While I don’t do politics on Kellblog, I do analyze messaging, including political messaging. My point is not to change your mind on a given issue, but to study what works in the major leagues [1]. Towards that end, I wrote a post back in January entitled Analyzing Core Messaging in the 2024 Election. I argued that the campaign messages distilled down to:
- Republicans want to save the country from a list of crises
- Democrats want to save democracy from a man
And that the Democratic message suffered from four key flaws:
- It was too cerebral — e.g., saving the American ideal and the soul of the nation.
- Fighting a man sounds vindictive while fighting for the country sounds noble. (Irony noted.)
- Democracy isn’t all that popular an idea. It’s often referred to as the least bad form of government.
- The message to cross-over voters was effectively: take one for the team. Vote for someone you don’t like in order to save the democratic system of government. (Hint: that’s not very compelling.)
I understand there are a hundred other factors that influenced the outcome and people will be studying that for years. But in this post, I want to take a quick look at some of the messaging tactics that I think worked to the Republicans’ advantage. I’m not going to touch on truth or falsehood both because that’s quicksand and because lots of other people do [2].
Here are the tactics that I think worked to the Republicans’ advantage:
- A simple, clear message. Put “Save America” against uh, well, I can’t even tell you what Harris’ message was. “Joy,” or “The Other Guys Are Weird,” or perhaps, “A New Way Forward”? [3] This is a big problem. You should always have a simple clear message for your candidate or, in technology, for your company and product [4].
- Talking about the problem. The Republican message recites a litany of problems with America. But it is very light on solutions (e.g., “I have the concepts of plan“) [5]. I have long believed that 80% of winning is about demonstrating understanding of the problem. In tech, we are so eager to talk about the solution (i.e., the product) that we fail to use the powerful technique of demonstrating absolute fluency in the problem. Complete your customers’ sentences when they’re describing the problem. They’ll love you for it. And then trust that you can solve it [6].
- Differentiation. While the Democrats did differentiate from the Republicans, they failed to differentiate from themselves. Given the unpopularity of the Biden administration, this was essential. But Harris offered no differentiation message. This enabled Republicans to position her as a continuation of the unpopular status quo. In tech, we must remember not only to provide differentiation from our direct competitors, but also our indirect ones, and sometimes from ourselves (e.g., our prior version). Most marketers build one generic differentiation message. They should build N specific ones.
- Tit-for-tat messaging. For example, “I’m not the threat to democracy, you’re the threat to democracy.” This goes all the way back to 2016 and “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet.” This tactic works because it muddies the issue. You don’t even need a strong counter-argument to neutralize the message because all you’re trying to do is gray it up [7]. The desired conclusion: “Well, they’re each a threat to democracy in their own way.” This works in technology. “We’re not the ones with scaling issues, they’re the ones with scaling issues.” Just build an argument to support the assertion. Even if it’s somewhat contrived, it can still work when you remember the job is not to win the point, but only to muddy it up.
- Attacking the opponent’s leaders, not their supporters. I think “the enemy within” can be seen as referring to key Democratic leaders. Whereas Hillary’s deplorables, Biden’s garbage, and Obama’s scolding were attacks not on the opponent’s leadership, but on their supporters. You don’t win votes by insulting people [8]. In technology, never attack the users of a product, but instead how the product has evolved. “Picking X was a good decision at the time, but now people are finding problem Y.” Or, “it was a great company back when you selected them, but new owners have come in, changed the leadership team, and killed innovation. We can help.”
- Speaking in plain language. Republicans generally express themselves in simple language. Democrats, not so much. Can voters correctly define facism? Regressive tax policy (in reference to tariffs [9]). Supermarket price gouging. Neoliberalism. Reproductive rights. Demagoguery. If someone needs a dictionary to understand your message, it’s a big problem. In tech, we should use regular language, as opposed to industry jargon, whenever possible. Confused people don’t buy from you. Especially when you’re a small startup.
- Consistent use of standard vocabulary. Open borders. Coastal elites. Immigration crisis. Invasion. Endless wars. Mass deportations. Election integrity [10]. Love these terms or hate them, Republicans picked them and used them over and over on the stump. Marketing is a game of repetition. Not only do the Democrats generally prefer more abstract words, they lack the discipline to repeatedly use them. Many technology companies do the same thing. They never settle on a common vocabulary, use multiple words for the same concept, and confuse people as a result. And the easiest thing for a confused buyer to do is nothing. That is, not buy your product.
No matter your views on the outcome of this election, I hope you can appreciate some of the messaging lessons that can be learned from it.
Peace out.
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[1] While I’m not trying to evangelize my views, nor do I try to deeply bury them. So they have a habit of leaking out. If that bugs you, stop reading here. In regards to my own views on the election, I’ll just say that it looks like I picked the wrong week to quit stoicism.
[2] It’s difficult to compete against an opponent who lies constantly. (In software as in politics.) But it’s not impossible if you inoculate against their lies in your messsaging (e.g., our competitor is going to tell you XYZ, here’s why they do that, and here’s why it’s not true) and call them out when they do (e.g., using tactics like tit-for-tat below). In this election, the lying issue was muddied up using tit-for-tat (described in the bullets above) with the desired conclusion being: “all politicians lie,” which grays out the large differences in frequency and degree.
[3] “A New Way Forward” wasn’t a bad message, but it was neither fully developed nor hammered home. (I had to go to her campaign website to learn it was the message.) Moreover, The New Way Forward was absolutely gutted by Harris’ flub on The View, which basically said that the new way forward is the same as the old way forward. Talk about driving a stake through the heart of your own message.
[4] For a startup, your company message is your origin story. Why you exist.
[5] Or the slogan “Trump Will Fix It” which captures the spirit perfectly.
[6] The other advantage of not proposing detailed solutions is that you have no concrete plans to attack. While Project 2025 was a very specific plan, Trump immediately backpeddled when faced with its unpopularity. It won’t take long to find out the extent to which that backpeddling was disingenous.
[7] A lot of messaging is the basic battle between black/white and gray. You want black/white differentiators for your offering and you want to gray out the differentiators of your competition. Think: in fact we both have that feature, but we do implement it differently.
[8] Also, when attacking an opponent with a cult-like following, you should never attack the cult because it only makes it stronger. That’s why people were dressing up as garbage cans after Biden’s gaffe.
[9] Many people don’t understand tariffs let alone how they represent regressive tax policy. Or, for that matter, what regressive tax policy is. The correct counter-message would have been to position tariffs as a sales tax or as an inflation driver.
[10] Which surprisingly became a non-issue on 11/6/24.