If you own a business, it’s not advisable to hire a PR pro, leave him on an island, and expect a successful marketing campaign. That’s not going to optimize your ROI. PR is far more effective when it’s synergized with all the other marketing and operational tools in your toolkit: You need a way to capture (and monetize) PR leads, amplify PR with ad buys, integrate your social media channels, and communicate brand attributes to colleagues, clients, and partners; etc.
When PR works well, it makes your entire marketing campaign run on steroids. It’s really impressive: Your credibility and profile all dramatically improve. But if your entire marketing plan is just “Go get PR,” it probably won’t work.
You see, PR has a blind spot.
For most of the 2024 campaign, I’ve been able to play amateur psychic and predict what the Harris-Walz campaign was gonna do next, as well as what it was thinking. That’s because the Democrats always use PR to promote their strengths, hide their flaws, and boost their marketing campaign. Their actions in the press always synergize with their marketing efforts on the field, which telegraphs their intent.
If you know what to look for, they can’t help but tip their hand. In fact, you can accurately predict it about 85.7% of the time (although there’s a chance my score might rise: I’m still holding out for the tutu).
But for the most part, my time is now over.
We can analogize PR to an air campaign: We control all that info flying through the skies. And we’re pretty good at pushing it, tracking it, reverse-engineering it, and understanding it strategically.
What matters now is the ground campaign. And that’s NOT what PR is good at.
The 2024 presidential election is actually 50 different state elections all rolled into one. The rules from state to state could differ dramatically. So do the local issues, local personalities, and the local candidates. No two regions are exactly the same.
And whether or not we win or lose will mostly depend on GOTV: Get Out the Vote.
If the Democrats have built a GOTV monster, we’re in trouble. That’s the kind of institutional advantage that can have an oversized impact in close state elections.
Of course, if MAGA built a GOTV monster, then the Dems are in a lot of trouble, too. It cuts both ways, but alas, I don’t think there’s a meaningful way to quantify the difference until we see it in action.
As many of you are probably aware, it’s been awfully rainy and windy in my hometown of Tampa Bay: Back-to-back hurricanes will do that to you. In my neighborhood alone, something like 500 out of the 600 homes were flooded, including my own.
One of my neighbors is a well-known Tampa weatherman on one of the top TV stations. When Hurricane Milton was approaching landfall, he said something interesting. He said that all the hurricane predictions are meaningless now. Furthermore, we can throw every last computer model out the window! They don’t matter anymore.
Because, when the hurricane is this close to landfall, you should turn off your computer and just go look out the window. That’ll tell you everything you really need to know.
We’re juuuuuust about at that point in the 2024 election. The predictions, polls, pundits, and pontifications are all pointless now. Their moment is gone. Nobody knows nothin’ no more.
Ultimately, the 2024 won’t be won in the air — it’ll be won on the ground. And I’m just not qualified to predict how it’s gonna go.
