Election EVE — What You Didn’t Notice about Biden’s campaign
ON this election eve — I wanted to plant a flag in the sand, that no matter what happens tomorrow, many parts of this election reached for the future in a way that I haven’t seen since 2008. To start with, does anyone else find it strange when political campaigns are appraised based on how much money they raise, and not by the amount of supporters they have? This election may start to crack that a little.
The influence that money has in politics is widely documented as a major destabilizing force in our democracy. Influence within the party structure is based on how much money you raise, and most successful politicians spend more time raising money than meeting with constituents and legislating.
Most of that money goes to buying ad distribution — in what are generally passive television ads or paid ads on Google, Facebook, or YouTube. Paid ads of a political nature have been banned on Facebook beginning a week before the election and continuing at least until all the contests are resolved, maybe indefinitely. This actually creates an opportunity.
The internet was supposed to democratize and decentralize power, not replace broadcast media buying with a digital equivalent. This election, accelerated by COVID, may finally realize some of these promises we imagined in the early days of the internet — that individual voices could be valued on the same plain as the few with big money to spend.
If you consider Broadcast television, which in many respects, still has the largest audience, the promise of the internet was that we break up the mainstream. That we would have every message for every audience. In practice, how do you actually do something like that?
As someone who worked as director of Supporter Generated Video for the much lauded “New Media Department” on the 2008 Obama campaign, we dreamed of making messages that appealed to and represented all the communities that supported that transformational candidate.
Presidential elections are the biggest polls we have as a country. It’s no accident that our culture, and in some cases, the face of our country can change quickly with a new President. In the political world, and this does spill over to the ad world in general, with the amount of money spent, plus the size and breadth of Presidential campaigns, they are often the only true laboratories for widespread innovation every 4 years — and then you have to win to vindicate the effort.
In the races for Senate, House, Governor and sometimes even more local levels, some innovation does occur, but most competitive campaigns try to eeck out a win using tried and true methods from ’16, ’12, ‘08 and yes ’88. Campaigns that aren’t competitive don’t have the resources to try many new things. Every 4 years, the political world looks to Presidential campaigns to truly try new things.
The 2008 election was the first Presidential campaign with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the iPhone.
I can recall in the campaign HQ in Chicago all the signs hanging overhead representing people from Latinos to Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders — there was even a section for Republicans for Change — on the video team, we tried to make at least one video to represent each group.
Now, through our platform Soapboxx, we just surpassed 3,000 videos made for the Biden for President campaign and distributed by the vast communities that support Joe Biden & Kamala Harris. We’ve allowed all of their supporters to act as a micro-influencer network sharing content endorsed by the campaign. We are on the way to many more by the time the election is all said and done with.
Every aspect of campaigning looks very different this year. In this COVID year, traditional campaign door knocking, house parties, and yes, even major campaign rallies are too dangerous, forcing campaigns (that care whether their supporters live or die) to find other means to get the word out. It’s causing a profound shift in the landscape that will likely be as significant, if not more than, what happened in 2008.
The Biden campaign is one of the largest tent campaigns in my lifetime. Its support includes Republicans and progressives, Northerners, Southerners, and everyone in between. It’s an honest attempt at an inclusive future. I hope we win. I want to live in that world. And this is something that maybe you noticed — while they certainly are spending a ton of money, this campaign has made more videos for more groups of people than any brand or anything else — ever.
As we leave the Forest Gump version of history — where everyone apparently had the same experience in every decade, which was never true — the Biden campaign will certainly go down in history in respecting the fact that we have a country with very different people living here and its job was to bring them all together behind a common purpose.
I may be biased, but I have had a front row seat, and I must say I’m proud of all the work that’s been done here. It may not be as noisy as the other brand — but it’s been endearing to me. If it works tomorrow, then it will set the new trend. Getting everyone to support you — and doing so with and for them.
I’ll never forget Obama ’08 — how happy everyone was on that warm November Election night in Chicago. But these Biden people did so without being in the same office, under really trying conditions. This campaign was more loveable for me. I hope we win.
Thanks to anyone who put themselves out there and made a video this year — whether they realized it or not — every one of those helped us all to gain a little more power.
