. A mother sits at her kitchen table, his kitchen table.
Archival: I learned a lot of basic lessons.
Hannah McCarthy: Yet, like, who is the first person to say that a candidate had to slow down right at the end of their sentence to make everyone applaud?
Nick Capodice: Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: I [00:02:00] gotta say, Nick, I'm the biggest softy in the world for this trope in movies and television. You know, the person who knows the score and tells the candidate exactly what to do or say, like West Wing.
Archival: I think we'd lose.
Archival: Not in new Jersey.
Archival: It's never been shown that racial profiling works, and I'm against it.
Archival: That answer is pretty simple, isn't it?
Hannah McCarthy: Wag the dog.
Speaker12: Lord willing and Jesus tarries. Eight days from now, I'm going to be taking you folks into the second term. Wait till you hear the speech tonight.
Nick Capodice: Veep.
Hannah McCarthy: Yep. But, I mean, I guess in Veep, it's [00:02:30] always an utter disaster.
Archival: I will work on putting forward a new, streamlined family's first bill before Congress in the near future.
Archival: She sounds like an underwater Bob Dylan.
Nick Capodice: It is always an utter disaster, Hannah. And, as we often say, lauded as extremely accurate.
Hannah McCarthy: That is true.
Nick Capodice: So today we are talking about the nebulous world of political campaign consultants. Who are they? What do they do when they run campaigns? And how do they know what [00:03:00] will help a candidate actually get elected?
Hannah McCarthy: All right, Nick, can we start with the who before the how? Who gets to run a campaign?
David Karpf: The people who run campaigns are mostly the people who helped to win a previous campaign.
Nick Capodice: This is David Karpf. He's a professor of strategic political communication at George Washington University.
David Karpf: Because of what we call superstitious learning, essentially. Once a team wins an election, you assume that they know what they're talking about, and that leads to a whole career. And you mentioned James Carville. [00:03:30]
Hannah McCarthy: Did you mention James Carville?
Nick Capodice: I didn't today in this episode so far, but I did when I spoke to David. James Carville is quite possibly the most famous political consultant. Am I allowed to do? James Carville.
Hannah McCarthy: Hannah, I'm going to leave that up to you, man.
Nick Capodice: The Democrats have got to come down from the persimmon tree. It's pretty much like that.
Speaker16: Those are the things that that that if I'm a Democrat, I'm much more care about that than than some word in a dictionary.
David Karpf: James Carville is the classic example of this, right? He helps Bill Clinton [00:04:00] win in 1992. It is not entirely clear whether Carville's advice was material to that, win or not. It's possible that Clinton would have won without James Carville. But having been the guy who advised Clinton, he then is able to set up shop and spend decades opining on what it takes to win because he won one. So he must know something. So it's kind of you're a staffer on a campaign that wins. That means you get hailed as a genius, and that means you get to be a staffer on other things. And [00:04:30] all the time you're bringing on people who will test out messages, test out new techniques to try to find anything that seems to make the line go up.
Hannah McCarthy: Carville advised Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton won. And while we might not be able to say whether Carville's advice had any material effect there, I do know that campaign advisers do a lot. Right?
Nick Capodice: Right. In terms of carville's material effect. We can't know because we don't live in multiple timelines. We're not salvadorians. [00:05:00] That cat is going to have to be both alive and dead at the same time. But yes, as you said, Hannah, they do a ton. And I wanted to talk to somebody about all of the massive complexities involved in running a campaign.
Rasheida Smith: I always say that, um, you know, campaigns are like orchestras, right?
Nick Capodice: This is Rashida Smith.
Rasheida Smith: My name is Rashida Smith, and I'm the owner of Dutton Consulting LLC, which is a data and field [00:05:30] firm. And we are political consultants. As a consultant, you have your very specific section. You know, I say the field is like the percussions and media. You know, TV may be the horns or the brass and digital, the winds, the flutes. Right. And mail could be like the strings. So all of this is about understanding your particular role, your expertise, and how you meld into the greater organization. Um, to bring your part [00:06:00] forward.
Nick Capodice: We are going to hear from Rasheeda a little bit later on strategies and processes she and her team use in campaigns. But before moving on, I wanted to share one tidbit from her. When you're trying to get someone elected, everything. No matter how long your campaign has been going on, everything revolves around the last 30 days.
