I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment: Nicky Hager: "The Hollow Men: A study in the politics of deception". Its about the failed attempt by Don Brash to lead the National party to victory in the 2005 NZ election. Hager has acquired an enormous amount of internal documentation about the campaign (emails, strategy papers and so on). He says they were leaked, others claim he must have hacked into the party's system. Nevertheless, the documents make for a great insight into the way modern political strategising and campaigning actually works. Hager's title gives you the tip that he doesn't approve and the jacket comes with an endorsement from John Pilger but don't let that turn you off its a great read.
National hired Mark Textor, and Crosby / Textor, the Australian Liberal party's longtime pollster and campaign strategist and some of that leaked material refers to him and his company.
The techniques revealed are interesting given that Crosby and Textor have worked on the last 5 or 6 Australian campaigns for John Howard and the Liberals. Though I imagine the ALP has long since adopted a very similar approach.
Textor (p194) apparently advised them to find "one simple message for change". This message had to answer the question 'why will voters want to choose Don Brash over Helen Clark?"
On pages 194,5 we learn that Crosby/Textor advise their clients (Australian Liberals, British conservatives and NZ National) to stick to five 'easily digestible' priorities. These five priorities became the story and once written it was, naturally, field tested by focus groups conducted by Mark Textor.
Interestingly, National also adopted Karl Rove's (Bush's adviser) approach of attacking your opponent's strengths, rather than weaknesses, because if the strengths are undermined there is nothing left.
Before doing the story, Textor recommended some 'benchmark' research into New Zealand beliefs, "against which all the subsequent research could be compared as the campaign progressed'. The apparent intention of this research is to find out concerns and beliefs that might provide campaigning leads. They asked questions like: where do you think Helen Clark and Labour could be doing better, or a re doing poorly at the moment?
For instance, people were happy with the state of the economy but when prompted were less sure that Labour had a plan to keep the economy going well. Crosby / Textor showed national how they could use this concern to justify their tax and welfare policies, even though there was little voter support for those policies(p158).
Crosby / Textor recommended that these identified beliefs or values accompany the single simple message on every occasion.
The problem with this approach obviously is that it identifies (often unfounded) fears and exaggerates them for political advantage. Using the outcomes of the Crosby / Textor beliefs research, National toughened its line on immigration. In a famous speech shortly afterwards Brash declared: "Nor, frankly, do we want immigrants who come with no intention of becoming New Zealanders or adopting New Zealand values". Sounds familiar?
According to Hager, the classic Crosby / Textor ploy is to position the client as responsible and mainstream while making remarks that are racist and targeted straight at the audience's often unspoken prejudices. The appeal to New Zealand (or Australian or British) values is 'understood' by many as a stand against muslims, asians etc.
Another key Crosby / Textor technique is known as framing (p161). Framing is used to give people a way of thinking about the issue ie to get them to think about the issue in a way that favours your approach and not your opponent's. For instance, National were urged to only talk about tax and welfare in terms of 'incentives' (even though they favoured the rich and punished the poor).
Framing often takes the form of a big, opening statement like 'hard-working people being held back by welfare bludgers'. Or perhaps, closer to home, "this election is about who do you trust to keep interest rates low".
In a second round of focus groups in 2005, Textor found that there was a little bit of below the surface concern that Helen Clark might be taking too much interest in minorities and not enough on "working families". Textor urged National to leverage this concern. National was advised to do things to get this concern to grow and mature and become real to people.
Apparently, (p165) Textor advised Brash to keep an A6 card in his pocket (as Howard is said to have done) with his key message printed on it. This was to serve as reminder to "keep repeating it endlessly". Apparently, two versions were developed for Brash an 11 sec short version and a 20 second long version. And people complain about the dumbing down of politics!
The cards also help with another key Textor technique called bridging, wherein the client links back every issue raised in interviews to the message on the A6 card in his pocket.
All these techniques work because they focus on soft voters and are aimed at getting a short-term reaction, ie getting them wound up to vote for you.
Nicky Hager is an idiot. If you were to publish a book on Helen Clark, it would have just as many bad things with it.
My dad is not racist.
Posted by: | 26 January 2008 at 11:26 PM