Campaign merch is a huge creative outlet for consultants, and their clients are reaping the benefits. On the right, one of the easiest recent examples to point to is the T-shirt created by Cavalry for then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s reelection bid. Who could forget Cocaine Mitch?
“Sen. McConnell has a great way of just embracing all of the nicknames that people have given him over the years, from Darth Vader to Cocaine Mitch,” Michael Duncan, a founding partner at the GOP shop, told C&E. “We wanted to capitalize on his willingness to do it.”
The project started after Don Blankenship, a perennial candidate running for the GOP Senate nomination in West Virginia, released a 2018 TV ad where he urged supporters to “ditch cocaine Mitch.” After Balnkenship lost, Team Mitch posted the original meme. And then, a full year later, the T-shirt version was born.
“People were sharing all these things online and the one we really like was an homage to [the Netflix series] ‘Narcos.’ There’s this photo from a lot of the promotional material of a young Pablo Escobar looking at the camera as a cloud of cocaine billows across a plain black background.”
Rather than trying to do a “cartoony” version of it, they worked with a silhouette of the photo in three colors creating “a very stripped-down version of the photo that would be an inside joke,” said Duncan. “We released it on Twitter and it just went crazy, people just buying thousands of these T-shirts.”
Twitter became their No.1 source of donor conversation. They even sold signed shirts at a premium. All to benefit McConnell’s 2020 campaign.
“It’s not common. It’s especially not common for a politician in leadership who isn’t the fresh newcomer to politics. That’s sort of why people liked it,” said Duncan. “[And] what I found with campaign merchandise, it’s a great entry point for new donor acquisition. For people who don’t frequently donate online to candidates, merchandise is a great way to get them onboard.”
Moreover, donors acquired through merchandise are high-value. “They’re bought into the campaign on a cultural level, but also people who buy merch give you their best contact information and their best email. They want to know when they’re getting it.”
The success of the Cocaine Mitch merchandise inspired Duncan and his colleagues to explore other creative outlets, including creating a podcast called “Ruthless.”
“So much of what we do is focused on numbers. Here’s the number of voters in our GOTV audience, here’s how much we have budgeted for persuasion ads on social media or television. What’s often lost in that is the creative element of politics and merch provides an outlet for that,” he said. “If we didn’t know that people would get the jokes, we probably wouldn’t do the podcast.”