Political Communication & Strategy

Consequences of the 2014 Midterm Elections

Tauna S. Sisco, Jennifer C. Lucas, Christopher J. Galdieri

• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781629220956
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Campañas políticas y elecciones

Some aspects of the 2014 midterm elections would have been unimaginable a decade earlier. SuperPACs spent unlimited amounts of money, candidates used Twitter and other social media to communicate with voters, and Democrats found themselves all but entirely cast out of federal office in the South. Other aspects of the midterm elections, such as primary elections, direct mail, and the hurdles faced by members of marginalized communities in making their concerns known, were more familiar. How did candidates and parties navigate these new and old realities of the campaign landscape? Top scholars examine the communications strategies of 2014 and their implications for future elections in this volume. The authors demonstrate that party branding, the social construction of group interests, and candidate rhetoric can have an important impact in midterm elections.

Political Communication
& the Republican Wave

Chapter 3

Party Branding, Marketing, and
Mobilization in 2014 and Beyond

Kenneth M. Cosgrove

American politics has moved over the last several decades from a Republican Party using a top-down–driven marketing model and a Democratic Party using a top-down–driven grassroots mobilization model to a hybrid marketing and mobilization model at work in both parties. The transition to the hybrid model has been accentuated by the rise of crowdsourcing (Tapscott and Williams 2006) and this had led to a more cocreative process than that found in earlier periods. This crowd-sourced, cocreated model has made citizens into more than voters/consumers; it has made them into active participants in at least some product and brand design, viral marketers, and customer evangelists. This chapter examines the impact that the marketing, branding, and hybrid-marketing mobilization model have had on US midterm elections. It pays particular attention to 2014 but notes that political marketing and branding have played key roles in the midterm environment. Absent a well-designed product and strong brand that the public supports, environmental factors alone will produce an electoral victory.

MARKETING AND BRANDING IN POLITICS

The rise of political marketing, branding, and the hybrid mobilization model has had a major impact on the surge and decline phenomenon that congressional scholars have long written about, as they have the ability to change the size of the electorate, what the electorate focuses on, and how passionately the electorate feels about what it is focusing on. The branded product can alter the surge or decline to the point that it becomes a wave or the party that controls the White House does not decline. This impact on US midterms is but one example of a global trend that has been documented by a global community of scholars (Lees-Marshment 2004; Marland, Giasson, and Lees-Marshment 2012; Lees-Marshment, Conley, and Cosgrove 2014). The political marketing model argues that (1) political parties sell themselves like other forms of business, meaning that they develop clear products and brands, (2) that they research the market and their customers, and (3) that they build strong relationships with voters as successful companies do with their consumers. They are very much the kind of market-oriented party that Lees-Marshment (2004) has written about.

Brands make promises about products and values. They function as educative shortcuts to educate the busy electorate about potential leaders quickly. The political brand is a useful tool because it can support a variety of political products, can appeal to many different audiences, can develop enduring value over time, and can be targeted very specifically. The brand makes the complicated simple and does so for a variety of things and in a variety of situations. A brand can be visual and emotive, meaning that it fits the way people really process political information (Westin 2008; Cosgrove 2007a). The brand can be defined as the total user experience with the product and all the ways the consumer interacts with it (Zyman and Brott 2003). As was true with political marketing in general, the Republicans were the first masters of political branding in politics (Cosgrove 2007c).

Three kinds of brands are widely used in politics: the house brand, the personal brand, and the platform brand. The house brand sits on top of the brand food chain. It is the one that people associate most heavily with the company and its products. For McDonald’s, such a brand would be the golden arches. For the Mercedes-Benz car, it would be the circular logo plus each owns its colors, tagline, and values. There are also personal brands that politicians work with over a career. The third kind of brand we will look at is the platform brand, one launched to either sell a single product or fit a specific situation. Platform brands have been used extensively in modern American politics. The platform brand generally has significant fellowship with the house brand, serving as a subsidiary designed for a single promotional purpose. The Republicans have used platform branding in a variety of situations to promote individuals and policies (Cosgrove 2012). One reason to do so would be to solve the problem of a damaged brand because a platform brand focuses on a single specific situation. Individual politicians, especially those faced with difficult electorates, can also develop personal brands. In the New Hampshire case study, we will see Senator Jeanne Shaheen use a personal brand to win a heated contest.

