What You’ll Learn in This Video

• Why defining the election on your own terms — controlling the agenda — is the strategy every winning candidate shares
• The five components of a genuinely compelling campaign message, and why “I’ve always believed in public service” isn’t one of them
• How to outsmart your opponent by studying their record, their team, and their patterns — and why The Art of War belongs on your reading list
• Why staying constantly in the news can be the deciding factor between two otherwise equally qualified candidates
• Why outraising your opponent, even by a wide margin, remains one of the most effective strategies in politics

Strategy One: Define the Election on Your Terms

In addition to your message, your advertising strategy, and your targeting, perhaps the most important strategy is defining the election on your own terms. Take the 2024 election: it’s President Biden versus former President Trump, and both of them want to define the election on their terms. Trump wants voters thinking about inflation, the border, and the general malaise about the economy under Biden. Biden wants voters thinking about something completely different — concerns about losing the right to make their own medical decisions, losing access to health care, and things they found objectionable about Trump’s personality. He or she who controls the agenda generally determines the outcome of the election. Both candidates in an election are trying to define it so that when voters vote, the issues they want on the agenda are foremost in voters’ minds. How do you do that in your own campaign? That’s part of your campaign message and the way you express yourself, which brings us to strategy two.

Strategy Two: Craft a Compelling Message

A non-compelling message sounds like this: I’m running because I’ve always believed in public service, I feel like stepping up to the plate, and I’m just going to listen to voters and do what they want me to do. There’s nothing compelling about that — it’s a candidate in search of a reason for running, someone on an ego trip. A compelling message has five components. First, tell voters exactly what you want to do when you get the job, in easily understood, substantive terms. Second, convey the parameters of your moral code and the values that will guide how you behave in office and how you vote. Third, tell a story that lets people know you mean what you say and that they can trust you to do the right thing when they’re not looking. Fourth, tell them just enough about yourself that they know your feet are on the ground and that you’ve done something real in your life. Fifth is the agenda piece from strategy one: why you, and why not your opponent? What can you say that your opponent can’t or won’t say? What are you for that your opponent will never be for? What will you do that your opponent can’t or won’t do? Figuring out the answer to that question is how you determine what you want in voters’ minds before they vote — the choice in clear, stark terms. He or she who determines the agenda generally wins the election.

Strategy Three: Outsmart Your Opponent

Effective strategy number three is outsmarting your opponent. I can’t tell you exactly how to do that without knowing the particulars of your race, but I can point you to a book: The Art of War by Sun Tzu, written many years ago and still carried around by cadets at West Point. Strip away the veneer, and a campaign is civilized warfare — we don’t use guns and bullets, but we use words, pictures, and symbols, and they can be just as lethal. Politics is intensely competitive, and the people running for office pine for the power that comes with winning. Here’s how I do it when a candidate hires me. First, I put their opponent on a Google alert, so I know the moment they make news — what they said, what they did. Determining the agenda means knowing the opponent just as well as I know my client, and sometimes I learn they haven’t been consistent, that they’ve said one thing in one place and something different elsewhere. That’s not dirty — it’s public record, and it’s legitimate in civilized warfare. Second, I look at the team the opponent has hired — the ad makers, the social media experts — and study their patterns from other campaigns they’ve worked on. Most political consultants have their own playbook, and sometimes I can anticipate what they’ll do. Knowing that, we sometimes run what’s called a head fake in a campaign: we lead the opponent to believe we’re going to do one thing, and then do the opposite, throwing them into chaos. These are the fine-tuning aspects of winning an election.

Strategy Four: Stay in the News

Effective strategy number four is being the candidate who somehow manages to be in the news day in and day out — you never see them dark on any day of the week, just a constant presence. They’re capitalizing on the news, paying attention to every breaking story, looking for anything connected to their campaign message, or to some problem that a missing policy failed to prevent. They court newspaper reporters, the bookers at cable television, producers at radio stations, keep a contact list full of reporters, and put out press releases to get attention. Nine times out of ten, if you’ve got two otherwise well-qualified, equal candidates, the one who stays in the news more often — who seems to be in the paper every two or three days, or every day toward the end of the campaign — is the one who wins when the votes are counted. Pay attention to the news, and have your antenna up for any story, publication, or event connected to something in your community, your campaign agenda, or an opponent’s stumble you want to make an issue of.

Strategy Five: Raise More Money Than Your Opponent

Effective strategy number five is raising more money than your opponent. That’s not always possible, especially if you’re challenging an incumbent, but if you can outraise your opponent two or three to one, that’s an effective strategy — it lets you outshout them on advertising and overwhelm them with your message. Your message still has to be compelling on its own, but don’t ignore the task of raising money in a political campaign. It’s the mother’s milk of politics — it makes the world go around, pays the bills, and pays to disseminate your message to the people who need to hear it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What’s the one strategy every winning political campaign has in common? A: Defining the election on their own terms — controlling the agenda. Whoever gets voters thinking about the issues that favor them, rather than the issues that favor their opponent, generally determines the outcome, because he or she who controls the agenda generally wins. Q: What makes a campaign message compelling instead of forgettable? A: A compelling message has five parts: what you’ll do with the job in specific, easily understood terms; your moral code and values; a story that proves you can be trusted; enough about yourself to show you’re authentic and grounded; and a clear contrast — why voters should pick you and not your opponent. Q: How do you “outsmart” your opponent in a political campaign? A: By becoming an expert on them — setting up a Google alert to track everything they say and do, studying the consultants and team they’ve hired and their patterns from past campaigns, and occasionally using misdirection to throw them off balance. Jay also recommends reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, since a campaign is civilized warfare fought with words, pictures, and symbols instead of weapons. Q: Why does staying in the news matter so much? A: Because between two otherwise equally qualified candidates, the one who stays constantly in the news — courting reporters, producers, and bookers, and finding stories connected to their campaign message — tends to win. Nine times out of ten, consistent visibility in the final stretch of a campaign is what tips the scale. Q: Is outraising your opponent really an effective strategy? A: Yes, when it’s possible. Outraising an opponent two or three to one lets you outshout them on advertising and overwhelm the electorate with your message, though the message still has to be compelling on its own. Money isn’t everything, but it’s the mother’s milk of politics — it pays the bills and pays to disseminate your message, so don’t ignore fundraising.

Want to Go Deeper?

Jay Townsend has spent more than 40 years creating winning strategies for political candidates at every level of American politics. Browse the full resource library at JayTownsend.com or subscribe to Jay’s YouTube channel for new campaign strategy videos every week.