In politics, you’re either on message or you are losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Winning Message.
It’s been a week since Election Day and you should be recovering from all the negative campaign commercials that flooded your various screens for the past few months.
With some time to reflect on the 2022 midterms, I thought it would be good to look back on the messages that made the difference and those that fell short – and how both impacted the final results.
Out of necessity, let’s limit ourselves to the only competitive-ish race of the cycle, which ended in Mike Lee’s victory over Evan McMullin.
The winning message for Lee proved to be the anti-Biden message many Republicans embraced. With inflation hammering American families and the best campaign sign being the four-dollar-plus sign outside every gas station, Senator Lee honed in on the need for Republicans to take control of Congress to put the brakes on the Democrats’ agenda.
Senator Lee also got a boost from the ultra-rare positive PAC ad. Former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman, who hired Lee as his general counsel when he was governor, appeared in an ad run by Club for Growth that helped assuage concerns moderate to mildly conservative Republican voters had.
For the most part, he got on message and stayed there and that’s why he won.
As for McMullin, his message focued on him being an outsider… which proved to have more drawbacks than benefits – or at least not enough benefits to claim victory.
Positioning as the outsider is usually a given when running against an incumbent but when that lable can be used to tie you to being such a Republican outsider that you’re, well, a Democrat and you’re going to have a tough time shaking that wolf-in-sheeps-clothing feeling for a lot of voters.
The biggest turning point for McMullin came not when Democrats decided not to nominate anyone from their own party to challenge Senator Lee, but when McMullin publicly opted to declare that he wouldn’t caucus with either party. That’s when being an outsider turned into a liability for many voters.
Since we subscribe to the importance of being on-message… McMullin’s decsion to turn his and the media’s attention to a PAC ad only added to the reach of the ad and cost him valuable time.
Moreso than Lee, McMullin was off-message and that’s why he’s now 0-for-2 in the Utah elections.
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground.
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