Repeat after me: new, unity, American, freedom, truth. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images.
Winning an election in our divided, distracted culture with its hopelessly fragmented media landscape requires a deft mix of political strategy but also something else: brand marketing. Kamala Harris and her party navigated the politics of this wild summer with nary a misstep. To my eyes informed by decades in the advertising business, they’re also winning the marketing fight.
While Donald Trump has been using his platform to hawk merchandise – printed-in-China bibles and crypto currencies – the Harris campaign has done a sophisticated job of building a positive emotional brand to contrast the deep negativity of the Trump/Vance campaign. That’s worth keeping in mind as we enter the final stretch of a fraught campaign.
Not everyone is so optimistic about all these emotions bubbling to the surface of the election. Patrick Healy of the New York Times opinion page wrote flatly of the Harris campaign, “Joy is not a strategy.”
But if we dig a little deeper into what’s driving all that joy you might have a different opinion.
I find it useful to distill a marketing strategy down to a few key words. Earlier this year I put together my own wish list. It’s been fascinating to watch so many of them emerge as themes of the Harris-Walz campaign, and I’d encourage Democrats at every level of the campaignto focus on these words even as they make the case that Trump is unfit for another term.
“New” is at the top of my list. Originally it was there as a hope-to-have. Now it’s what the Democrats have given the voters, improbably enough given that Harris is an incumbent. In the ad biz we have a saying that that new is the most powerful word in the language. It signifies hope. We shouldn’t be surprised it’s driving a lot of momentum. Symbolism is also helping. Trump’s grumpy old-billionaire scowl vs. Harris’s meme-friendly smile.
With the initial head rush wearing off, the campaign’s job is to keep finding ways to contrast a steady stream of energetic new ideas with a Trump campaign that, for now at least, is doing them the favor of re-running the same tired old show from 2016 and 2020.
“Unity” comes next. At one point I wondered if the word unity could work much the way the word “hope” fueled Obama’s first campaign, given the unsettling feeling among voters that the whole country might be breaking apart.
It’s more complicated than that, but we have been hearing the word a lot from both parties. I’ll fearlessly predict that Trump reached his highwater market when he said his brush with an assassin’s bullet had made him a changed man out to unify the country. Now that he’s disavowed that vow and reverted to form, unity is ripe for the Democrats to own. It can be as simple as using the word “we” rather than breaking everything down into party or identity. Harris hit the perfect note by offering, “A chance to chart a new way forward, not as members of any one party or faction, but as Americans.”
“American” is a word I’ve been waiting to hear more of from the Democrats, and it was a great thing to see them reclaim patriotism at their convention. In the past they’ve tended to leave the cynical flag-waving to the other party. But there is deeper, more authentic kind of patriotism. It is serious high ground. By becoming the party of Trump with all his badmouthing of the country we all share, the Republicans have given the Democrats a rare opportunity to claim it for their own.
“Freedom” is the other word from the Republican lexicon that the Harris campaign has been busy taking ownership of. It’s a neat bit of marketing jujutsu to defend something better than tax cuts and deregulation with the kind of soaring rhetoric Ronald Reagan once used.
Given the swamp of disinformation and misinformation we’re all living in, “truth” carries special significance. Some strategists will tell you everyone knows Donald Trump is dishonest; he is after all a convicted felon. Why waste time and money repeating it?
Standing on the side of truth is useful as a defense against the barrage of false attacks being aimed at Democratic candidates all up and down the ballot, and it’s an easy case to make as we see Republican lies do real harm to hurricane survivors or the people of Springfield, Ohio.
Here’s a positive way to frame it. Lying is lazy leadership that holds this country back. Moving forward means facing hard truths together.
There’s a marketing strategy in five words: new, unity, American, freedom, truth. Easy to remember. Easy to share. I don’t know if that’s the way people advising the Harris/Waltz campaign would describe their efforts, but it’s a good way to understand what they’ve achieved in an astonishingly short time.
They’re good words to keep in mind by any Democratic candidate who doesn’t want the emotional advantage of late summer to get lost in the hard politicking that’s sure to come with the campaign’s final days.