One of the most important parts of setting up your campaign is developing your winning message. In this episode, Joe and Martín teach you how to do that by using a Tully Message Box and are joined by fellow politics podcaster Margie Omero of The Pollsters, who chats with Joe about how to use polling to develop your winning message.
Your campaign needs to have a winning message—one that resonates with voters and stays true to your values. How do you make one? Using a Tully Message Box of course! This week, Joe and Martín will walk you through how to use a Tully Message Box to come up with a winning message for your campaign. Joe interviews Margie Omero of The Pollsters, the only bipartisan women podcast about polling, to teach you how to use polling to inform your message and what to look for when hiring an amazing pollster.
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Martín Diego Garcia
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Presented by The Campaign Workshop
(Intro Music)
Joe Fuld (00:05):
Hey friends, you're listening to how to win a campaign where you get an insider's perspective that teaches you not only how to run, but how to win. I'm Joe Fuld
Martín Diego Garcia (00:16):
And I'm Martín Diego Garcia and you can find us @CMPWRKSHP on Twitter or @thecampaignworkshop on Instagram. Welcome and thanks for listening to episode three of how to win a campaign. If you haven't heard our second episode with Mayor Annise Parker about running for office, it's totally worth the listen. She ran 11 times, won nine of those times and had some great insight on what it actually takes to be a candidate,uand running for office and balance sort of a candidate work-personal life balance. It's a great lesson if you haven't listened to it already.
Joe Fuld (00:48):
It's unbelievable like candidates and how they can actually find any balance at all in running for office and having a life and she is able to do it. We're really excited about this episode. This one. We're really going to answer questions with our great guest, Margie Omero on messaging. How messaging really is put together in a campaign, what tools you use, like a message box or polling to build that message and what are the main challenges for creating a message? How do you ensure your message doesn't get misinterpreted? Really thinking about do you need polling? Can you afford it to really build a message in your campaign? Also, the idea of incorporating your message throughout everything you do, whether it's a stump speech, whether it's door to door, and the best practice for doing that.
Martín Diego Garcia (01:44):
Yeah, your message is really the core thing that you are trying to get voters to remember about you. We often tell our our participants, right, that a voter needs to hear your message anywhere from eight to 12 times, whether that's through direct mail, whether that's through social, whether that's knocking on their door or calling them at their home, right? They need to hear it multiple times before they actually start to, it actually starts to resonate and they really start to attach your message to you as a candidate. And so honing in what that specific message is and being able to repeat, repeat, repeat that on multiple ways in which you're doing some voter contact is really, really important.
Joe Fuld (02:20):
Right, and you want to think about that message as an umbrella that covers issues that you're going to be talking about and allows you to pivot to different issues but keep it together with that centralized thematic message that engages voters, remembering that the message really has to relate and engage with them. It's not about you, it's about the voter. So really developing that message is not easy, but you've got to know your story and know your community and really understand how that message is going to break down in the campaign.
Martín Diego Garcia (02:58):
And we use an exercise, a Tully Message Box that we have a couple of blogs on our website about at thecampaignworkshop.com feel free to check those out, but it really sort of centers the voter for you to understand and get a sort of visual of what are you saying about yourself as a candidate? What are the positives you are highlighting? What are you saying about your opponent? So what are voters hearing about what you're contrasting with your opponent And then on the flip side, what is your opponent saying about you? How are they framing your campaign and how are they framing themselves? So this way, as you're thinking about your message, you're really getting what is the voter hearing from all four sides of that, that uh message box so that you can then hone in on a message, highlights your positives while also countering what they may be saying about your campaign.
Joe Fuld (03:40):
Yeah, we don't do a campaign here at the campaign workshop without doing a message box first. It's one of our processes that we go through and regardless of what political consultant you hire, every campaign that you work on or you're part of should have a message box as part of the ways that you begin that campaign. In this interview we dig in deep. We talk a lot about polling. But what I'll also say is we also talk a bit about what happens if you don't have a poll and how do you best put together a campaign without that resource. And it's really, you want to think about that message box. You want to really think about listening and understanding what the differences are between the candidates. So you really can create that compelling contrast. And it doesn't have to be a direct one, but a good tacit contrast can make a huge difference in a campaign.
