Being honest, this Substack has been, let’s say… underutilised over the last year or so.

Part of the reason for that is that I’ve been getting my new business, Fieldwork, off the ground. And part of the reason is that I’ve been publishing my writing on LinkedIn (I know, I know...) as the Friendly Fire newsletter.

If you use that platform, I hope you’ll subscribe over there. Some articles include:

• Attention is the currency of modern politics

• Let’s talk about the non-profit industrial complex

• You’re not organizing. You’re mobilizing.

Back to Fieldwork. I started the business earlier this year to address two specific challenges:

1. I see a gap in progressive organisations: unions, parties, advocacy organisations. Leaders are struggling with the demands of running large, complicated campaigns and organisations. They are losing fights they should be winning, usually due to overwhelm swamping clear strategic thinking. They also struggle with team capacity, for the same reasons.

2. I wanted a way of working that I really enjoy and find meaningful. To be honest, I struggle with anything containing a hint of busy work. I’m turning 40 soon, and I have committed that from now on I will only do work that I feel is actually useful to the world. Building and supporting the broad progressive movement is how I will make my contribution to the world going forward.

So my plan going forward is to build a practice that lets me work directly with progressive leaders and their teams. I’m not looking to emulate any of the fantastic creative campaign agencies that work in this space. I’m offering something different - strategic counsel, team training and development, and campaign planning. I want to spend time with leaders, using the benefit of my 20 years of experience to help them build powerful organisations and campaigns.

You can check out Fieldwork here.

Please get in touch if you’d like to chat! I’m always keen for a coffee or a beer if I happen to be in your town.

Thanks for reading. I’ll post to this list occasionally with updates, so I appreciate you subscribing.

Cheers,

Jack

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Much has been said and written about the three VP finalists Shapiro, Kelly, and Walz. I won’t repeat or recycle the punditry. What I am going to do is break down how the Harris campaign has deployed Tim Walz as a strategic asset in the 48 hours since the announcement, and draw out from that some insights that campaigners and communicators can use in their message development.

Specifically, I want to explore the idea of anchoring and framing in communications and campaigns, and why I think the Harris campaign has done a particularly good job framing the election this week.

How Walz has been deployed

Since Tuesday the Harris campaign has deftly deployed Walz in a series of packed rallies and on social media. Their objective was to introduce a relatively little-known political figure to the nation and in doing so maintain the political momentum the campaign has enjoyed since Joe Biden stepped aside and Harris took the nomination.

But stepping back, let’s look at how the campaign has deployed Walz as a tactic to support their ultimate objective of degrading support for Donald Trump and consolidating anti-Trump support behind the Democratic ticket.1

Tim Walz shot to consideration for the VP spot with an interview he gave on cable news where he described Trump and JD Vance as “weird”. The clip went viral. Walz is very much not weird (for an American). He hunts, and fishes, and he will come over and take a look at your car when you hear a rattle (probably). This provided the Harris campaign and supporters online with a great frame: they are weird, let’s just be normal.

Walz’s aesthetic, demeanour, biography (teacher and football coach) and delivery are extremely normal. He’s not a generational political talent, but he's got candidate skills and he is comforting, engaging and relatable. That contrast with his opponents is why this blow landed so hard.

The final piece of the message puzzle locks in

From the announcement of her candidacy, Kamala Harris has successfully reframed the election to be about freedom and the future, instead of age and the past. In her launch video, she set out the choice in the election:

In this election we each face a question: what kind of country do we want to live in? There are some people who think we should be a country of fear, chaos and hate. But us, we choose different. We choose freedom. The freedom not just to get by, but to get ahead. The freedom to be safe from gun violence. The freedom to make decisions about your own body.

This is a progressive reframing of a core American ideal: freedom.2 It is a frame Barack Obama successfully activated in each of his campaigns for President.

The strength of the Walz deployment, on the back of him single-handedly '“making ‘weird’ happen”, is that it has laid a foundation for Harris to build the freedom frame into the overarching prism through which voters see the remaining 90 days of the campaign. Freedom is a contested idea. It can be difficult to own. But it is a lot easier to make the case that someone like Donald Trump or JD Vance wants to use the government to remove your freedoms if people already think those guys are a bit… weird.

