By Adam Pagnucco.
In Part Three, we covered how any national right-wing group must have a lot of money and a smart recruitment effort to take a shot at our school board. But even those things are not enough. The money must be spent strategically to maximize the odds of success.
Here are two things I would expect sophisticated national operatives to do in a race like this.
Polling
Once the money and candidates are in place, the next step is an early poll. This is not primarily for horse-race polling, which is inaccurate early and would apply to a field that is almost entirely unknown. Instead, this poll would do three things.
Look for weaknesses
MCPS has had a lot of controversies – attendance, crime, hate incidents, drugs, LGBTQ+ curriculum and the recent sexual harassment scandal. Which among these things do voters know about? What concerns them the most? Insurgents need to know this in order to communicate with our electorate.
Crosstabs
A poll should find out how these issues interact with geography and demographics. Are some issues particularly important to some groups? This requires a large sample size (perhaps 1,000 or more respondents) and that would greatly increase the cost of the poll. But an outside effort with national money could afford it.
Message testing
What messages work best? This might require a second poll but a competent pollster could test known issues in an early poll. There are different ways to communicate about crime, taxes, academic performance and other relevant issues. National-level pollsters are good at formulating message tests and finding the right language to win votes.
Targeting
Montgomery County is not one monolithic jurisdiction. It is the equivalent of many jurisdictions of geography and demographics sharing a common set of borders. Armed with national-quality polling and crosstabs, an outside group could use many resources to push targeted messages. They include the voter file, census data, proprietary partisan data (like Nationbuilder), digital firm data and my personal favorite – blended voter file, email and consumer databases.
I have worked with the latter data on multiple occasions and it contains robust, granular fields. It’s not just the traditional party, age, precinct, voting history and racial data that one would expect. It also contains fields like religion, estimated household income, language, military status, education, dwelling size, business owner, gun owner, children at home, homeowner/renter and MUCH more.
There are even some off-the-wall fields like cat owner, dog owner, electronic gaming, interest in musical instruments, stamp collector, interest in knitting, interest in specific sports and science fiction readers. These may not all be relevant to elections, but the detail is amazing.
Why does this data exist? The principal reason is that when you are recorded as buying or selling – particularly with debit or credit cards – that information is sold and amalgamated with other data about you, including your email address and voter registration file. Sophisticated political players like national parties use this information but it is even more widely used by advertising and marketing companies. It’s invaluable for targeting.
This combination of polling and targeting capacity can be used to guide strategies for mail, digital, texts, field and even cable TV (to an extent). A group with these resources will know exactly what to say, how to say it and to whom to say it – and will have the means to deliver this messaging over and over again to the appropriate recipients. This is how multi-million dollar campaigns are waged. There is no reason why such methodologies cannot be brought to bear in our school board races if there is enough money and brains to implement them.
And so for any candidates who are recruited to take over the school board, this is pretty easy. Raise enough money to be respectable and keep your mouth shut. Let the independent expenditure committee(s) and/or Super PAC(s) playing in the race do all the work. This kind of campaign may be well known at the national level but it is almost unknown in our local races, especially underfunded ones like school board campaigns.
Could this kind of a campaign overcome candidates who have one or more of the traditional keys to winning school board races: incumbency, the Apple Ballot and the Post endorsement? We will have some thoughts about that in our conclusion.