Did Warren Get Her Ad Campaign Wrong in Iowa?

[brooklynite]

Politico

DES MOINES—It was late summer, and Elizabeth Warren was sitting pretty. The closely watched Iowa Poll, conducted by Ann Selzer for the Des Moines Register, showed Warren at the top of the Democratic presidential field. She was flush with cash. The organizational juggernaut her campaign had built was widely lauded. Insiders here were calling her the prohibitive frontrunner. And she had yet to air one TV ad in Iowa.

This wasn’t an oversight. It was a strategy. From mid-August until late October, when her rivals were flooding the airwaves, Warren would remain dark on TV for 12 weeks. Her first ad on broadcast TV ran on Oct. 26, long after she had risen to the top of the field.

Beginning in mid-August, Pete Buttigieg pretty much took the opposite approach. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, spent $2 million on TV and radio ads during the same 12-week period. He had run five different spots by the time Warren appeared on television for the first time. When November’s Iowa Poll was released, at the end of that 12-week run, the small-town mayor with the funny name was in first place—and the Des Moines Register heralded him as “a clear frontrunner.”

Since that moment, the race’s dynamics have shifted again and again, and heading into the last weekend before the Iowa caucuses, most observers consider it a four- or even five-way race that’s too close to call. Once Iowa Democrats make their choice on Monday night, pundits are sure to use the results to try to settle any number of intra-campaign disputes, including whether Amy Klobuchar’s Iowa-focused strategy paid off, and whether Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders lived up to their sky-high name recognition during what must be each man’s final shot at the presidency. But among campaign staffers and media strategists, the caucuses will also serve as a referendum for a crucial question in the dark arts of campaign messaging: What’s the most effective way to reach voters in 2020? Should campaigns go heavy on digital spending, or do it the old-fashioned way, on TV?

[Happy Hoosier]

1. I think her main problem...

Was that she flubbed the roll-out of her MCA plan. The funding part was vague, hand-way, and she did not support it well. She felt compelled to actually back up the plan with a way to fund it (good for her), but she she discovered how perilous that is. In contrast, Sanders simply refuses to talk about it except in the vaguest of terms and launch a counter attack.

And this comes from someone leaning towards voting for her.

[brooklynite]

2. Yes, but an ad campaign would have helped her frame her message...

[Happy Hoosier]

3. Maybe, but her drop was national, not just in Iowa. NT

[DanTex]

4. Yeah, I think when she semi-backtracked to the two-step rollout thing it may have hurt her.

Not because the two-step thing is a bad idea necessarily, just because it looked like she might have changed her mind, and may have contradicted her position as the candidate who's got the most detailed plans.

Also I think that the Sanders-Warren disagreement thing didn't work out well for her poll numbers.

[Tom Rinaldo]

6. Early on Sanders said that middle class taxes would go up under his plan

That was widely (and justifiably IMO) viewed as candid on his part. Warren did not have nearly as crisp an answer for at least two debates, and that was viewed by some as evasive on her part at that time. Warren has since been more detailed about funding for Medicare for All than Sanders, but I think that is when and how the damage was done.

[Happy Hoosier]

8. Which is fair enough....

But he has been careful to avoid talking specifics... for a couple reasons, I think.

1) It's hard to predict
2) It'll sound much scarier than it is.

I don't like Sanders' "all at once" plan, but I think he's handled that as best as can be expected.

[MineralMan]

5. I think you probably have to do it both ways, and then some.

Voters come in all varieties. Some never look at a TV screen. Others never look at any other sort of display. Still others rely on things like AM Radio or newspapers to get information. Some want their campaign information first-hand and personal.

The narrower your focus, the fewer people you reach with advertising for anything.

Iowa does not necessarily reflect the general population of the US very well. However, what I wrote above is still true everywhere.

Another serious problem in Iowa is that the campaign was diluted by there being too many people running, frankly. All that noise from all those candidates overloaded the attention span of Iowa caucus-goers. Not Iowa voters, but caucus-goers. The two groups are not the same. Caucus-goers are more likely to be appealed to by the personal, face-to-crowd sort of campaign. They like participating in the flesh with other people. That's why it's so difficult to accurately poll people in caucus states.

We are going to have to wait until Tuesday to learn how the caucuses went. Prediction isn't going to work very well.

[squirecam]

7. If you say you have a plan for that

The plan should have details. If the plan doesn’t survive those details, it wasn’t much of a plan.

I don’t think Warren is done though. This race is far from over.