Case Study
“Not My Job” used Sharron Angle’s claims that creating jobs was not a senator’s responsibility against her.
Laying the Groundwork: No One Can Do More In the spring of 2010, we launched a sustained push de- signed to communicate two critical ideas: Reid was fo- cused on the problems Nevadans were confronting every day, and no one could do more to help them than he could. We believed the facts were on our side, but we had to be careful. With Nevada in such distress, overreaching and making big claims about his efforts risked running afoul of what people were experiencing as they confronted the economic crisis. So we went in the opposite direction. Our ads offered
concrete examples of the ways Reid was using his clout to make a difference in the lives of average Nevadans—like the local veteran who no longer had to drive 300 miles to get treatment because of the VA hospital Reid was getting built or the construction worker who had a job at a new solar field that Reid’s tax credits helped bring to the state. The stories we told were simple, straightforward and intuitive.
In an intensely cluttered media environment, the ten- dency is to produce ads that use jarring visuals and graph- ics to break through. Here, too, we took a gamble. Our ads were shot in a documentary style, letting our subjects tell their stories in their own words. Supers communicated facts rather than grand claims. We used silence and ambient sound to give the spots a uniquely authentic feel. In our view, the ads worked. On Election Day, Nevadans had a clearer sense that Reid was focused on their problems and that they stood to lose something important if he lost the race.
Sealing the Deal: She’s Just Too Extreme As the Republican primary unfolded, we carefully pre- pared for the emergence of any one of the three leading candidates. When the perceived frontrunner, Sue Lowden, stumbled (suggesting that Nevadans could “barter” for health care), our campaign seized on the mistake, help- ing to sink her candidacy and elevate the eventual winner, Sharron Angle. As a state legislator, Angle had cast a series of votes that put her far outside the mainstream. Her statements during the primary were similarly extreme—suggesting at one point that rape victims should make “lemonade out of lemons” and at another point that Social Security violated the First Commandment. When she won, we knew what we had to do: disqualify her, using her words (not ours) to do so because voters had no idea what she really stood for. Our first ads hit just days after she became the Repub- lican nominee, taking her to task for advocating the elimi- nation of Social Security. Over the next four months, our efforts to fill in the picture on Angle were unrelenting. We
“What’s Next?” criticized Angle for saying that Social Security and other programs should be phased out. 30 Campaigns & Elections | Canadian Edition
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