Rasheida Smith: 30 days out and everything's happening right. You're probably in the middle of preparing for GOtv, but now, in this day and age, vote by mail is live. So [00:06:30] people are voting every day. In some places you're getting ready for early vote. So people are voting one way, and now you're going to open up a second way for people to start voting before Election Day. You're also looking to close your arguments, your final persuasion arguments, And make sure that either you're doing a compare and contrast, or you're bringing your positive message home, or you're making sure that you are reconfirming the votes that you already have [00:07:00] and what that looks like. And so right now, you're really focused on how do you end. You know, we have the saying, we say we open to close and we close to open campaigns are the only corporation that is built to close. And so 30 days out you're thinking about how you close.
Nick Capodice: Abc Hanna. Always be closing.
Speaker18: Always be closing. Always be closing.
Nick Capodice: And yes, I am quoting Glengarry Glen Ross here. And that's relevant [00:07:30] today because campaign consultants are salespeople. Sort of. It's about branding and messaging. They are selling America a candidate. But the problem is you don't really have a chance to try out something new like Crystal Pepsi or the Arch Deluxe because the stakes are so high.
David Karpf: A critical thing to keep in mind here is messaging in electoral campaigns is like the worst place in the world to develop new communication techniques. [00:08:00] And the reason for that is the outcome you care most about is winning on Election Day. That happens once every two years or four years. If we're doing presidential, it's once every four years, and every four years you have a different media environment, different candidates, different everything else. So once every four years you get the actual outcome you care about. That makes testing kind of guesswork.
Nick Capodice: So one of David's favorite examples of how political campaigns are different than ad campaigns is to compare them to [00:08:30] selling gym memberships.
David Karpf: Selling gym memberships is an amazing place in the abstract to develop new communication techniques, because every week you can try out a new message or try out new targeting.
Nick Capodice: Now you have bought a gym membership or two in your time, right?
Hannah McCarthy: Hannah I have.
Nick Capodice: So what made you pick that gym in particular out of all the ones in town?
Hannah McCarthy: Uh, it was close to my apartment. They had a massive discount. It was, like, really inexpensive for the first year, [00:09:00] and it was big.
Nick Capodice: All right, so the people who run that gym can say, all right, so, you know, we doubled our size, we added a bunch of ellipticals or whatever. Let's see how that affected membership in January. Oh look, we got this huge boost in late May. That must have been in response to our six months free trial that we promoted on the radio station, the gym. People have a ton of data that they can measure and directly tie to stuff like their ad campaigns or their promotions. Not so in the world of [00:09:30] political campaigns.
David Karpf: Electoral campaigns, the only things that they can measure, they can measure engagement online. They can measure signups to your list. They can measure fundraising. Um, they can do some experiments where like they'll a B test exposure to a message and then see how people respond to that. But it's still mostly like like focus groups. You know, you were putting people in a room, exposing them to a communication and then seeing what they think. Or you're watching in the wild to see on social media [00:10:00] how people are reacting to something. And all of that is really coarse, because what that's telling is how are people reacting to a message when they're exposed to it? It's not actually telling you about the behavior you care about, which is will they vote for a candidate who they weren't otherwise going to vote for on Election Day?
Hannah McCarthy: Did David say whether or not there was anything similar out there, like something to hang our hat on, something that people sell that at least rhymes with the world of political campaigns.
Nick Capodice: He did offer one example that's a little bit closer. A famed advertising [00:10:30] rivalry.
Speaker19: You got the right one, baby.
Speaker20: Coca cola.
David Karpf: Right. Because part of what's going on here in American presidential elections Is we only have the two parties and people have a lifelong association with those two parties. And once every four years they vote for a president. So it's kind of like a Coke versus Pepsi situation where they have deep familiarity, familiarity with the brand, but they only get to buy one soda every four [00:11:00] years. Right. Like Pepsi can try out some really fascinating ads there, but convincing the Coke drinkers that this once every four years I'm going to go with the product that I don't haven't always gone with is just incredibly hard.
Nick Capodice: So we got Jim's, we got Cola, and I got one more. Hannah, can I do one more?
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, please.
David Karpf: Uh, Quidditch in Harry Potter.
Archival: It's wicked fast and damn near impossible to see. You catch this, the game is over, and we win.