Martín Diego Garcia (04:32):
Yeah, and the, and the message box also really helps you as Joe said, right? You create this before you, if you were going to utilize polling right before you, you, you write out the questions or the messages, you're going to be testing on polling because they will likely come from this message box exercise, right? And you'll be able to see which messages poll better or which messages test better with your audience based on some of this polling. So you'll be able to hone in how do you actually say that you're going to be a fighter for your community? How do you actually talk about your experience as being a teacher or a firefighter or a community member and and what part of your story actually resonates the most with voters and using this message box to help you figure out what to test in your polling is really, really helpful.
Joe Fuld (05:12):
Absolutely. I think of polling as the final research tool. I think of the message box as an organizational tool, right? To get to that point, and it might be that you're in a campaign where you don't have that research and you got to turn that organizational tool into your fundamental core messages and then you want to prioritize your message box. But if you have the ability to do polling or focus groups, that nice first step of getting everything in one place is so important.
Martín Diego Garcia (05:41):
Yeah, and if, if as a candidate you can't afford polling, right? They can be sometimes pretty expensive. There are other ways of creative ways of figuring out how to hone in that message after you've done the message box and basically testing the pieces of your story or the pieces or the way in which you talk about issues, whether that's on the doors, whether that's through your social media platforms and in whatever way you're engaging with the voters that you're communicating with will allow you to sort of see, when I say it this way, does it resonate stronger with voters than when I say it a different way or when I talk about my, my personal story and highlight my work experience versus my values, right? What is actually resonating with folks in what our folks, voters in particular engaging more with. And it allows you to sort of hone in that message. So by the time you get to election day, right, you have a strong message that you want to continue to repeat over and over and over again to that target audience of voters.
Joe Fuld (06:33):
Yeah. Well listen, this was a great interview. It was a lot of fun to talk with Margie. She's awesome. We hope this conversation gave you a little bit of sense of how to hone in on that message as we said, and really dig into creating a campaign message or a poll to get more information for your campaign and connect with the right voters. So now here's our interview with Margie Omero.
(Music)
Joe Fuld (07:05):
Welcome back to how to win a campaign. And today I've got my guest, Margie Omaro, Margie's a principal at GBAO Strategy, a democratic polling firm. She has over two decades of experience in qualitative and quantitative research to inform strategic advice for democratic candidates, nonprofits and advocacy groups. She's worked with the Kansas Governor, Laura Kelly, the DNC, the D triple C, Emily's List, Center for American Progress, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and Every Town for Gun Safety. She's worked on issues like immigration, guns, the Kavanaugh hearings, the special counsel investigation, race issues, abortion you name it. And she is also a cohost of her podcast called The Pollsters, Margie Omero, welcome to the show.
Margie Omero (07:53):
Thanks for having me. And if you want, I don't know how this would make you feel Joe, but I've known you for most of those 20 years. We've known each other almost that long.
Joe Fuld (08:03):
That is like amazing. So I I the first time like I remember meeting you, I mean we could try and do this is when you were working for Mark Mellman I think that is when we first met. Yeah that is, that is a long time ago. 20 years in this business. In 20 years of you being a pollster. I mean that is a, that is a long time.
Margie Omero (08:27):
It was my first paying job out of college.
Joe Fuld (08:30):
What is the most challenging part of being a pollster?