Developing a platform brand is a classic midterm strategy that has been used consistently by the out-party (the party that does not control the White House) since 1994. The Democrats in 2006, as one of their early branding forays, and the Republicans in 2010 and 2012 used platform branding to run as something like a parliamentary opposition party (Cosgrove 2007b). In 2014 the Republicans employed a platform brand to create a single favorable selling proposition that could be used to tie Democrats to an incumbent president who was particularly unpopular with the audiences they were most trying to mobilize. The Republican platform brand had a clear single selling proposition, “Agree or disagree: Barack Obama’s done a poor job and your elected officials have agreed with him most of the time so it’s time for a change,” instead of a public debate of what the party stood for. The Republican platform brand fit the product and fit the marketplace, meaning it was well positioned for success. Contrast that with the situation in 1998 when the Republicans attempted to do the same thing to the Democratic congressional candidates and the scandal-plagued President Bill Clinton.

Table 3.1. Party Branding 1994–2014

Election	Platform Brand	Winner
1994	Contract with America	Republicans (out-party)
1998	Clinton Impeachment	Democrats (in-party)
2002	War on Terror	Republicans (in-party)
2006	6 for 06	Democrats (out-party)
2010	Anti-Obamacare/Tea Party	Republicans (out-party)
2014	Anti-Obama	Republican (out-party)

While the public disapproved of Clinton’s actions, it was equally unhappy about the GOP’s proposed solution given the perceived personal nature of the offenses, meaning that in a similar strategic environment, the Republicans lost seats in 1998. The public did not approve of the brand and the product it was supporting and did not buy it.

The use of branding of any sort demands that promises made have to be kept. Failure to do so can put a party in the position that the GOP has occupied for the last several election cycles, in which a series of economic and security policy failures associated with the Bush Administration have undermined their core brand promises. Where the Democrats have struggled, it has been because Barack Obama was hardly the post-partisan he was sold as in 2008 and pursued a liberal policy agenda. As Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) argued, the Democrats spent too much time and effort on health reform instead of middle-class–oriented economic policies and this impacted the party’s marketability (Waldman 2014). The GOP won back the White House because it chose Donald Trump, a man who has his own brand, as its standard bearer in 2016. The GOP’s overall brand and product problems remain alive as of this writing (for a discussion of Trump’s understanding of the value of branding in politics, see Coppins 2015). The difference between brand promise and product performance is one of the key ways citizens can evaluate their political leaders. If promises made are not kept, if the leader turns out to have different values from those promised, then brand problems ensue.

THE PARTY BRANDS

Republicans pioneered the political marketing and branding model and were rewarded at the ballot box for having done so. The GOP has been using a branding and marketing model since the 1960s and in midterm elections since 1994 (Cosgrove 2007b). In 1994, 2002, 2010, and 2014 it picked up seats through the use of a well-constructed brand. The Republicans, as part of their emphasis on marketing, pioneered a host of political innovations in politics like direct mail, mass market advertising, the partisan press, talk radio, and by 2004 psychographic segmentation and database marketing. In 1998, even though the situation was strategically similar to that found in 2014, the Republicans lost seats because of a poor brand and poor product designs. In 2002 it controlled the White House and still picked up seats because it built a brand around the response to the events of 9/11, despite having a president in office whom many thought to be illegitimate and who was in office when 9/11 happened. Finally, after 2004 the Democrats rolled out a platform brand and won seats with it in 2006. Both emphasize their skill-set advantages. For Democrats, the focus is on mobilization first; for the Republicans, the focus is primarily on marketing. In both parties, the shift to a marketing and branding emphasis was led by a more ideological wing, conservatives for Republicans and liberals for Democrats (Cosgrove 2007b; Bai 2008; Issenberg 2012). Both parties have moved to a hybrid model but with different points of emphasis. The Democrats still stress grassroots organizing; the Republicans still stress emotional branding. The GOP still places a great deal of emphasis on the emotional branding with which it traditionally works (see, for example, Condon 2014).

