Rick Davis, manager of John McCain’s Presidential Campaign, has made available online a 14 minute presentation on the campaign’s strategy for the next election. For British Conservatives, the details of the presentation are probably less important than how advanced and sophisticated it shows American campaign techniques to be.
While the presentation has been criticised for placing undue emphasis on some polls that favoured McCain, what is immediately striking to British observers is how honest and frank some of the tone and commentary is. “The political environment [is] probably one of the worst in our party's history”, Davis begins in the opening seconds, with Barack Obama boasting “the strongest fundraising machine in Presidential history” and “the ‘wrong track’ numbers for our administration are at a historic high point”.
Coupled with the honesty about the hurdles and weaknesses ahead is a transparency about which parts of the country are safe for both parties, and which are the states where the election will be won. A stunning amount of psephological and geographical data has been collected and made use of in this presentation alone. I know from my time in Washington that there is nothing unusual about any of this – this level of polling, strategy and clear-headed, honest analysis is absolutely the norm for a big Republican campaign.
Davis goes on to say of the campaign: “We’ve decentralised our campaign with regional campaign managers organizing themselves in 11 regions. They have their hands in all aspects of campaigning: fundraising, message development, grassroots outreach, the victory programme and every aspect of the campaign in their states.”
“In the next four months we will open over five hundred offices in the targeted states alone.”
“Our burn rate over the course of the campaign - how much we spend versus how much we raise - was at 78%, compared to Obama’s today which is 83%. But now, when we’ve amped up our fundraising, we’ve cut our burn rate to 45%... Compare this to Obama’s today which is a burn rate of over 114%. That means he is spending more money than he is raising.”
Time and again, accounts of the rise of New Labour discuss the importance to the party’s presentation, and its 1997 landslide, of efforts made to learn from the 1992 Clinton campaign. Even as our political fortunes look very favourable, British Conservatives clearly have much to learn from our American counterparts about modern and cutting edge techniques for organisation and running an election campaign.
UPDATE: The briefing can now be viewed on Youtube.
