A political campaign strategy is a game plan for selling a candidate to voters, built around three questions: who needs to hear your message, what you’re going to tell them, and how you’re going to get that information to them. In this video, political consultant Jay Townsend breaks down all three, from voter targeting to platform-by-platform advertising tactics.
What are political campaign strategies? It’s a game plan to sell a candidate to voters. There are three really important topics here: who needs to hear your message, what you’re going to tell them, and how you’re going to get that information to them — that’s what goes into a campaign strategy.
You cannot be all things to all people in a political campaign. Some people will never vote for you no matter what you say. Some can be persuaded based on their habits in the voting booth. And some are already for you — all you need to do is make sure they vote. That’s the basic idea of targeting.
One way to look at voters is by partisan affiliation, which gives you a sense of how they lean if your jurisdiction registers voters by party — and helps you gauge how many persuadable voters you’ll need to appeal to. A second way is by geography: urban, suburban, and rural voters are often as different as night and day, and understanding where your lowest-hanging fruit lives is another way to dissect the electorate.
You should also look at demographics: age brackets, voting history (do they vote in primaries?), income, whether they own or rent, net worth, and even credit rating if you tap the right data source. All of this is fair game for targeting voters by income, net worth, and education level when constructing your strategy.
The second part of a campaign strategy is deciding what you’re going to tell the voters you’re targeting. First, what makes you qualified to do the job — voters expect you to tell them. Second, your moral code and your notions of right and wrong — do you care about the same things they do? Third, what you’re going to do for them: how you’ll improve their quality of life, what problems you’ll solve, what wrongs you’ll right, what injustice you’ll correct, and what policy positions you’ll fight for.
Fourth, voters always wonder, even about candidates who make appealing promises: how do I know I can trust you? You need to answer that, often through a story about an experience that made you passionate about fixing a problem relevant to them.
Fifth, and often decisive at the end of a campaign: what makes you better than your opponent? Voters appreciate the clarity of understanding the real differences between you and the other choices on the ballot. Answering these five questions is what constitutes a complete campaign message.
Once you’ve done your targeting and built your message, it’s also your job to examine the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents. Your job, ultimately, is to get more votes than someone else, and part of what shapes your messaging is what makes you better and unique in the field — things only you can say about your moral code, your biography, your issue positions, and the problems you’ll fight to fix.
A great campaign strategy appeals to a major section of the electorate while differentiating you from the rest of the field. Voters expect you to deliver this information; they won’t go looking for it themselves, so it has to be a deliberate part of what you disseminate over the course of the campaign.
When I was growing up, most Americans got their news from Walter Cronkite at 6 p.m. on CBS — a single primary source for the entire country. Those days are gone and they’re not coming back, which means there’s no longer one place where people get their political information. Only 10 to 15 percent of the population reads a newspaper daily; the rest get information from a mix of sources, and you have to meet voters where they already are, because they’re not going to change their habits to accommodate you.
Younger voters get much of their political information from TikTok. Middle-aged voters, roughly 35 to 60, get a lot of theirs from YouTube. An older demographic leans heavily on Facebook. People of all ages still get some information from Instagram, some find their political news on Twitter/X, and others get it on LinkedIn, which is newer to political use. Reaching a diverse electorate means using all of these platforms.
You also have to conform your message to each platform’s format. TikTok and YouTube are video — still pictures won’t get you anywhere there. Facebook and Instagram favor a combination of pictures, video clips and short, pithy text, though some Facebook posts are all words. Twitter/X mixes pictures and words and draws a different audience than TikTok or YouTube. LinkedIn, newer to political content, is almost entirely word-based. You have to shape your message into video, image-and-text, or pure text depending on the platform.
Social media is the most powerful weapon in politics today, in the U.S. and around the world — but it requires patience, since it takes repeated posts before a message really sinks in. It’s also a beast that must be fed: succeeding on social media means posting almost every day, not once a week or once a month. The reward for consistency is enormous; the cost of being absent is steep.
Social media isn’t the only way to disseminate your message, and there are inexpensive, tried-and-true tools too. In a small town, go door to door, have good conversations, and ask permission to put a yard sign in supporters’ yards as the election nears. Phone calls still work. Text messaging is a great way to reach people, and plenty of people still read emails from political candidates. These tools are inexpensive and won’t bankrupt a campaign, which makes them especially valuable for a grassroots effort.
Some tools do cost real money: television, radio, and persuasion mail. If you’re running in a large urban jurisdiction or a big city, commercial TV is worth considering because it efficiently reaches a large audience all at once. In many rural communities, there’s a dominant local radio station where people tune in for news and weather — a great way to reach voters if one exists in your jurisdiction, though you do have to pay for it.
The third and most universal paid method, and one that isn’t going away anytime soon, is persuasion mail — the glossy mailers with pictures, bold headlines, and candidate information that show up around election time. In one recent mayoral race in my own city, I counted 50 different mail pieces in the campaign’s final month, and the candidate who sent the most mail won. It still works.
These are the basics of a political campaign strategy. In a small jurisdiction, it isn’t particularly complicated; as races grow past five or ten thousand voters into larger markets, it can get much more complicated, which is why most candidates in large jurisdictions get help putting their strategy together.
Q: How do I decide which voters to target in my campaign?
A: Start with partisan affiliation to gauge how many persuadable voters you’ll need, then look at geography (urban, suburban, rural voters differ significantly) and demographics — age, voting history, income, homeownership, and net worth — to identify your base, your persuadable middle, and voters who will never support you.
Q: What five questions should a complete campaign message answer?
A: What makes you qualified, whether your moral code matches voters’, what you’ll do for them, why they can trust you, and what makes you better than your opponent. Voters expect you to answer all five without having to ask.
Q: Which social media platforms matter most for reaching voters?
A: It depends on age: TikTok reaches younger voters, YouTube reaches a middle-aged audience, and Facebook skews older, with Instagram, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn drawing their own mixes. Reaching a broad electorate requires using several platforms together, each formatted appropriately — video for TikTok and YouTube, image-and-text for Facebook and Instagram, and mostly text for LinkedIn.
Q: What inexpensive tools can a grassroots campaign use to reach voters?
A: Door-to-door canvassing, yard signs, phone calls, text messages, and emails are all low-cost tools that can carry a grassroots campaign without a large budget, especially in smaller jurisdictions.
Q: Is persuasion mail still effective in political campaigns?
A: Yes. Despite the rise of digital and social media, persuasion mail — the glossy mailers voters receive before an election — remains one of the most widely used and effective tools, particularly in larger races where a candidate can afford to send multiple mailers.
Jay Townsend has spent more than 40 years advising candidates at every level of American politics. Browse the full library of free campaign resources at JayTownsend.com or subscribe to Jay’s YouTube channel for new videos every week.
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