RALEIGH – Politics is an inescapable, indispensable element of a free society. Though I believe governments – federal, state, and local – should be smaller than they are now, I also believe strongly that governments exist to perform important tasks through coercion that individuals cannot perform through voluntary transactions. Governments protect our rights. They organize the provision of certain public goods. Politics is the means by which these important governmental powers are acquired and wielded.
Politics, then, is a serious business. Which is to say not only that it isn’t frivolous – no matter how much the antics of certain prominent Democrats and Republicans may make us want to erupt in sidesplitting laughter – but also to say that, in a sense, politics is a business. There are certain, common business practices that politicians and consultants of all stripes employ to market their availability and qualifications for office to the voting public.
Just as in the for-profit world of business, the politics industry is undergoing dramatic change, led by technological innovation and the information explosion. Previous waves of change brought us campaign commercials on the radio (in the 1930s and 40s), commercials on television (in the 1950s and 60s), modern direct-mail fundraising and campaigning (in the 1970s and 80s), and Internet-based fundraising and campaigning (in the 1990s and today).
At least since the 2000 election cycle, one of the most interesting developments in the business side of politics has been the resurgence of old-fashioned kinds of campaigning facilitated by new-fangled tools of the trade. For one thing, voters bored with broadcast advertising – and increasingly hard to broadcast to, given hundreds of channels and personal-media options – are in the market for alternatives. That’s what North Carolina Democrats are hoping. As The News & Observer reported, they are using a series of party billboard this year in a conscious emulation of the old Burma Shave campaigns.
But it’s more than just TV fatigue that is driving political professionals to use mail and other less-jazzy means of communicating. The existence of more sophisticated, better-maintained databases have helped to bring back interpersonal campaigning such as phone calls and door-to-door canvassing. I remember reviewing a 1988 book entitled The Clustering of America, by Michael J. Weiss. He used polling data to group Americans into 40 affinity clusters, with names such as Downtown Dixie-Style, Coalburg & Corntown, Young Suburbia, Gray Power, and Blue Blood Estates. While most of Weiss’ book dealt with how marketers could use these clusters to design campaigns for company brands, he did discuss their potential application to politics. There was a lot of potential, Weiss wrote, but as of the late 1980s “cluster targeting has found a more receptive audience among corporate clients attempting to influence public policy and arouse the citizenry.” Political consultants had not yet learned to use these tools effectively.
That was then. This is now. U.S. News reported last week that Democrats, having see Republicans make extensive use of cluster targeting in the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, are seeking to use the tool more skillfully to help their candidates make major gains this year. For their part, GOP leaders are using more-extensive versions of their technique in Michigan and several other battleground states this year. Clinton advisor Harold Ickes is one of the converts. “In a period when the presidency is decided by a handful of voters in a handful of states,” he told U.S News, “we need to be able to say, ‘OK, we can’t win a certain constituency, but we can find an additional 5 percent support in that group.’”
Take this sentiment, stir in web-based tools for organizing and coordinating ground-level campaigns, leaven with the pecuniary interests of pollsters and consultants, and sprinkle with ideological passion and incumbent desperation. That’s your recipe for Politics 2006 & Beyond.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.