This is why we can think about Walz and ‘weird’ as an anchor, a reminder of a shared and somewhat nostalgic view of normalcy in a campaign that has been anything but normal. It undermines Republicans credibility to speak on what is normal, and therefore on what is freedom. This gives Harris a clear run at a definition of freedom that supports her historic candidacy and platform.

Takeaways for campaigners

I think there are two things campaigners can take away from this case study:

1. The winner of a campaign is the side that frames the campaign. Don’t respond to the oppostion, set the terms of the disccusion around values your audience holds dear, and make your issue align with those values.

2. Don’t overcomplicate, remind people of what’s at stake. By anchoring the audience in what's normal and what's weird, the Harris campaign has simplified the choice for voters. You should try to do the same. People only have so long to listen to you!

Thanks for reading.

First, we have to briefly examine how campaigns have evolved from the pre-internet era to today.

The evolution of campaigns

Pre-internet

In the pre-internet era1 campaigns could be understood as comprising two main components.

The first was a broadcast strategy, sometimes called the “air war”. The air war consisted of a traditional media strategy that included earned and paid media on the twin platforms of print and TV. That included advertising, op-eds, and earned coverage by interacting with media outlets to generate press.

The second was the in-person strategy or the ground game. We mostly saw this in political campaigns or some labour campaigns. It also popped up now and then on particularly well-resourced corporate PR campaigns. This ground-based bucket of tactics includes door-knocking/canvassing, events, and rallies.

Skip to today. Campaigns still incorporate traditional media and ground game, but they also include an increasingly significant digital element. I like to think about the integration of digital into broader strategic communications and campaigns in three phases:

Phase 1 (2004-2012), campaigns used digital as primarily a novelty item and for fundraising.

Phase 2 (2012-2016), digital was used as an additional delivery mechanism for broadcast communications through digital ad targeting and to fundraise.

Phase 3 (2016-present), today the best campaigns use digital as a place to build reciprocal relationships with distinct communities and fandoms… and to fundraise. Additionally, the best modern campaigns fuse traditional media, ground and digital in a way that the three feed each other, rather than siloing them off.

Most campaigns you interact with still use a phase 2 approach. They treat social media as a broadcast delivery mechanism, an alternate and complementary channel to traditional media, and a tool to deliver advertising. It is still primarily a one-way approach, outside a few leading campaigns mostly in the US.

This is a problem because it means campaigns miss out on the opportunity to build a core of superfans that can carry their message back into their social circles. As the information environment becomes hyper-individualized and curated, campaigns that prioritize broadcast messaging through traditional or digital platforms will always be vulnerable to those that engage and activate core bases of support in a reciprocal manner.

A great example of a Phase 3 approach to campaigns, that treats supporters as a core part of your team, is in the 2020 Democratic Primary when the Buttigieg campaign made their brand kit available to supporters, and let them customize logos and other assets so they could co-create the campaign image they shared online. ‘Supporters as partners’ is a key component of the best campaigns in the modern era.

Ok, history lesson over. Here are my five rules for campaigns.

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My five rules for campaigns

Based on my own experience as a campaigner and strategist, I think about campaigns through the prism of these five rules.

1. Play everywhere you need to and nowhere you don’t.

Campaigns should ask, to borrow a term from medicine: what is the minimum effective dose needed to win? This will inform a whole bunch of decisions down the line. For example, if you’re running a national election campaign, you have to show up everywhere: TV, Facebook, TikTok, email, on the doors. But if you’re campaigning for an obscure change to regulation, you might narrowcast your tactics: lobbying meetings, industry press.

2. Treat supporters as partners, not as an inconvenience.

For a campaign to achieve scale, it needs to give supporters a meaningful way to engage. Identify, empower and deploy supporters as the most effective messengers for your campaign. Include supporters as co-creators of the campaign, especially when it comes to user-generated digital content.