Margie Omero (08:35):
You know, one part that is great is that you get to do all kinds of different things. You know, you deal with clients, you write, you crunch numbers and look through data sets. You talk to voters, you tell stories. I mean there's all this, you know, you have to learn about a variety of different topics. It's not any one area. So at that part, the generalist piece I really like, but it does, it does mean that you know you have to learn about a lot of different things. So that part can be challenging. I think one of the main challenges that we've had in polling that has been true sin--you know for the 20 years I've been doing this is keeping respondents on the phone and adjusting to where voters are and how to reach them and explaining complicated policy and political conversations too in a way that voters can understand. So there's all kinds of nuance to the stories and policies and debates that we have here. But that doesn't mean that voters are interested or they have a different job. We have this job, they have a different job that's not understanding the different nuances. So being able to explain that in a way that's clear is an important part of the job too.
Joe Fuld (09:41):
So does a candidate need a poll to come up with a good message? Where does the message come from?
Margie Omero (09:47):
Ideally a candidate should have an idea of why they're running for office. They should have something they want to say. It should make sense kind of on its own. Sometimes it needs some tweaks. I mean sometimes people are running because there's something personal that they want to talk about and not everybody wants to hear their, maybe candidates are shy about saying something personal but actually voters really want to know that story because that story is really compelling. So people can approach their reason to running, to run for office in different ways. But this should start there. Obviously I think everyone should have a pollster. It's good to test your assumptions. Sometimes we learn things and subtleties that we wouldn't have been able to guess and that polling helps us figure it out. And if we had done a kind of not good enough poll, like a hundred interviews done and you know, kind of sketchy methodology that might give us a false positive or a false negative, you, you, you're not sure if it would be better to just go with your gut at that point if you have good advisors. But you don't need a pollster to tell you what to say. But sometimes a pollster can help you revise of all the things that you want to say, which ones voters find most appealing.
Joe Fuld (10:53):
And so what if your campaign, and you don't have money for a poll, what's a replacement for that?
Margie Omero (10:59):
There are a couple things. One, you should, you know, you can talk to some pollsters about other kinds of options, right? Sometimes there are options that include texting or online that can help you get a sense of the area in a way that's cost effective or a hybrid method of doing a portion with landlines and a portion online. And so you're able to reach people. It's reaching people on cell phones that drives costs up. Like that's the part that's really very expensive because according to federal law, you have to use a live person to make, to dial. You can't use an autodialer to get someone on the phone the way you can with landline, you have to have someone actually manually dialing cell phones and so that just drives cost up. So if you can minimize the cell phone costs by using some other methodology that can sometimes make things a little bit less expensive. But there are lots of very cheap ways. They're not all necessarily good ways. So I think if you don't have the funds for a poll that includes some live interviews or at least some attention to the voter file and some attention to your sampling with somebody who does this for a living, I think it might be better to just not do a poll because I caution people from going in the wrong direction. I've seen polls know, send people in the wrong direction. And if you don't have a professional writing your questions on top of that, then you don't really know exactly about the interpretation that you might get as a result.
Joe Fuld (12:21):
You've talked a little bit about like how important methodology is, how important the person writing the poll is. So what is the difference between a good pollster and a bad pollster? Right. And when you're, you've been doing your work for 20 years, I'd like to say you're a good pollster, right? And I can say that. I'm sure you say that too. That's good. And you are, but my question is right, if you're listening to this podcast, if you're running for office, how should a client, a campaign manager, a candidate like figure that out. How do they know?
Margie Omero (12:55):
So if you're talking to somebody, obviously if they just pick up the phone, you know they may not be completely familiar with your race at that moment, but let's just say you've given the pollster a little bit of time and say, okay, I want to talk about polling. They should come to you with an awareness of how the election works in your area are, it depends on when you're running for office. It depends. You know, obviously elections and voting work differently all over the country. They should know if your state has party registration or not or same day registration or not or what have you or what else is on the ticket or if it's a battleground state. All those things like your pollster should come to the table knowing all of that, like cold is kind of table stakes of what they come to. The table knowing about and they should be able to talk about turnout, turnout scenarios, what elections have looked like in the past, what their own theories are about how the race might look, but also there to listen too. So not simply to say, Oh, thanks for calling me here. I'm going to tell you exactly what I think this is about. I mean, I don't know. I guess some people do that and they may be good pollsters. I, it's not my approach in the end when you were talking to somebody, you're there to listen. Just like I listened to voters, I want to listen to what candidates want to say cause they live there. I don't. So I want to hear what their perspectives are as well and what they think they want this race to be about.
