Geodog

Blogging Camp Wellstone: Day One, Jim Ross on Creating a Campaign Plan and Budget

The first speaker in the Working on a Campaign series was Jim Ross, a San Francisco political consultant. He seemed like a strange choice at first. He did some early work for Representative, now Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, famous for his statement "My vote can't be bought, but it can be rented". Ross has successfully managed the conservative (for San Francisco at least) side of many San Francisco ballot issues, such as Gavin Newsom's Care Not Cash initiative, and he was the campaign manager for Gavin Newsom's successful bid for Mayor. It doesn't take much googling to find some pretty impassioned opponents of Jim Ross. His introduction earned him some (polite) hostility from a couple of the San Francisco political activists present. Last quarter, he was the biggest money maker among San Francisco political consultants.

Upon reflection, perhaps all those are reasons why Camp Wellstone invited him to speak. He is a very successful campaign consultant. Clearly, he knows something about winning elections. It was also a great introduction to the trade or profession of campaign management -- more on that later.

Here are my notes of Jim Ross' talk, Creating a Campaign Plan and Budget:

Step one, before you do anything, before you decide to run, is to do your research. You wouldn't believe how many candidates come to see me and ask me to work on their campaign without having done the most basic research. The first questions to answer are:

• How many registered voters in the district?


• What is the typical turnout?


• How have challengers done against incumbents in the past?


• How much money was spent in last election?


• What are the issues voters care about?

If you don't know what voters care about, do you have the money to do polling? In some states, you can get a lot of public polling information for free. The [Pew Foundation ???, California Foundation ??? missed what sources he stated] ... do polls on what people care about.

Research past winning candidates.
How did they win? Copy their strategies. Don't worry about being creative, worry about winning.

Resources:

Time
Spend your time raising money or reaching people. Time is the finite resource.

People
Overhead (Staff) is the most expensive thing in a campaign.

Money
Unless you can self-fund, you need to raise money. Howard Dean proved that liberal candidates can raise money.

Small races, how you raise money:

• Friends and families - Ask people who know the candidates the best, friends and family. (Candidates always want to call the people they don't know and ask them for money -- wrong).


• Respecters - People who know and respect the candidate. Work colleagues, acquaintances, college buddies. People from work, school, neighborhood, and civic groups. Good candidates are connectors in the Tipping Point sense, people who have lots of second tier friends.


• Professional donors - advocacy groups, affinity groups (e.g. Sierra Club, NOW, Unions) -- they won't give money until the other 2 have given money. You have to prove yourself to them first. You can buy the record of every donor in San Francisco for $5. (Every candidate wants to start with those).

Make a Budget
Figure out how you will spend the money. Small budget campaigns waste the most money because they don't plan on spending money. Example: They don't expect to get money, so every time $500 comes in go buy bumper stickers or lawn signs or something else useless. Before you know it they have blown through enough money for a targeted direct mail piece. If you don't know how you will spend the money, you don't have a plan. Make a guess and refine it as you go.

Make a Plan
Research is to figure out the best way to reach voters. The top priority of campaign is voter contact. Campaigns are a place to communicate a message to a voter.
There are lots of ways to get to 50% plus one person. Field-based (grass roots) campaigns are an expensive way to talk to voters. It is the most effective way to reach voters. But it isn't necessary the cheapest.

Uses SF supervisorial races as example of how to figure best way to reach voters. 60,000 voters registered in a district, 27,000 voters will vote. Need 13,501 votes to win.
Two things you can do to win:

• Turn out the people who would vote for you, but wouldn't normally turn out. We call them low propensity voters.


• Or get the voters who are going to vote, to vote for you.

Asked about voter suppression, Jim Ross replied: the purpose of negative campaigning is to suppress turnout. But that is advanced campaign strategy, and I'm here to give you campaign 101.

For Gavin Newsom - we got undecided voters who were going to vote, to vote for Newsom (using direct mail, TV), and then worked to turnout 18k more people who were Newsom supporters, but who wouldn't otherwise have voted (using direct mail, Get out the vote (GOTV)).

So you need to make a fundamental decision of how to spend the money on which. A bad budget that is well put together and worked from is better than a good budget that is ignored. [Jim Ross has a longer description of his strategy for the Newsom campaign at Tilting the Playing Field: Voter Identification and Turnout]

Bon mot of the day: Like Tolstoy said about families, every good campaign is the same, every bad campaign is different.

[I should also note that at this talk I sat next to a very nice woman wearing a scarf and chewing cough drops like mad -- I woke up the next morning coughing and with a sore throat, and it has been downhill every since, so the quality of my notes declines pretty severely over the weekend, and it is taking me a lot longer than I planned get them cleaned up and posted. If it hadn't been for the encouragement from my family (run, Lyn, run) Robert and Heath, I probably wouldn't have bothered.]

Posted by Geodog at October 5, 2004 01:03 AM | TrackBack