One thing we’re sure to see plenty of heading into the presidential year is experimentation, especially on the digital campaign front. Case in point, see GOP digital consultant Wesley Donehue’s call out of Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s plan to offer supporters a 10-percent cut of what they raise for his campaign: “We win by experimenting,” Donehue wrote.
And while presidential primaries are nearly always the Wild West when it comes to testing new tactics, campaigns down the ballot will likely need a renewed focus on fundamentals heading into next year given the attention the top of the ballot will command.
Fresh off some incumbent protection primary wins in 2023 contests, Jimmy Keady, who runs JLK Political Strategies, a nine-person GC shop in Richmond, Va., laid out what was successful in moving Republican primary voters this year.
“I always think direct mail in Republican primaries [has] the biggest bang, and can saturate the message the quickest from a targeting perspective. But the successes that we had in these races this cycle, and last cycle [have come from] an aggressive ground program that knocks tens of thousands of doors [while] targeting those same voters with mail, optimizing those same voters with digital and a little bit of TV and radio,” he told C&E. “[It’s about] really finding those voters that we can move, and talking to those voters in eight different mediums.”
Keady added: “It seems like every two months a new app has been invented, or there are new streaming services, or it’s hard to get a hold of people. So it’s kind of like taking traditional methods that we know work and try to do as many of them as possible to try to get voters on all sides.”
Experimentation with a long-shot presidential campaign’s fundraising is one thing. Getting Republican primary voters to the polls in an off-year election is another. But this tension is likely to permeate a lot of races this cycle as candidates at all levels try to break through in a fractured media environment saturated with news about the top-tier presidential candidates.
In fact, Keady, who does offer media for his clients as well, said he’s been adapting his tactics to adjust to this environment.
“I think one of the problems our industry has [is] we’re running races that were 10 years ago,” he said. “Voters have so many choices. They have so [many] other things to do with their with their time activity-wise. And there are so many channels to talk to voters.
“I think the most successful campaigns that I’ve been a part of, even the ones that we’ve won where we’ve been outspent, [have] done a bunch of little things very well — talking to voters in multiple channels. The all-of-the-above approach to saturate the same message with those target voters, ultimately, I think is the most effective way because of how voter habits are changing.”
Keady also had some perspective on how candidates can navigate between the ongoing GOP presidential primary and their own local contests: “A lot of these primaries that we won are in competitive seats where we have to run different brands to win,” he said.
“Obviously, [President Trump] is always going to have a role in primaries, but the way that I see candidates winning is them sticking to their own brand, their own personality, and really brand building around who they are as conservatives and Republicans and what they’re going to do.”
