Telling Stories to Win Elections

Key Topics

Stories are the most effective way to be remembered

Stories are the quickest way to answer questions – asked and unasked

Stories Capture Attention

Showing Builds More Credibility Than Telling

How to Tell an Effective Story

Conflict

Activate the Reader’s Imagination

Deliver a satisfying ending

A seasoned campaign manager once summarized for me the reason he had been so successful in political communications. As he put it: “I am a student of storytelling.”

At the time I thought that was odd. My experience thus far as a political campaigner had been an exercise in organization (marshalling human resources like door knockers and phone canvassers), in analytics (analyzing massive amounts of voter history and polling data), in fundraising and budgeting, and a few other important hard skills.

I quickly learned that this veteran campaigner was completely correct. All of those things – the volunteers you recruit and manage, the issues that you focus on and how you position yourself, the way you raise money and who you raise it from – are downstream of the story that your campaign tells about itself to volunteers, to donors, and most importantly, to voters.

Why do Stories Work?

In 2005, Joshua Foer – who regularly forgot where he put his car keys and self-identified as “forgetful” – attended the USA Memory Championships as a journalist. One year later, after training with some of the masters that he had interviewed, he attended the same event as a competitor, and left as the 2006 USA memory champion. He details some of the secrets to his success in his 2011 bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. One of the biggest insights that he points to is that humans have a much easier time remembering stories than they do facts or statistics; we simply evolved that way.

Look no further than all of the students who sat glossy-eyed in history class, failing to remember the names of famous founding fathers, the dates of their accomplishments, or the order in which they were elected to high office when these facts were dryly communicated to them as a series of lines on a chalkboard to memorize, but were easily able to recall the name of Aaron Burr’s daughter, or the details of the battle of Monmouth, after watching the hit musical Hamilton.Perhaps you, like me, are only familiar with the different steps in the legislative process because of watching the journey of a “bill on capitol hill” in an episode of Schoolhouse Rock.

For whatever reason, our attention is captured, our memory is activated, and our emotional reactions are evoked by stories much more than they are by any other method of communication. The same is true for the way in which voters are engaged with, persuaded, and mobilized in an election campaign.

You are lucky if you get to actually communicate with a voter for 30 seconds during the entire campaign. Even if a candidate or volunteer knocks on every door two or three times, you are still likely to miss many if not most of the voters, and you are not likely to have a long conversation with any of them.

Few of them will watch debates or town halls. No campaign will get more than a third of voters on the phone – and even then, only for long enough to ask them if you can count on their support (to which most will answer that they’re undecided).

That means that you are probably not going to get a chance to answer their individual questions about the things that are most important to them before they enter the voting booth.

The stories that you tell in your political communications – especially the direct mail pieces that you send – need to help them to infer things about you that answer those questions for them. There are many reasons why direct mail is the most effective medium for telling those stories in a political campaign, but this should hold true for all channels of communication that your campaign uses.

What kind of a man is George Washington? People say he’s honest. They say the same about other politicians too. But did you hear the story of young George Washington, who as a six year old accidentally damaged his father’s cherry tree with a hatchet, and even at that young age confronted his father’s rage with the iconic line “I cannot tell a lie…I did cut it with my hatchet.”How did Abraham Lincoln get the honest Abe reputation? By walking miles from his humble log-cabin to return a lost book (or pennies to an overcharged customer – the myths differ, but the crux of the story stays the same).

Will JFK have the courage to confront the Soviets? The man is a war hero who swam miles through unforgiving waters with an injured crewman – a man he could have easily left behind to save himself – draped across his back.

Who is Margaret Thatcher, and how can she possibly fix the British economy for the everyman? She’s the daughter of a grocer, raised with the values of thrift, discipline, and personal responsibility. Her family store, a modest but self-reliant outfit, treated every customer – rich and poor – with the same respect, and the Thatchers stood on their own two feet, choosing to rely on their own hard work rather than a hand-out.

Though her father would become a local leader and eventually mayor, she would always describe herself as the daughter of a grocer.

In any campaign, you are competing not just with your opponents, but with Netflix, with 30 second Tik Tok stories, with the book they’re reading, and with the hundreds of errands, to-do lists, and other things demanding their attention daily.

There is a reason why twitter, instagram, Tik Tok, and Facebook are so much more addictive than other forms of media and advertising.