David Karpf: Now let me [00:11:30] grant. I didn't read the books. I only watched the movies. I was going to read the books with my kids once. They were old enough. And now I'm less of a J.K. Rowling fan, so I'm going to go there. But my understanding of credits from the movies is that there are all of these people playing this game, and then there's two dudes running around trying to catch the snitch. And actually, whoever catches the snitch wins. Right. Like the entire rest of the normal game has no material impact on who wins. It's just those two dudes flying around trying to catch that outside other thing. Right. [00:12:00] Like the stakes of presidential elections are so high that we spend billions of dollars on communications trying to shape the outcome. And they are close enough that this stuff probably does matter at the margins, but also the vast majority of what you're doing is not going to affect the outcome at all.
Nick Capodice: Real quick, before I get Avada Kedavra the heck out of here, there are two times in the Harry Potter universe with the team that got the snitch didn't win the game. But that is not the point here.
Hannah McCarthy: You know, I didn't realize [00:12:30] until now that Avada Kedavra is like basically Abracadabra.
Nick Capodice: It really is Harry Potter. Jay. Gatsby. Both victims of the green light.
Hannah McCarthy: But, Nick, is there anything like. Is there anything that we know moves the needle to get people to vote one way or another? Did David say whether anything actually affects campaigns?
David Karpf: The depressing finding from most of political science research on this over the decades is [00:13:00] that the impact of campaigns on election outcomes is so small that it's almost impossible to measure. Now, that doesn't mean that campaigns don't matter at all, because campaigns do. Like, what a campaign is usually doing is reminding and bringing home the voters who would have voted for you anyway. So like if one side ran a campaign and the other side just didn't, we would probably expect that to have impacts. We've never had a case of it, so we can't really measure it. But the the depressing thing is it's not like the candidate with the most money always wins, or the candidate [00:13:30] with the best comms always wins. They're kind of responding to external factors that are beyond their control.
Nick Capodice: So David used a barely offensive swear word here that I'm not going to put on the radio, but I'll summarize for everyone due to external factors. Incumbents, the people who are running to keep the office they already hold. They have been getting their backsides kicked and the last few elections internationally.
David Karpf: But it seems like a big part of what's going on is we know that elections tend [00:14:00] to be just broadly retrospective, that people tend to vote based on. How do we think of the state of the country and the world right now? And if it's going great, then you tend to vote in favor of the incumbent party. It's not going so well. If you're not happy with it, you vote against the incumbent. That tends to be the broad trend in elections and every stable democracy post-Covid. The electorate, when they had a chance was like, yeah, life sucks right now and we're going to blame the people in power. That's been happening everywhere. Like a better come strategy doesn't change [00:14:30] that. Like it's a bad. It turns out in the past few years have been bad years to be incumbents. You do everything you can with a calm strategy to try to minimize that or turn it around, but there's no magic words that are actually going to fix it.
Nick Capodice: All right, so that is one side of the coin. After a quick break, we're going to get to the other side and all the things campaign consultants do to get those votes, as well as a quick dive into the world of weird in [00:15:00] 2024.
Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, if you want the literary version of what Nick and I do, we wrote a book breaking down every gear and winch in the governmental machine. It's fun. It's got cartoons. It's called A User's Guide to Democracy How America works. Check it out.
Nick Capodice: And there is no billboard of T.J. Eckleburg.
Hannah McCarthy: We're back. We're talking about the nebulous world of political consulting. [00:15:30] And, Nick, you were about to say what kinds of things consultants do before the break.
Nick Capodice: I was so I am bringing back Rashida Smith. Rashida runs Dutton Consulting LLC. Her specific focus is on something called field operations consulting. That is basically ensuring that campaigns have enough direct contact with voters. But Rashida has worked in just about every level of campaign consulting. She started by telling us how consultants determine [00:16:00] messaging.
Hannah McCarthy: So this is deciding what a candidate should say, what they should focus on when they're going around talking to voters.
Nick Capodice: Precisely.
Rasheida Smith: A lot of this is based on science, and there's some parts of it that's just really sheer gut, right. And so understanding the local landscape and then you do polling. And so you're testing your messages and you're seeing what messages work with what constituencies, right. Or subsets [00:16:30] of voters. And so you may have some messages that say, you know, jobs are most important versus immigration. You may have someone that says quality of life and parks are more important than taxes. Maybe taxes aren't the issue for a local space. It just really depends on what's happening locally. And when you find that subject that really moves the needle, when you find that talking point or that message point, that's when you drive it home.
