Charisma used to be the whole game. This cycle, in this specific district, we are actively campaigning on the fact that our guy is thoroughly, reliably unremarkable.
Spent today’s strategy call working through, in genuinely exhaustive detail, exactly how to convince voters in our specific battleground district that our candidate is boring, a specific, deliberate messaging strategy that still catches me slightly off guard every time I say it out loud, six years into doing this work, since I do not think I ever expected “please notice how thoroughly unremarkable this man is” to become an actual, central pitch our team spends real money and real strategic energy trying to land.
The underlying logic, once you actually sit with it, makes considerably more sense than the strategy sounds on its face. Our internal polling in this specific district has identified a genuinely significant bloc of voters who are disappointed with both parties in roughly equal measure, tired of the constant drama and constant conflict that has come to define national politics more broadly, and our actual theory of the case is that this specific bloc responds considerably better to a candidate who projects calm, ordinary normalcy than to one who tries to match the current political moment’s prevailing energy and volume.
I think there is something genuinely worth sitting with here about how thoroughly this specific strategic environment has shifted over the years I have been doing this work. Earlier in my career, the conventional wisdom I was actually taught, repeatedly, by more senior strategists, emphasized charisma and energy almost above every other candidate quality, the specific, magnetic ability to command a room and generate genuine excitement treated as close to a prerequisite for any genuinely viable campaign. This cycle, in this specific district at least, we are running the exact opposite playbook, actively downplaying anything that might read as flashy or performative in favor of leaning hard into our candidate’s genuine, if admittedly not especially exciting, ordinariness.
Our candidate himself, to his considerable credit, has embraced this specific strategy with a genuine self-awareness I find refreshing, joking openly on the trail about how thoroughly unremarkable his own daily life actually is, coaching Little League, a genuinely mundane day job he still works part time, a specific normalcy he leans into deliberately rather than trying to dress up into something more conventionally impressive. I think that specific self-awareness is itself part of why this strategy is working as well as our early data suggests it currently is, since a candidate visibly performing normalcy without genuinely embodying it would likely read as considerably more hollow and considerably less persuasive to exactly the skeptical, double-hater voters we are trying to reach.
I do not think this strategy would work in every district, or in every election cycle, and I want to be honest that I am genuinely uncertain whether it holds up through November or whether it proves, in hindsight, to have been a fairly narrow, cycle-specific tactic that worked for this particular moment’s specific voter fatigue rather than any kind of durable, generally applicable strategic insight. What I do know is that our internal numbers have moved in a genuinely encouraging direction since we shifted our messaging this direction several weeks ago, a shift I am cautiously, genuinely optimistic about while also remaining fully aware how quickly campaign numbers can move in the opposite direction given any number of factors entirely outside our control.
I am heading back into tomorrow’s door-knocking data with real curiosity about whether this specific messaging shift is actually reaching the voters we are targeting or whether it is simply resonating within our own internal team’s sense of what should work, a genuinely important distinction that only real, sustained field data can actually resolve, however confident our current strategic instincts currently feel sitting here at the end of a long, genuinely exhausting strategy call.
I mentioned today’s strategy debate to a friend who works on a considerably different kind of race in another state, one leaning into precisely the opposite approach, high energy, high visibility, a candidate deliberately positioned as the exciting alternative to establishment politics as usual, and she reported her own internal numbers moving in an equally encouraging direction, which has left me thinking honestly about how much of effective campaign strategy in this specific moment is less about any single, universally correct approach and more about accurately reading the particular emotional register of the particular electorate you happen to be trying to reach.
I think that distinction, reading the specific district rather than applying some generalized playbook, is probably the single most important skill this job actually demands, considerably more important than any specific messaging tactic in isolation. Boring is working here, this cycle, with these particular voters. I do not think that tells us much of anything reliable about what will work in the next district over, let alone in the next election entirely, and I am trying to hold that humility honestly even while our own current numbers give me real reason for cautious optimism.
I think six years in this business has taught me, more than any single specific tactic, exactly this kind of humility about generalizing from any one race’s current success. I have watched strategies that worked brilliantly in one cycle fail completely in the very next one, sometimes in the exact same district, simply because the underlying electorate’s mood had shifted in some way no amount of careful modeling fully predicted in advance. I am holding onto today’s cautious optimism loosely, genuinely grateful for encouraging numbers while remaining fully aware how quickly this specific race, or any race, can shift in ways our current strategy simply did not anticipate.
More from this author at Tinsel Vandergraph, prat.uk.