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The major political campaign of 2014 is a money-driven, consultant-guided exercise in sticking to the script.
To those who work on campaigns or follow them closely, this is not surprising. But it was still jarring last week to see the details laid bare in 144 pages of internal strategy memos that made their way from Democrat Michelle Nunn's campaign to National Review magazine and, then, the world.
It is a cynical document, slicing the population into interest groups and fundraising targets. The consultants who prepared it would blanch at its language if it came out of the mouth of the candidate, who is meant to be drilled relentlessly on messaging. The candidate herself took care to distance herself from a document she said was just one piece of advice provided to the campaign in December.
But in remarkable detail from scheduling to budgets to voter targeting, it’s all there, the road map to an underdog victory. And it isn’t pretty.
Republican and Democratic consultants inside and outside of Georgia said all campaigns have plans, but not necessarily arranged in such complexity and detail. The Nunn memos reflect two important things: that she is running a well-funded campaign, and she’s doing it for the first time.
The reality of money
Let’s start with the money, because it always starts with money.
The memos direct Nunn to spend 80 percent of her time raising money in 2013, a number that gradually declines to 70 percent now and 50 percent during the October stretch run.
The amount of time candidates and officeholders spend raising money — as opposed to politicking or legislating — has risen dramatically in recent years, the result of the arms race of high-priced media and technology needed to reach voters.
“It’s a reflection of the realities of campaigns today,” said Charlie Gerow, a longtime Republican consultant in Pennsylvania. “A candidate who isn’t spending that amount of time raising money is either independently wealthy or not going to win their race.”
Nunn’s Republican opponent, businessman David Perdue, deployed at least $3 million of his own money to help him win the GOP primary and the runoff. A spokesman estimated that Perdue spent about one-third of his time raising money.
The sums raised in Georgia to date guarantee that this will be the most expensive U.S. Senate race in state history. Nunn had raked in $9 million by the end of June. The memo sets a goal of $18 million to $20 million in all.
These mammoth sums will be accomplished because Nunn is “a fundraiser’s dream” because of her nonprofit world contacts from the Points of Light foundation and the “treasure trove” of donors familiar with her father, former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn. Being a woman helps, too.
‘Certain boxes’
In perhaps the most-quoted part of the memo, it is revealed that Jewish people provide a “tremendous fundraising opportunity” but one that will depend on “Michelle’s position on Israel.” That position, among others, is described as “TBD.”
Asian-American voters are a small group but “more likely to be a fundraising base” than some other minority groups. The Latino constituency “has not been appropriately engaged and must be fleshed out.” Recruiting African-Americans as “validators, volunteers and voters” is critical.
Perdue said the document serves as “hard evidence” that Democrats are the ones who put different groups “in certain boxes.”
Eric Gray, a Georgia Democratic strategist who is not affiliated with the Nunn campaign, said the supposed outrage is unwarranted.
“The Georgia Republican Party hired a guy to do outreach to black folks,” Gray said. “It’s what the party should be doing. They can call it racial profiling on Michelle Nunn’s campaign, but that would be inaccurate. They do the same thing.”
Tailoring image
Some of the most resonant passages involve the careful calibration of Nunn’s image.
It discusses recruiting farmers and gun owners to endorse her to show Nunn is “a different type of Democrat” and counteract claims that she’s too liberal. A direct-mail vendor proposes sending postcards with “rural-oriented imagery” to “combat the notion that she is an Atlanta-based candidate uninterested in, or unfamiliar with, the rural parts of the state.”
Heath Garrett, a Georgia Republican consultant who has worked on races across the country, said these sections feed into the existing perception that Nunn has run an overly cautious and inauthentic campaign.
“Whether that’s fair or not, it looks like this is a Madison Avenue-manufactured type of candidate and image that they’re trying to portray in the media — paid and earned media,” Garrett said.
Staying on message
In dealing with the press and the public, the top communications aim is to “enforce message discipline.” Nunn was to be grilled in question-and-answer sessions to make sure she was consistent. In the age of video trackers and YouTube, it’s a must for any campaign.
Nunn, so far, has had few unforced errors in that department. Perdue had his share during the primary, including a moment caught by a tracker in which he demeaned former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel as the “high school graduate in this race.”
Republican consultant Chip Lake, who advised the U.S. Senate bid of the at times off-message U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey of Marietta, said it's vital for candidates to remember that a recording device is almost always on them.
“Having message discipline is boring because you’re saying the same thing over and over and over again, and so it’s a challenge for candidates to be message-disciplined,” Lake said.
“They believe very strongly that they’re smart and they have a lot of different things running through their heads that they need to change what they say to different audiences, when, to the contrary, successful candidates say the same thing.”
Not her words
Some of the instructions from the Nunn consultants are almost like Campaign 101, on building networks and finding roles for staff. They show a campaign as of December that had not fleshed out many policy views for the first-time candidate. “Our education platform needs more depth,” one section reads.
Campaign manager Jeff DiSantis said the campaign plan has changed considerably since then, but he declined to elaborate how.
In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday in Macon, Nunn repeated that they were not her words in the documents. The memos were “a set of advice that I was getting from a variety of folks. I’m getting advice every day from everybody, from my parents to friends to my children.”
As for that blunt tone, longtime Washington Democratic strategist Paul Begala — who has advised campaigns for President Bill Clinton and Georgia Gov. Zell Miller — said it does not represent Nunn.
Those are the words of “cold analytical political professionals who you need in this world,” Begala said. “But having been around Michelle and seen her passion for ideas, that doesn’t reflect her thinking.”
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