Getting a message out to blue people

July 19, 2020 5:03 PM

I (along with several thousand other people I'm sure) have something I'd like to say to Democratic voters in heavily blue and heavily red states. It's not controversial, I'm just trying to get a thought out there. How does one do this on various budgets?

The thought is that we've pissed off our allies significantly and they are going to be watching the popular vote in November to see if the American people can be trusted again. It's not enough to throw Trump out of office; for the first time in most our lives the popular vote counts too.

It could definitely use some trimming, but presumably that's one thing I could ask a consultant about. Can someone help me orient myself around this stuff?

(please note that I am far more interested in the mechanics than in an evaluation of this particular message)

posted by Tell Me No Lies to Society & Culture (6 answers total)

You’re probably either going to have to buy ads of some sort, do a direct mailing, or do a phone bank. Step one is to figure out what medium is most likely to reach the number of voters you’re hoping to reach. Once you get an idea of the efficacy of various media, then you can research pricing. (Not just the cost of the media, but also the cost of production. TV ads might be cheap, but you have to hire a camera crew, video editor, etc. And not just monetary costs - if you have volunteers making phone calls from their own phones, there’s no monetary cost to you, but where do you get the volunteers?) From there, you can calculate what reaches the most people for your budget. Then you can get your consultant to tailor your message to that medium.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:16 PM on July 19, 2020

I honestly think most likely Biden voters are quite clear on the popular vote counting and are motivated by a desire to deliver a historic trouncing to the Republican Party across the board. This particular rationale is not uniquely your idea, plenty of people already feel that way. And alas voters are unlikely to be motivated, by and large, by an appeal to foreign opinions. Those who will be so motivated are highly likely to be voting already for democrats. So you face the more basic question of whether it’s worth the effort to try to cut through the tremendous amount of noise and information and chatter and advertising with this message. And at what cost. Michael Bloomberg spent 100 million dollars trying to reach every democratic voter in the primary. He lost by a gigantic margin. But everyone saw his ads.

Maybe pitch it to one of the anti-Trump Republican video-ad shops — Lincoln Project or Meidas Touch — there might be one that’s more foreign policy oriented too. They already have eyeballs, money, and an audience (and they’re making video ads that go viral online on a daily basis) and maybe your pitch can inform something they put out. They definitely try to speak to Republican and independent foreign policy mavens.

But for a moment picture a voter likely to care how Germans or Koreans think about America.

They’re voting. Unless they are a Republican, in which case maybe they are considering not voting, which is what we want them to do.


I actually think your message is better directed to wavering Republicans.
posted by spitbull at 6:31 PM on July 19, 2020 [3 favorites]

Another possibility would be to participate in an already-organized outreach to voters. VoteFwd.org comes to mind: they are leading a GOTV effort to folks in swing states wherein volunteers write letters to occasional voters who lean Democratic. Because door-knocking GOTV is probably not going to happen this year, their goal is to reach 10 million voters. You could certainly craft your message to fit into the letter, which would then be read by voters who need some motivation to go vote. On the plus side, there would be very little cost to you (really just postage), they've already identified the voters who could be most influenced by your message, and you're helping to make a Biden landslide happen rather than just talking about it. Of course, you'd only be reaching the voters you actually write to, not a broader audience, and these are people in swing states not heavily red or blue states.
posted by DrGail at 6:55 PM on July 19, 2020

they are going to be watching the popular vote in November to see if the American people can be trusted again.

I mean, the popular vote didn't go Trump's way last time, by a not-insignificant margin, and yet here we are. So I'm not sure that is what should be used as a global proxy for the trustworthiness of "the American people".

But to your question: as DrGail said, it's probably better to add your signal to an already-active frequency than to just contribute more noise to an already noisy environment, where it will more easily get lost. If you're that motivated to get a message out there, team up with an org whose job it is to identify what "out there" means and can best target your message.
posted by pdb at 7:23 PM on July 19, 2020 [1 favorite]

Have you tried going viral on Twitter? Easier said than done of course. You could find people with existing audiences and either try to get them to see things the same way or pay them to include it in their newsletters.
posted by slidell at 7:26 PM on July 19, 2020

Amazon and Google say they can target ads quite specifically to a demographic. Pretty sure I read a story on MeFi about someone gaslighting a roommate with very specific ads. Full page ad in a local newspaper, but I read my local paper online and miss the big ads. (aside - this means I miss local sales and offers, which is about the only form of ad useful to me)

Letters to the Editor. Not a mass approach; they have to be original, not re-posts. An excellent letter might be able to be re-posted.

My friend is doing a campaign of posting and re-posting the best memes she can find, many of them do get re-posted.

Comment on blogs and articles.
posted by theora55 at 6:19 AM on July 20, 2020