Dem
51
GOP
49
Hal Malchow has been a Democratic consultant for nearly half a century, and worked on the campaigns of five Democratic presidential candidates. His specialty is voter outreach, and his job for those campaigns was, in one way or another, to oversee their contact-by-mail operations. If you ever got a postcard about the merits of voting for Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, odds are it was produced under Malchow's watchful eye.
Sadly, Malchow's career is about to come to an end. In fact, it will end tomorrow. Since the late 1980s, he has known that he has the genetic markers for Alzheimer's disease, which also took his mother's life. In the past several years, he has begun to manifest symptoms of Alzheimer's, and he doesn't want a repeat of the slow, often agonizing decline he witnessed with his mother. So, he is in Switzerland right now, enjoying one last vacation with his family, and then he will receive end-of-life assistance tomorrow.
His final bequest to the party he's served for nearly his entire adult life is a book, Reinventing Political Advertising, that he self-published earlier this year. As someone who has rather a lot of expertise in this particular subject, he thinks that the blue team is doing it wrong, and using a model that was suited to generations past, but is not suited to the present.
We have often written that we don't really think political advertising works that well anymore, although we don't have Malchow's extensive experience to draw on. Nor would we have come up with the particular solution that he proposes, even though it makes a lot of sense. The central observation of the book is that voters largely don't vote for candidates anymore, they vote for parties. And so, advertising that promotes [CANDIDATE X] or denigrates [CANDIDATE Z] is missing the point. Instead, he thinks that the Democrats should invest their advertising dollars in promoting the Democratic Party and its ideas. In other words, the brand is more important these days than the individual people.
This is an interesting thought and, again, it makes a fair amount of sense in a world where ticket-splitting has become rare. That said, change is hard, and politicians in particular tend to be stuck in doing things the way they've always been done. Further, politicians who work hard at fundraising want that money to go to promoting their careers, not to promoting everyone. At the same time, the current approach is clearly producing seriously diminishing returns, so the pooh-bahs could be open to a new way of thinking... maybe?
Clearly, political campaigns aren't going to spend time boosting the party when they have a specific race to win. The DSCC and DCCC also have specific mandates. The one party organ that has total flexibility is the DNC (and similarly the RNC). From the above item, it is clear that the RNC is not going to go with this piece of advice. So the one person who might take the advice to heart and has the money to back it up is DNC Chairman Jaime Harrison. His mission is to elect Democrats in general, not any specific Democrat. If he decides to start a campaign "selling" the Democratic Party, he could do it. To us, Malchow's point about the parties being more important than the candidates these days makes a lot of sense.
In any event, rest well, Hal Malchow. You have surely earned it. (Z)