Hannah McCarthy: And [00:17:00] how do they do that? How do they see if the needle is moved?
Rasheida Smith: We take polls, you know, we poll likely voters and then we ask them questions. A battery of questions on issues so we can have one subject, for instance housing and have seven different message batteries. And so we'll test the messaging different ways and see would this make you more likely to vote for an individual who had this stance less likely or didn't matter. And so we weigh [00:17:30] that. Not only do we weigh it across all the voters and say everyone who participated in this poll said X, but then we look at what we call crosstabs, which is subsets of those voters. Now we're grouping them. We're grouping them by age. We're grouping them by gender, we're grouping them by geography, we're grouping them by socioeconomic status. And so that is how we understand that women who make up 54% of the electorate in a particular race feel [00:18:00] this way about this housing issue or child care. And so this is the issue that we should hone in on, because this is what moves the majority of the voters that we're going after.
Nick Capodice: And once they've chosen a message and they have polled to ensure it's the right message, they go to town with it. And it's got to be snappy.
Rasheida Smith: Years ago, you could have something that might have been two minutes and it would have kept someone's attention span. And then today we're doing seven second videos, right? But [00:18:30] at the same time, there has to be that overall message that we know that works. So how many different ways can you say, um, the rent is too high?
Archival: Once again, why? You said it. The rent is too damn high.
Rasheida Smith: How many different ways can you say lock her up? How many different ways can you say all of the campaign slogans, you know, gas, guns and groceries, right. That have won campaigns now for a couple of years? How many ways can you say this and [00:19:00] how many ways can you depict this so that your message is being heard and you're being remembered or associated with the message that works? And it's really about repetition. How many times are you in front of that voter with that message? How many times do they get a chance to see you? You know, they say, you know, you need something like 25 times in front of a voter before something sinks in.
Hannah McCarthy: Wow. I mean, repetition actually works. I should have guessed that.
Nick Capodice: Yep, repetition actually [00:19:30] works. You should have guessed that.
Hannah McCarthy: I want to step back a second and ask if consultants have anything to do with the very first step of a campaign. Not just what a candidate says, but who they are, how they present themselves. You haven't seen She's all that, have you?
Nick Capodice: I haven't, Hannah, but I will, I promise.
Hannah McCarthy: No, you really, really do not have to, Nick. It's a terrible movie, Lainey.
Archival: No offense, but when was the last time you tweezed. What?
Hannah McCarthy: Um. It is one of the many [00:20:00] movies where the protagonist takes off their glasses, lets their hair down, and suddenly they went from being someone you barely noticed to the most attractive human being on the planet.
Nick Capodice: That is an old chestnut. I gotta say, though, as fun as it is to imagine a consultant putting Walter Mondale in a leather jacket and giving him a snazzy haircut, Rashida says that is not how it actually works.
Rasheida Smith: Well, you have to know that a candidate has already been shaped by their life experiences and who they are and what they stand for. And [00:20:30] so, as much as other political consultants are seen as the puppet masters, right, in many ways the candidate has already done that. And what you are doing is amplifying who that candidate is and what they stand for. Now, there are pieces that you do help mold and shape a candidate based on experience and based on the science part of campaigning and what needs to happen. But if that stuff isn't innately in that candidate, [00:21:00] it usually doesn't work.
Hannah McCarthy: Can we go back to something that David said? Um, the fact that we're a two party system and it is really hard to get people to switch from Coke to Pepsi, but that's what consultants are hired to do, right? So how do they know if they're succeeding before the day of the election? How do they test for it?
Nick Capodice: So they have a bunch of metrics, one of which is called modeling.
Rasheida Smith: Where you assign a support score to either issues or the candidate. And [00:21:30] so you'll have a score from 0 to 100. So the people who are let's say 80 to 100 are definitely with you, definitely leaning your way. And I don't care what party you're in, the people who are below 50 are probably not coming your way, probably not coming out. And so maybe you want them to think the election day is the day after. And so that's that's slither. That's right in the middle. Those [00:22:00] are the folks who your persuasions and those are the folks who you're really looking to touch and get in front of and see if you can get them on your side.
Hannah McCarthy: Last thing, Nick, I would just love to know what, if anything, we know about the weird thing.
Archival: There's the childish nicknames, the crazy conspiracy theories, this weird obsession with crowd sizes.