Joe Fuld (14:11):
Yeah. I mean a big part of what you're hiring the pollster for is for the help in honing your message and getting that good message down. So how do you know Margie, what a good message is versus a bad message
Margie Omero (14:28):
Before you test it. I mean you test it, then you see if it's a tests well or not. But one way is does it mean, I mean does it mean the same thing to ev--whoever you read it to, right? Is it conveying what you want it to? Sometimes people can read something and it means something completely different to them. And if that's the case then it's not worded clearly enough. And I guess it depends on what your message is trying to do. Is it activating the base, is it in a primary, is it trying to persuade folks in the persuadable middle? Are you giving, trying to give permission to people who have voted for an incumbent a long time to vote for someone else? If that's the case, you don't want to give them a message that says this person is a bum, you know, because voters have voted for this person. So if you're saying this person's a bum, they've always been a bum, then you know you are not welcoming people into the fold. And that I think is important messaging too. Again, it depends on the district and and the election, but it's all those considerations are what you should expect from your pollster and it just is completely custom. It's not simply you know, cookie cutter. Now at the same time, I guess the last piece of it is if you're trying to explain some of these common policies and messages there, there is a lingo to some of this that if you're not careful you could end up all of a sudden a could feel like, be in a situation where you are saying that you are for something. You are not, I am going to have to strain to think of an example of that off the top of my head, but there's some specialized language that comes from kind of experience in the area. Like up for example, I had someone on a team, this was years ago and they were just like talking about voter outreach and you know like just voting in general and they wrote something in there about election fraud or voter fraud. I was like, you know, this was a little bit a long time ago. It wasn't kind of in recent times where it's truly partisan. So at the time not everybody kind of knew that voter fraud was like a partisan code that folks on the right talk a lot more about voter fraud than folks on the left. They just thought that they were like, we should eliminate fraud here too, you know? And so this is the kind of thing that if you've been doing this a long time, you say, well that phrase might mean something that you don't intend for it to mean.
Joe Fuld (16:36):
How do you make sure that they're taking away from the poll what they need to take away from. I think people draw sometimes different conclusions from polling. I'm sure you've had this with clients, like how do you, how do you as a political professional get the client to focus on the right outcomes from the poll?
Margie Omero (16:57):
I mean it's part of it is what you highlight in the deck and in your presentation and you know, we put together, you know, really nice PowerPoint. We have key findings, we have themes that we reiterate throughout. Ideally I like to present in person. It's not always possible. It's not present over the phone. It's certainly better than just sending an email and saying good luck, you know you want to really walk them through it. And not everybody looks at PowerPoint decks all day. So it's better to have someone kind of walk you through it and, and explain what you see and you want to be part of the team throughout. Ideally. And all teams work differently and you know, teams have different needs and demands. But if I'm part of a team that is in frequent communication, they'll send me press releases, speeches, direct mail pieces, mail plans, you know, GOTV call scripts, television scripts, you name it. And I usually them like, I don't edit every single thing, but I, you know, I often, I can't help myself sometimes I'm like, Oh yeah, I, you know, I like to kind of break out the red pen for some of that. And some of it's based on polling and some of it is just based on, you know, helping make the language tighter. And that's why it's good to have a team that you feel can work together. And you know, accepts feedback and gives feedback and is engaged because then you know, then you're able to get a better product if everybody, you know, kind of works together on these things.
Joe Fuld (18:15):
For sure. And I mean incorporating that message, that message shouldn't just go in a drawer somewhere. Right. It's got to, as you said, go in the press release, go in the door to door script, go in that television spot or the digital ad and making sure that there is that discipline to have that message go throughout is to me a key of of winning a campaign is making sure you have that message discipline.
Margie Omero (18:39):
Right, exactly. And it just, it makes it big impact. When I first started my business, and this was a long time ago and I remember one of the first presentations I did and I went in, person flew to the state, I did the presentation, I left them a printed copy of the deck and they said, this is great. The last pollster had just gave us crosstabs and we never saw him again. This, you know, I can't believe you gave us a thing. You know, so it makes it difference to have somebody walk you through what it means because it's not simply about, well 35% said this and 36% said that, but if you look at this group then it's 32% that's, maybe there's a story in there, but we want to have the numbers come to life a little bit.
Joe Fuld (19:21):
For sure. So you have a podcast called The Pollsters, which I'm a fan of. Yeah. Well tell us a little bit about the podcast and what you do on the podcast.
Margie Omero (19:35):
So it's bipartisan and we are almost coming up on five years. I think we're going to have like a five year anniversary for the party for the pollsters. So we've been doing it for a long time. So it's me and a Republican pollster, Kristen Soltis Anderson, who is a Fox News contributor and a Washington Examiner columnist and is out and about all over. And so she and I had seen each other in like green rooms and panels and things where we would be together as the D and R on something. And we were doing a State of the Union coverage like NPR, say the union coverage now almost five years ago. And I said, I want to talk to you. I have an idea cause I had looked online, I didn't see any podcasts that were bipartisan two women, bi-partisan, none. Right. And I didn't see any about polling. Now neither those things are true anymore. But five years ago there was just zero and zero and both of those buckets. And so that was my pitch. I barely got to the end of the sentence and she was like, yes, this is what we need to do. I'm like, there's no polling podcasts, there's no bipartisan women's podcast. She's like sold, done. So we started to put it together and you know, we, we knew each other before, but we became friendly and developed a chemistry as a result of doing this now for a long time. And we try to kind of follow an arc of our episodes where we, you know, start off by saying like here are what the top lines are kind of like a memo, like a polling memo at the top lines. And then we have a couple of different topics and then we have key findings and we can't always do it exactly that way, but that's our goal, our aspiration. And we have at the end something like something, some garbage poll but doesn't matter what the methodology is like most annoying Christmas song or what do you think of man buns or whatever is out there. I mean there's no shortage of that. The internet is filled with garbage polls that are done for publicity or like on a newspaper website, whatever. So there's just always whatever we find ridiculous we put at the end, but we try to check in on like impeachment and the primary and Trump's approval rating and then whatever kind of big topics are happening and it's fun. It's like it's a good exercise to kind of go through all the public polls every week. And we've had a lot of fun doing it and we try to keep it a little light, but it's a, you know, it's a passion project and labor of love as, you know.
Joe Fuld (21:53):
Yeah. Well Margie, Omero, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. It's great to have you on the show and I look forward to talking again soon.
Margie Omero (22:04):
Yeah thank you, take care!
(Music)
Joe Fuld (22:10):
And we're back. Thanks again to Margie Omero for chatting with us. Some of my favorite takeaways about this interview were how to use polling to refine your campaign message. You want to remember that a poll can help you figure out how to frame your message and prioritize your issues. You may think a certain message or issue matters a lot to folks, but a poll is really going to tell you how. Once you nail down your message, put it to use, repeat it over and over and over again.
Martín Diego Garcia (22:42):
Yeah. Joe, to that point, I mean, as a candidate you're going to be bringing in, right, the things that you are passionate about and why you're running for office. And they may or may not be the same things that your community is passionate about, right? And so a poll to refine your message is really helpful, but it's not to say that you can't bring your own sort of personal passions to this, right? So you may be running on the environment or ending corruption, but what's really important to your voters is education or health care. And so for you, you want to be using this poll of how do you figure out a theme that marries those so that you're able to craft a message that both brings your passions and the community concerns together. Not necessarily needing to put one over the other.
Joe Fuld (23:20):
Yeah, that's right. You want to keep it simple. Talk to voters in a language they understand. It's not enough to talk about the right issues if voters don't understand what you're saying, you're never going to get your point across. Keep your message simple. Stay out of the weeds. And as Margie said, test messages that reflect the way people actually talk and think about things.
Martín Diego Garcia (23:42):
And you could really do that Joe, right? Like as the candidates are knocking on doors, as you start to test different language, see what as actually resonating with the folks at the doors, what are they asking questions about? Are they really understanding what you're saying? I think that's a super helpful tool.
Joe Fuld (23:55):
Absolutely. The, I like to think of canvassing as an ongoing tracking poll. A lot of it is really anecdotal data, but it is also actionable that can let you really figure out how are people paying attention to me? Are they listening to what I'm saying? Are there things that I said at one door that people really responded to? How do I keep engagement up? The other thing too that I want folks to think about if you're hiring a pollster is just that a good pollster is a team player. They're not just there to feel the poll and go away or have the poll be on a hard drive or in a drawer somewhere. You want the pollster to be asking questions of you to make sure you're asking questions of them getting real buy-in. They understand the nuances of all of the polling data that you've now generated. So having them be a real resource is super important.
Martín Diego Garcia (24:50):
And also thinking about how do you utilize them as a mentor or a learning opportunity for you and your campaign, right? So as we're continuing to think about campaigns beyond our own, we want to make sure that our staffers who may be a first time staffer on your campaign, how do we teach them how to look at a poll? What does it mean how to work with a pollster? So also be thinking about that when you're dealing with your pollster, right? You're paying these folks for their brain and their time. So utilize it wisely.
Joe Fuld (25:15):
Yeah, I mean one of those things is if you've never read a crosstabs before and you're a first time campaign manager asks the pollster how to read a crosstab, have them walk you through how to do that.
Martín Diego Garcia (25:26):
Joe, what is a crosstab?
Joe Fuld (25:29):
Cross tab is a big stack of paper that is usually sent to you in a PDF. But in reality, what that stack of paper is is two questions that are run against each other. It could be demographic data or run against a question and for you to really understand what are trends deep in the data, you have to look at the cross tabs, but pollsters do this themselves. But the benefit, and I think it's really important is for everyone who's a manager to really be able to look at these as well. So you can ask questions and say, Oh, how do these different pieces of data reflect each other? Is there a trend that I'm missing? And frankly it allows you to go back to your pollster and say, Hey, there might not be this crosstab here for a question that I was interested in. Can you run that for me? Have those conversations with your pollster. So the other piece here, which I think is really important is if you're going to invest in a poll, do it right. If you can't afford to do a poll and you're really thinking that you're going to do something really cheaply, it might not be the right thing for you to poll in your race, right? You want to think about that, and I think pollsters different pollsters about the methodology that they're going to do about whether your race is right to do a poll. There are some campaigns where they're just going to be too small for polling to really be reflective. We think it's super important to have representative samples. Ask your pollster about that. We see more hybrid surveys, which are phone-online. Think about that and you want to make sure that you reduce the number of questions so that people actually stay on the phone and answer the surveys.
Martín Diego Garcia (27:17):
Polling can seem very, very complicated, but it's also really, really useful if you're able to do it and do it right. So hopefully this help you hone in on your message for your campaign. And our next episode, we're going to be talking to Claire Stein, Ross, a principal over at CSR Operations, really about the logistics of HR and setting up your campaign. We're going to dive into effective hiring processes, onboarding, managing of staff to get those as streamlined as possible so that you can really spend your time talking to voters and hopefully winning. But until next time, this is Martín Diego Garcia
Joe Fuld (27:48):
And Joe Fuld breaking down how to win a campaign. How to Win a campaign is Joe Fuld, Martín Diego Garcia, Hope Rohrbach, Daniel Lam, Heidi Job and Elena Veatch. Music by Mike Pinto. Sound editing by Junto Media. Special thanks to the team at The Campaign Workshop. Please review, like, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
(Outro Music)