The Campaign Workshop Blog

To build an effective political campaign strategy, you need to understand the landscape your campaign is operating in. While talking to voters is always going to be the best way to get to know the issues that drive your community (and the larger American electorate), books are another great resource to inform your approach to politics.

Digital advocacy seems to be the term of the moment, but achieving real online advocacy results can be tough in both execution and budget. If you are at a nonprofit where money is tight, (when is it not?), spending money on hiring a digital advocacy consultant to manage your digital and online presence can seem like an easy line item to cut.

Your campaign is finally over and you might be feeling a bit of that post-campaign emptiness inside. We understand that feeling and have a lot of insight on what to do after a win or a loss. Like for most things in your campaign you’ll want to be thinking about a plan for your campaign shutdown at the beginning of the campaign as part of your overall campaign plan.

It’s the day after the election — you finally made it. Whether you won or lost your political campaign, your operation won’t end as soon as the results are in. You ran an organization for months that hopefully bore semblance to a well-oiled machine. You likely had people on your payroll, whether it was one campaign manager or a whole team of dedicated staff.

Political advertising can be expensive, so it is imperative to make sure that every dollar is well spent. A big chunk of that change will go towards figuring out who you want to serve your ads to and where, whether for conversion or eyeballs. Over the past few years, methods for creating ad universes have evolved to become more precise and granular – enter list matching.

Hal Malchow is the former Chairman of MSHC partners, which was a political consulting firm that pioneered the use of statistical modeling and control group experiments in politics. His work in changing campaign politics is chronicled in Sasha Issenberg’s 2011 book, The Victory Lab, The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.

Deep canvassing is a growing tactic for voter persuasion that uses longer, two-way conversations. Campaigns, especially electoral campaigns, are always on the lookout to find the most efficient and effective way to persuade voters to support their cause. In the past, door to door canvassing and phone campaigns were a staple of field operations to identify and persuade voters to vote for their candidate or issue.

Black Lives Matter. Across the country and around the world, we have seen protests demanding an end to systemic racism and police brutality in our country as well as justice for the recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah McClain and countless others.

Campaign logos matter. The advertising world is well-versed in using and exploiting the visual language of typography to convey messages that go beyond the overt, verbal language on the page. Cal Swan, author of Language and Typography, says, “These two distinct areas often come together in practice as there is clearly a very strong relationship between the conception of the words as a message and their transmission in visible form.” Nowhere is this more important than in political messaging.

Looking for accurate presidential election predictions? As Election Day approaches, it seems like every news channel will reference the latest polls or how many points ahead Trump or Biden are in the race for the White House. But as scientific and data centric as polls can be, there are a few unconventional ways to make presidential election predictions, and most are eerily correct.

We are often asked to predict the future in politics—especially when it comes to Presidential Election Predictions However, being a political consultant does not mean being the best judge of what will happen on Election Day. We are determined to help our candidates win, and that can make us less objective in predicting electoral odds than we should be.

Let’s talk about gang printing and economies of scale. And—lest you think that “economies of scale” sounds boring—let me assure you that there is nothing boring about saving money. As campaigns get off the ground and start building out their plans, they often want to do several pieces of mail, segmenting their targeting universe (because, crosstabs!) and customizing messages across multiple mailers.

Since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we have seen women running for office at all levels of government at an unprecedented rate—and winning. We’ve written ultimate guides for running for office in the past, but running for office as a woman comes with a unique set of challenges and opportunities.

Have you experienced post office delays? Beyond the current political dysfunction, USPS has fallen victim to inconsistent funding, under-capitalization, ill-timed cost cutting measures and a lack of respect for the system and its workforce. On top of the ongoing pandemic, USPS will be facing an unprecedented influx of absentee ballots.

Pollster Ben Lazarus is currently the Director of Research Solutions at TargetSmart. He is a specialist in state legislative races and works as a principal pollster and analytics consultant for the New Jersey Democratic Assembly Campaign Committee, the Maryland Senate Democratic Caucus, and the Indiana House Democratic Caucus. We asked him 7 questions on polling in state legislative races.