I agree with you and Newt about the need to re-examine every assumption, belief, tactic, and strategy.
Ultimately politics is very much like business. A political party has a product to sell. To be successful a business must attract enough customers to generate sufficient sales to be economically viable. Likewise, a political party must attract enough votes to elect a majority in governing bodies to achieve political power.
Winning in both instances involves choice. The companies/parties, choose which customers/voters they wish to go after. The customers/voters assess the choices presented to them and either select one or choose not to buy if the choices aren’t perceived as either relevant or being a good value. In the 2012 election, 43% of the voters chose not to “buy”. The non buyers represent a untapped opportunity for both political parties, just as non buyers represent an opportunity for sellers in the business world.
Earning sales or votes ultimately comes down to the quality of the product and how it is marketed. A key fact — the company or the political party defines its product, not the buyer or voter. If the product is not purchased it is the seller’s fault for failing to understand the needs of its potential customers or properly communicating product benefits, it is not the fault of the customer when the customer chooses not to buy. Freedom of choice is inherent in the buying decision.
Having a superior product and marketing it effectively is key to success in business or politics. The more complex the product (i.e. automobiles, computers, political candidate) the more features/attributes/dimensions the product possesses. Specific features/attributes/dimensions are more or less relevant to individual consumers/voters. To one consumer the styling of an automobile may be more important than the quality of the sound system while the opposite may be the most important feature for another potential customer. Likewise, for the voter the race or ethnicity of the candidate may be the most important attribute while for another it may be the candidate’s position on one single narrowly defined issue. In the business world, superior products can fail because they “miss” on one single dimension the seller overlooks. An example is video tape technology. Betamax with its superior recording quality lost to VHS with its longer recording time. As it turned out the customer was willing to sacrifice quality to put more hours of programming on a single tape.
For complex products with many attributes, the seller must choose which features to highlight in its communication message to customers. A focus on less meaningful features will result in a less powerful and compelling selling message. Likewise an attempt to describe and explain many features is doomed to failure as the most important features to the potential buyer get diluted. When everything is important, nothing is important.
When trying to persuade buyers/voter, in addition to the content of the message, advertisers must consider reach and frequency when deploying the message. Reach refers to the number of potential customers the message will be heard by. Frequency is the number of times an individual potential customer will hear the message. For a fixed advertising budget, the more potential customers a seller tries to hit (reach) the fewer times the advertiser will be able to convey the message to an individual potential customer (frequency). For this reason, businesses and politicians attempt to target customers/voters most susceptible to responding to the message with a purchase/vote. Advertisers who optimize the tradeoff between reach and frequency will usually realize the highest sales (or votes) assuming the product is compelling and the content of the message is meaningful to the target customers.
In assessing the results of the election conservatives need to stop blaming the voters (i.e. the customers). As the sellers of the concept of individual liberty, it is our job to provide an attractive product (candidate) and to communicate the message in a manner that is relevant to enough potential voters to realize a majority. Potential voters are under no obligation to buy what we are selling. If voters were mislead by the message of our opponents or decided to vote based on flaw in our product (whether or not we perceived them as flaws), so be it. In the end the buyer, i.e. the voter, is right.
In the business world managers are selling everyday whether or not she/he visit customers. To move up the corporate pyramid you have to create and sell concepts internally. There are always disagreements over tactics and strategies and executive are always evaluating often conflicting points of view when making decisions. Successful business people and businesses always analyze objectively “losses” in order to determine how to improve strategy and execution. Almost always this post analysis allows the business to develop a better product and communication strategy for the next selling opportunity.
As you point out demographics are a given. Singles now outnumber families in the voting age population. Singles have different needs and concerns than traditional middle class nuclear families. Likewise the priorities of a poor recent immigrant or fourth generation undereducated and unemployed welfare youth on the street in a northeastern urban area are very different from the concerns of a white middle class college educated suburban dweller working in a management job at a corporation in Texas. The truths that are self evident to one are not to the other. As society becomes less homogenous, political parties must put together coalitions of disparate groups to win elections. The Democrats understand how to build coalitions of groups having different goals. Republicans seem to have difficulty analyzing groups and tailoring the message.