The Democrats had early branding successes with the three-letter-initial presidents (FDR, HST, JFK, and LBJ) but veered away from branding and marketing toward a focus on grassroots mobilization and interest group activity instead of the kind of institutionalized party building and marketing model that the Republicans developed during the 1960s to 1980s period. It was finally after the 2004 election that the Democrats changed their approach (for a discussion of this period, see Bai 2008). The Democrats adopted political marketing techniques much later than did the Republicans, but when they did so, they added a few of their own—including better databases and social media as part of their effort. Database marketing and grassroots canvassing allowed them to take advantage of the next big innovation: social media. By 2008 the Democrats were masters of the marketing and mobilization model. The combination of grassroots organizing in their DNA, smart phones in their hands, aspirational values in their brand, and analytics in their campaign model meant that the Democrats became quite successful from 2006 onward. During this time, the Democrats developed a house brand that was aspirational, focused on change, anti-Bush, and supported specific products aimed at specific targets (Peters and Rosenthal 2010; Cosgrove 2007a, 2007c; Bai 2008). While these efforts may not have always been fully coordinated, as Peters and Rosenthal (2010) show, Nancy Pelosi was actively seeking to brand the congressional party two years before the Obama brand rolled out in 2008; they were ultimately successful in winning elections and shifting the party leftward. The Democrats, during the Obama years, jettisoned their famous kicking-donkey logo and adopted a light blue color scheme on a white background. The large letter D inside a circle with the tag “the Democrats: Change That Matters” became their logo and tagline.

The Democrats’ branding efforts were augmented by efforts to register and turn out a larger number of likely Democratic voters (Issenberg 2012; Roth 2014). The 2014 effort, named the Arbor Project, sought to use data to target those who were likely to register and vote Democratic (Roth 2014). Such efforts closely resemble in branding and business dress the materials that the party uses to sell its candidates or voter information signs produced by either state and local governments or nonpartisan groups interested in building awareness about the election (Issenberg 2012). Democrats placed an emphasis on canvassing especially within lower-income communities that were less likely to have in-home Internet access (Issenberg 2012; Gerber and Green 2000). Democrats have tried to make Election Day a special event, to encourage people to to learn how to register and when they can vote. They also encouraged people to vote early and have pushed for long early voting periods whenever possible. These efforts have been so successful that they have led high-profile Republicans to study and add similar things to their own campaigns (see, for example, Ruffini’s 2012 study “Inside the Cave”).

The next section of this chapter will look at the way Democratic candidates were impacted in the midterms by their different branding strategies.

Democratic Midterm Branding: The Case of New Hampshire

Typical of the way the hybrid model works is the case of the 2014 Midterm Elections in the swing state of New Hampshire, which always features competitive elections as a result. In 2014 first-term incumbent Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen was running against former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. In 2014 New Hampshire offered both parties a test market to measure how close their brand could get to the center while keeping its ideological integrity and how it performed with a direct challenge in some of the same market spaces.

Senator Shaheen’s campaign presented voters with a personal brand that tied the candidate to the state and specific Obama policies but not to the president himself. The brand presented the candidate as being from and promoting pro–New Hampshire policies and featured a tagline of “putting New Hampshire first.” The bulk of her ads were shot in-state. Some featured the candidate, others contained representatives of targeted audiences, and some had testimonials from female Republicans in favor of Senator Shaheen. The campaign bui...