Nick Capodice: So I have to start with a massive [00:22:30] caveat here. Hannah. We did not speak to anyone involved in the Harris campaign, so this is pure conjecture, albeit conjecture, from people who work in this field or study this field so as to why it stopped so suddenly, Rashida said. That sort of abrupt cessation of a message comes from testing.
Rasheida Smith: That's it. It's testing. Right? And especially when you have larger campaigns, you're testing more often. You're testing weekly. Like if you're playing [00:23:00] on a national level, you're testing all the time, right. Or tracking polls.
Nick Capodice: But David Karp, the professor at George Washington University, who we heard from earlier, he went a little further.
David Karpf: So I have a hunch. Um, again, I wasn't in the campaign. I don't know exactly who was talking, who was being listened to and what data they had. But the thing that was very clear about the you're being weird line that Kamala Harris had used before, then Tim Walz picked up, used extraordinarily well, [00:23:30] and suddenly everyone on blue Sky was cackling over. It is. Well, it depends on which numbers you're going to look at, because amongst the party base that clearly resonates and is very powerful. Um, I particularly liked it not just because the party base liked it, but also because of the I believe that the action is in the reaction. And you could see Donald Trump, JD Vance, Ben Shapiro, like the entire conservative media and political apparatus, was visibly uncomfortable with getting called weird. [00:24:00] And in general, in politics, if you've got a line that is making the other side get flustered and make mistakes, keep on saying that line. So I really liked what I was seeing there.
Hannah McCarthy: The action is the reaction.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, and I think that's an interesting way to think about it.
David Karpf: It's a line from Saul Alinsky's Rules for radicals, which I still teach in my class. But yeah, it's a classic Alinsky ism is the action is in the reaction. The thing that I wasn't seeing and didn't have insight into was there was this slice of the of the potential electorate [00:24:30] who were probably suburban. I don't like I don't know exactly where they are, but they are Republicans who voted for Nikki Haley in the primary, felt deeply uncomfortable with Donald Trump and at least on paper, seemed gettable. And my guess is that the weird line that works really well for the blue sky crowd and produces reactions from conservative elites. It's very possible that in focus groups, that target segment was like, no, don't know. And [00:25:00] that then becomes sort of an internal fight amongst the advisers of should we be targeting our comms at animating our base and getting the other side to make mistakes, or should we be targeting our comms at getting people who wouldn't always vote for us, but it's a tiny segment who might to feel real comfortable voting for us.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick, can you explain what Kalms is? Is it communications?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. David said comms. A lot of times, comms is everything [00:25:30] you do to communicate in a campaign. So it's your messages on social media. It's your ads, it's all of your candidate speeches, etc..
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So which does David think is a better strategy to get your base really excited and riled up and go negative on the other side, or to be gentler, to try to convince people on the other side to come over to yours. Grass is greener. [00:26:00]
David Karpf: Um, there isn't a right answer there. And one of the things that I always tell my students is that the curse of social sciences in general is that you can't run history twice. You have different advisors saying we should focus our messaging at different constituencies. All of them are kind of guessing because while there's data we can measure, the thing that we really care about is election outcomes. And that will only happen once in November. The fight here is less party versus party left versus right than it is. Uh, [00:26:30] a broader story of the world is very simple versus the world is very complicated. Right? Like the authoritarian message from Donald Trump is and like we call it authoritarianism, we can also call it populism. But the basic message is the reason the world isn't the way you want it to be, is that the world is being run by crooks and idiots. Put me in charge. I will fire them and arrest them and then everything will be better. And the message that the Democratic Party has, or the message of progressive technocracy is the [00:27:00] world is very complicated. Uh, elect us, and we will have well-meaning people try their best to make things better at the margins. And when they make mistakes, they'll keep on trying to make things incrementally better. The worse the objective world gets, the less appealing that latter.
Nick Capodice: I'm Nick Capodice and I am coming to you today to tell you that I made this episode. With Hannah McCarthy and Marina Henke. I am proud of the work I do here at Civics 101 with Christina Phillips our Senior Producer and Rebecca Lavoie our Executive Producer. Somewhere out there a family is sitting at their kitchen table, and they're wondering, who did the music in this episode? I am here to tell them that their names are on the way. they need to know that the music in this episode was by Scott Holmes, Jesse Gallagher, Epidemic Sound, HoliznaCCO, Blue Dot Sessions and Chris Zabriskie who makes the best. Podcast. Music. Ever. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR NHPR