Ultimately it boils down to the product and the message. Is our product (our philosophy) relevant to 51% of the people who turn out to vote? If not, our product will “lose” when it is tested in the marketplace. Occasionally we may win when the competition does a particularly poor communication job or its candidate makes a major mistake (the packaging is flawed). However, over time people will consistently buy the most compelling and relevant product to their individual situations. Purveyors of products declining in relevance lose market share until they exit the scene.
Is our problem the product, the message, or both? Likely both. With respect to the product, the major issue seems to be the attractiveness of the packaging (i.e. the candidate), not the content (the concept of individual liberty). Certainly with the message itself we have major issues with content, reach, and frequency. Our problems with both packaging and message relate almost entirely to the internal processes of the Republican Party. The party is not united and when an organization lacks unity it often compromises the quality of its leadership and sends out confusing messages. Look at the US automobile companies in the 1970’s for example — poor leadership, poor products, and confusing messages to the consumer.
If the Republican Party defines its target voter as white, suburban, middle-class, churchgoing and belonging to a traditional nuclear family it will be swamped by the current demographic and cultural trends. What encourages me is the 43% of Americans who choose not to vote. They have rejected the message of both parties yet they are members of the society. They represent an untapped pool of potential voters for a party willing to take the time to understand their aspirations and communicate to them how they can achieve their dreams though individual liberty and self reliance.
Thank you for a thoughtful and cogent analysis.
What encourages me is the 43% of Americans who choose not to vote.
You are right, this is a vast pool of potential customers for our product. I agree with you, our product is individual liberty but I do not believe it was among the choices which the customers consciously considered in the last election. In my view Obama succeeded in shaping the issues, as Newt pointed out in his speech, the issue became Sandra Fluke and more recently became Grover Norquist. It is clear that it no time in this campaign did we drive the debate. My instinct is (only instinct, not knowledge) that in politics if you are on defense you are losing.
That suggests (but only suggests) that there is an entire breakdown in message identification as well as message delivery. It seems to me that there should be a handbook on the timing, nature, target, and expected effectiveness of, for example, radio advertising to Hispanic groups. I would expect, (but only expect, not presume) that we will find that there is a interesting curve of effectiveness which tells us that early messages are more dollar productive than later messages. I suspect we will find that the dollar cost per vote is on a similar curve.
But all this presumes that there is a dedication to fact-finding in which all methods of message selection, delivery and persuasion is tested against other methods and we have some hard data upon which to proceed. In other words when is it effective to spend money on radio advertising, television advertising, cyber war, boots on the ground get out the vote? The subset of questions which popped to mind merely considering such a list is long and and only leads to more questions.
But I do not understand how we can conclude that we have bad messenger or a bad message until we know where we screwed up. Until we know that it was our ground game, or that it was our belated response to the negative ads characterizing Romney, or was the failure to pursue Benghazi, or was the failure to articulate the coming financial disaster, or that it was the muzzling of Paul Ryan, that caused the apparent problem, i.e., the inability to get white Republicans to the polls. How can we conclude that it was Romney's Mormonism, as one poster on this thread has asserted? How can we say that it was conservatives staying home because of Romney's history in Massachusetts if we do not know what the electorate knew? We can pontificate all day long and feel self-righteous about our conservative bona fides that it "t'was Rinos that killed the beast" or we can actually find out what happened.
One of the most dangerous courses in war, business, or politics is to engage in assumptions. What appears to be "common sense" to me as a well-educated, white, suburbanite, upper-middle-class, professional is not necessarily obvious to single women who have felt betrayed by one man after another. They do not think the way I do. We have very very little in common. All I have to do to prove this to myself is to take a look at the magazines directed to women in a doctor's waiting room. We laughed at Sandra fluke, we thought her demands were ludicrous and would backfire on Democrats. Who had the last laugh?
What we do not know is killing us. What we think we know is killing us faster.
If we continue self righteous but ignorant, we will never crest the demographic tsunami which is breaking upon us.
