Forward Janesville - TheReport - Fourth Quarter 2020

Dan Cunningham • Vice President of Government Affairs and Education • danc@forwardjanesville.com The 2020 presidential election will go down in history as a campaign like none other. The influence of the coronavirus pandemic changed the way the candidates campaigned and the way many of us voted. The plot twists were straight out of a movie, and they gave the election an uneasy roller-coaster quality, complete with the queasiness. As an insatiable political junkie, I followed every twist and turn to an unhealthy degree, and there were points when I just wanted the ride to end. In the end, the nation chose to “Make Politics Boring Again” but choosing former Vice President Joe Biden over incumbent President Donald Trump. Here are some observations that have been rattling around in my head: A Note on Polling: Pollsters said that a repeat of 2016, when a huge underestimation of Trump support led to an election day surprise, was unlikely to happen again. Yet…it happened again. Pollsters will engage in a bit of revisionist history once all the votes are tabulated (e.g., ‘we weren’t that far off’), but you shouldn’t buy it. An ABC News- Washington Post Poll the week before the election gave Biden a 17-percentage point lead over Trump in Wisconsin…a race Biden ended up winning by less than one percent. While this poll was an outlier, Biden’s polling average gave him an 8.4 percentage point lead on the morning of November 3. There is no way to spin this: the polls were a complete failure, and polling methodology needs a fundamental shift. I felt duped by the polls in the 2016 cycle, but I came crawling back in 2020. It is going to be difficult for me and many others to trust the polls in 2024. Out with the Old: Old school campaign standards—’get out the vote’ phone calls, door to door campaigning, money spent on network TV commercials, etc.—are still the yardstick by which campaigns are measured. The conventional wisdom is that campaigns that maximize these metrics have the best chance of winning. While Donald Trump turned some of this logic on its head in 2016 by running an unconventional campaign, the chattering class in Washington still puts far too much faith into the effectiveness of these methods. If you are like me, you probably got a few dozen campaign calls during this election season. I didn’t pick up a single one of them. (To be honest, I’m more likely to Google an unfamiliar phone number than I am to answer the call.) I know someone who volunteered to make ‘get out the vote’ calls during this election cycle, and not much has changed about these calls: they involve a volunteer reading a script to a citizen who has probably just sat down to dinner. (Untested theory: I believe that some undecided voters end up voting for the candidate who bothers them the least.) Guess how many political ads I watched during this election cycle: maybe a half- dozen, and that was by choice. Why? I never watch network TV, and when I do, I zip through the commercials. The storyline about Biden overwhelming Trump with a wave of TV ads probably made Democrats feel good, but it ignored a key fact: fewer and fewer people get information from the 6 o’clock news, which has long been the prime spot for political advertising. Successful campaigns are pivoting to meet voters where they live: online and on social media. While “microtargeting”— gathering online data about individuals to create targeted messages that will appeal to them—gets a bad rap because of the way it has been used, it is the future of political advertising. FJI Election Special Only in 2020… 6 • W W W . F O R W A R D J A N E S V I L L E . C O M