3. Be relentless about message and audience alignment, but never contradict yourself.

Microtargeting is an overused term that doesn’t really provide the returns promised, although it’s been a boon for social media companies selling ad inventory. It is essential to talk to distinct audiences in a language and tone that resonates with them, on the platforms they spend time. But always avoid the temptation to say substantively different things to different groups on the assumption they won’t compare notes. The internet doesn’t work like that.

4. Meet the public where they are by making it about them, it’s never about you.

Campaigns should avoid talking about the benefits that will accrue to them (or their members) if they win. A hard truth is that most people are too busy to think about much more than getting through the week, let alone get invested in causes that feel distant from their daily lives. Even if the public sympathizes with you, that doesn’t mean the issue is salient enough to break through their other concerns. It’s the job of the campaign to provide a reason for the public to get on board, to narrow the gap between the public and their campaign issue: “It’s the right thing to do” isn’t enough.

5. Take the shortest route to victory, win the campaign, not the argument.

Tempting though it may be to use a campaign as a vehicle to expound on all the ways your cause is correct, this is not an effective way to win. While a campaign’s methods shouldn’t undermine the core values of the organization, the campaign itself should have no loyalty to anything other than its objective. This means that if a campaign needs to highlight only the most appealing elements of its message, it should. You are not required to express nuance in a campaign, and you don't have to give credence to opposing arguments.

That's all for this week, thanks for reading. Please share and subscribe to get future posts directly in your inbox.

What’s the differnce between an astronaut and political campaigner?

Not everyone thinks they are an astronaut.

This riff on an old joke gets to something I’ve come to know over my career. It’s that campaigning is a discipline in itself. Call it a career, a profession, a trade. It is highly specialized, widely misunderstood, deeply methodological, and brimming with lore. Just like any other profession.

But there’s very little in the way of “professional development” for campaigners. There are of course some training programs. But there is little sense of a collective profession. I hope that by writing this newsletter, I can contribute to building that which is lacking.

So why am I doing this?

I’m someone who likes campaigns. So much so that I’ve been working on them for almost 20 years.

I took my first campaign job in my first year of university. I was a part-time field organizer for a labour federation campaigning against a right-wing government’s attempt to roll back labour and employment protections for workers.

From there I moved into digital organizing, then election strategy, political staffing, and fundraising. I’ve lived and worked in Australia, Canada, and even a short stint in the US. I’ve been a campaign consultant with the Australian Labor Party, Canada’s NDP, and numerous third-party election efforts. I’ve also been a national political director at one of Australia’s largest unions.

Now, I work in consulting. Helping clients plan large campaigns with strong winning messages and developing the organizational muscle to implement on these strategies.

Through all this, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best in the business. Strategists, ad makers, politicians, digital organizers, union leaders, and lobbyists. I’ve learned a lot from these people. I’ve also seen my share of f*ck ups, failures, and… opportunities for growth.

Who is Campaign Breakdown for?

Well, it’s for campaigners.

But that’s a broad term. It means communications people, organizers, advocates, advertisers, digital strategists, fundraisers, and organizational leaders. It’s for people that work in politics, non-profits, unions and the advocacy world.

It’s also for people that want to better understand how professionalized campaigns work, and how to engage with them. It’s for journalists and people who work in media.

It’s for community members who want to learn to organize around issues locally. It’s for academics who get the social science but want to understand how and why campaigns make the decisions they do.

This you? Subscribe!

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Why should you subscribe?

By subscribing you’ll get to read my breakdowns and analysis of current and historical campaigns. I’m going to give you a look behind the curtain and provide you with my unvarnished perspective. Here’s what that means.

In each newsletter, I will take a look at a different campaign. It could be an entire election campaign, a corporate PR campaign, an issue campaign by an advocacy group or union, or a moment within a larger campaign.

Regular posts will go live every two weeks, on a Thursday (Australian time).

I might also sporadically send a newsletter on a developing topic or provide some other ad hoc content. This might be things like reading lists, conversations with prominent campaigners and strategists, or guest posts. We’ll see!