The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns

Abstract

The ads aired by the two candidates in the 2010 Colorado U.S. Senate race told the story of the ideological war that defined that midterm election. Michael Bennet, a freshman Democrat appointed to replace a man who had become one of Barack Obama’s Cabinet secretaries, was deeply in hock to a liberal White House. Tea Party Republican challenger Ken Buck was—or so went the punditry and Bennet’s attacks—too conservative for the moderate, suburbanizing state. Meanwhile, one million letters being delivered to Democratic-leaning Coloradoans in the last days of the race made no mention of either candidate, his allegiances, or the issues that separated them. They lacked any allusion to the ideological split riving the nation or reference to the policy consequences of a change in party control of the Senate. The folded pieces of laser-printed white paper were designed to be ugly, with a return address referring to a sender whose name voters were unlikely to recognize. The sender thanked the recipient by first name for having voted in 2008, and then said she looked forward to being able to express such gratitude again after the coming elections. The letter, dispassionate in tone and startlingly personal in content, might have inspired most recipients to dispatch it to a trash can with no strong feeling other than being oddly unsettled by its arrival.