This captures my experience working in politics:
When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.
(Attributed to Pablo Picasso)
Most political media is like Picasso’s art critics; what gets coverage is not what professionals discuss. This makes it hard for outsiders to understand the actual work of winning elections. That’s a problem, because politics requires broad engagement from lots of people. Without good information widely available, it’s hard for outsiders to engage constructively as voters, volunteers, or donors.
Below are some publicly available materials that illuminate the actual work of electoral professionals.
Electoral Strategy
A good starting point is to see what a professionally prepared electoral strategy looks like. There’s no one right approach; the strategies below use different reasoning and reach different conclusions. But all have more depth than any political media.
Reid Hoffman’s donor advisor Dmitri Mehlhorn describes his strategy leading up to the 2020 election, framed around defending against the “assault on truth” via evidence-based communication.1
Way to Win and Movement Voter Project are progressive donor collectives that emphasize local community organizing. Way to Win has shared its full strategy from 2022; you can read highlights or see the full 110-page report. Movement Voter Project’s 2024 strategy is in the slides linked here.
Mind the Gap advises donors on the most quantitatively testable and tested programs to fund. One of its strategy memos was leaked to the journalist Teddy Schleifer and is available here (scroll to bottom).
Messaging
Reading or listening to these interviews will give you more insight into Democratic messaging than watching hundreds of hours of political media.
The two experts below disagree on many areas but agree on some, such as the importance of explicitly calling out Republicans’ extremism on certain topics.
Dmitri Mehlhorn: The Man Financing a Political Counter-Revolution. Sample quote:
[P]eople on the left were extremely enthusiastic about taking the fight in terms of salience and issues, in a way that we found to be helpful to Mr. Trump and hurtful to Trump’s enemies.
A Dmitri Rebuttal by Messaging Expert Anat Shenker-Osorio. Sample quote:
When you ask [focus groups], “What is your beef with Democrats?” I can tell you that none of them – and I really do mean none – the first idea that comes into their own head is, they want to defund the police.
Their beef with Democrats… I’m sure that you can guess. That they’re slow, that they’re bad on the economy, that they spend too much money, a whole litany of things. … We ask them, “If you had to liken Democrats to an animal, what animal would you pick?” … the animals that they give us for the Democrats is a snail, a sloth, a turtle, some permutation of a thing that doesn’t do much, and does it slowly.
Testing messaging is difficult. If you spend $6 million testing anti-Trump messages, you might receive a summary of results like this one leaked to The New York Times. Here’s an interview with Ali Morrell of Blue Rose Research, who is on the front lines of message testing. Sample quote:
It’s a broader ecosystem of actors that are influencing people and influencing how voters think about the Democratic party, and therefore we can’t be thinking about this word [versus that] word, or this ad [versus that] ad, we need to be thinking holistically about what we stand for as a party and how we communicate that to voters.
Many practitioners are becoming less focused on the words of a message and more on its source. In other words, the same message will have a different effect coming from a political ad versus from a friend.2
Another good resource is the Message Box by Dan Pfeiffer.
Data and analysis
Mike Podhorzer is among the most insightful and long-tenured analysts of political data. For many years his work was limited to professionals, but last year he began sharing his great work via Substack.
After every election, “what happened” is a major topic of research and discussion. While the winners are mostly known right away, it takes until the following spring and summer to really understand who voted and what worked. The 24-hour news cycle forces talking heads to jump the gun with all sorts of hastily assembled statistics; professionals know to withhold judgment for months, until reports like these are produced:
Work on the front lines
Higher Ground Labs publishes a great overview of political technology. While there are lots of projects underway, most that they catalog are small and scrappy and could use support.
In my circles, the closest thing to a trade magazine is the Great Battlefield podcast by Nathaniel Pearlman. He has interviewed a number of practitioner insiders who rarely speak publicly. Here are a few episodes with people I happen to know and respect.
Electing Progressive State Legislatures with Daniel Squadron Of The States Project
Using Behavioral Science For Voter Turnout with Robert, Kristina And Heba Of Vote Tripling [now called Vote Rev]
Ethical Email Fundraising with Josh Nelson of The Juggernaut Project
Maximizing Political Donations with Laura Pearl Of Flip The Vote
Relational Organizing For Progressives with Mike Pfohl Of Organizing Empowerment Project
Investing Large Dollars to Save Democracy with Tamer Mokhtar
Labor, Polling, Analytics And Progressive Politics with Mike Podhorzer
Closing question
What resources like these have you found helpful? I’ll update this post as I find good pieces.
In August 2022, Mehlhorn shared his updated thinking on the Great Battlefield podcast (here’s a rough AI-generated transcript).