Sunday, August 5, 2007

Politics 101 - How to Make Everyone Hate You

Welcome class.

Today we will discuss how to alienate voters in a political campaign. Please open your textbooks to Chapter 12 - John McCain.

At the top of page 85, it lists the cardinal rule of politics: Know Your Target Voter. Let’s examine how McCain selected his target voters.

In the 2000 campaign, McCain targeted Republican and Independent voters who rejected the religious right and politics as usual. He appealed to this audience in a speech in February 2000:

“Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”

His target was the “Reform Voter”. In a general election, this would have been a winning strategy, but was not quite enough to overcome the influence of traditional conservatives in the primaries.

Approaching the 2008 race, McCain shifted to target the traditional conservative base. He embraced Jerry Falwell and tried to portray himself as the establishment candidate. He thought he could add this voter block to the reform voters he attracted in 2000.

Does anyone in class know why this was destined to fail? Anyone? …No Mr. Spicoli, it’s not lunch time, put your hand down.

The answer is that in politics, as in life, you can make an enemy much faster than you can make a friend. By abandoning his maverick image and embracing the establishment right, he immediately lost the support of reform voters, but could not attract traditional Republican base voters, who still remembered their opposition to him from 2000.

Is everyone following me? I still see some confused faces, so I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say you meet two strangers. You give the first one a candy bar, and you punch the second one in the face. You now have one friend and one enemy. Ten minutes later, you punch the first one in the face and give the second one a candy bar. Do you still have one friend and one enemy, just with the rolls reversed? No, you now have two people who are angry at you, and don’t trust you.

McCain compounded this dual alienation by shifting again in the middle of the campaign to lead the fight for comprehensive immigration reform. Instead of a punch in the face for the traditional base, this was a kick to the groin.

By not remaining focused on his target voters, McCain lost both the reform voters he attracted in 2000, and traditional base voters in 2008.

I see we’re about out of time for class today. For next Thursday, please write a 10 page paper contrasting McCain’s voter targeting with the Giulani campaign’s consistent targeting of defense/fiscal conservatives and social moderates.

Class dismissed.

No comments: