The Election Game by Joseph Napolitan
This 1972 manual on political consulting explains why your fact sheet isn't moving anyone.
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“Television provided the stimulus, but personal reaction was the real content of the spot.”
— Joseph Napolitan, The Election Game and How to Win It
The TV spot Napolitan was writing about is the Muskie heartbeat ad from the 1968 campaign. The visual was a wobbling line and a beeping heart monitor. The voice-over asked:
“Muskie. Agnew. Who is your choice to be a heartbeat away from the presidency? “
And that was the entire spot.
You’ll notice, it contains no claim about Muskie or Agnew, nor does it contain statistics or arguments in favour or against the candidates.
And yet every voter who saw it understood what it was saying — and many of them concluded that Agnew, not Muskie, was the unfit choice.
What’s fascinating (to me, at least), is that the spot didn’t put that conclusion into the viewer’s head. It pulled that conclusion from the viewers mind.
That may seem counter-intuitive on first blush, but it makes so much sense if we are already familiar with Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, and his view that we all have pictures in our heads, and our job is to draw from those pictures. And it’s a theme Joseph Napolitan turns to in his book, The Election Game & How to Win It.
We see this same mechanism at play in the more famous Daisy ad from 1964, where the closing line was Lyndon Johnson saying “we must either love each other or we must die” — something no reasonable person could disagree with. And yet every voter understood the ad was about Goldwater, and that it was saying he would get them killed. The fear was already there, sitting in every American adult’s head since the Cuban Missile Crisis two years earlier. The spot pulled the trigger.
Napolitan calls this the difference between received and perceived media. The spot doesn’t deliver a message to a passive listener. The listener completes the spot from inside their own head. The medium is merely the catalyst. The reaction is the content. And the practitioner’s job is to choose stimuli that create this reaction.
This sounds like a theory of political advertising. It is. But it’s also a theory of all communication, and one that we ought to bring to our work every day if we are in the business of communicating with the public.
Why This Book Matters
For most of my career, I have been operating on a working theory I’d absorbed from mentors on political campaigns, or with political campaign experience. I think if these mentors had written their own guidebooks, most would overlap with Napolitan, even if his 1972 book is dated in parts, and difficult to enjoy in others. (There’s a lot of name dropping of characters none of us know, and it sometimes makes you feel like Napolitan is writing for an old boys’ club…if you know you know..)
But it’s still worth the read, because it’s the first useful manual for running a political campaign, and because its central claim is still incredibly relevant today: that communication works by recall, not by argument.
It also contains a counter-intuitive argument that voters don’t vote on issues, and most campaigners make the mistake of campaigning on issues.
Napolitan cites private polling in which he finds that when you ask voters what they actually want in a candidate, they don’t tell you they want policy alignment. They tell you they want someone who is honest and who cares about their problems. By a margin of four or five to one over a candidate whose positions match theirs.
Voters vote for the person they trust. And the gap between what the practitioner thinks voters care about and what voters actually decide on is, in my experience, one of the most expensive mistakes in this business.
I also think this book is worth a read even if you’re not interesting in running a political campaign. And that’s because every business is in the business of politics, whether the CEO knows it or not. Regulators, employees, customers, governments, activists, investors — they’re all constituencies. They all form opinions. They all vote in their own way. The CEO who pretends otherwise is a political leader who doesn’t know they’re running a campaign, which usually means they’re losing one. And the discipline that would have helped them — message definition, channel selection, controlled versus uncontrolled communication, treating the work as a one-day sale — is the discipline Napolitan documents in this book.
That’s why this old, dusty book belongs in the canon.
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