They use short, quick stories to capture attention.

Normal people don’t pay attention to politics, even while they understand the importance of voting, and take time out of their day on election day to vote (though 20-60% of them don’t even do that in any given election).

If you invest in getting your message into their living room – getting your envelope opened or your phone call answered – you have a very limited window to capture their attention.

The best way to do that is by competing with other channels of storytelling – the television, the book that they’re reading, or the 30 second stories being beamed into their eye-sockets by their smartphones – with a captivating story of your own.

It can be a story about your candidate, a story about the key issues in the race,or a story about them, but what it shouldn’t be is a bunch of charts, facts, figures, statistics, and dense paragraphs filled with platitudes about your plan and platform.

In Dale Carnegie’s timeless work How To Win Friends and Influence People he says that a key way to win someone over to an idea is to “Let the other person feel that the idea is theirs.”

One of the reasons stories are such a powerful tool for persuasion is that they allow the reader or listener to draw conclusions that they are guided towards but not spoonfed, such that the reader feels that the conclusions were their own.

It is much more effective to tell the story of Little Red Riding Hood and have the listener draw the conclusion that they should be wary of strangers than it is to simply say “don’t trust strangers.”

In the same vein, telling a story about your candidate that strongly implies a conclusion is much more effective than telling the voters what conclusions they should draw about your candidate, because the former tactic allows them to feel that theyindependently came to those conclusions on their own.

The Structure of a Story

Every great story has a clear story arc. It has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a hero’s journey, and it has rising tension.

The hero’s journey in its most basic form goes something like this: We are introduced to the hero in their ordinary environment as a baseline, and then some disruptive event causes them to make a choice whether or not to go on an adventure to face a challenge, solve a problem, or seize an opportunity. They cross the point of no return, choosing the journey that will shape them. They make friends, enemies, and mentors along the way. They are tested, challenged, and confronted with their demons, eventually overcoming these tests and revealing their true character, ideally along with some growth that mirrors their earlier deficiencies. They achieve their goal and return home forever changed.

In the movies, that can look like a farm boy from a desert planet receiving a distress call, losing his surrogate parents, meeting a wise mentor, and flying off to save the galaxy from the evil empire personified by a scary bad guy voiced by James Earl Jones.

In political communications, it may look something like this:

I was a dairy farmer and a dad – totally unaware and unmoved by what the school board is or who comprises it – until tragedy struck our family: A car accident left my son confined to a wheelchair, which led me to learn just how inaccessible our schools are. I tried to get accessible amenities built so that he could keep doing what he loved, and I was stymied at every turn by out-of-touch school board trustees that had raised their own salaries every year like clockwork, but couldn’t find the money to build wheelchair accessible amenities in our schools! I’m running for school board trustee so that even after my son graduates, no kid like him needs to feel left out or left behind.

Conflict is the thing that drives stories forward and makes them interesting. Without conflict, it is impossible for a story to be in any way interesting. If the choices facing the character are clear and easy, then they are not interesting.

For example, let’s add a layer of conflict to our story above.

When I told some of my more politically sophisticated friends and neighbors that I wanted to run for school board to help make our schools more accessible for kids like my boy, they warned me what I would be up against.

No incumbent of our school board has ever failed to be re-elected since 1992. They are some of the most prominent, well-connected, and well-funded people in this town.

I was warned that I would have to raise the kind of money that I don’t have, invest the kind of time shaking hands and kissing babies that a farmer can’t afford to invest, and that I could go broke, lose the season’s crop, and make a bunch of important enemies along the way, and still lose.

But I thought about it long and hard, and I thought about a father’s responsibility to his son, a citizen’s responsibility to his community, and what weowe the most vulnerable members of our society – especially our kids. I decided that if the school board couldn’t be persuaded to do the right thing, then I would need to take a stand, and I would put my faith and trust in the good people of our town – people like you – to help me do the right thing.

The plot thickens. Our candidate’s choice is not obvious, which is what makes him so compelling. We can imagine ourselves being faced with a similar choice, and it’s not obvious what we would choose to do. Many of us would not choose to take the hero’s journey, and so it’s the high stakes that reveal the character of the hero.

It’s because of the high stakes, the clear conflict and the difficulty of the choice that we are rooting for the hero when he ultimately makes the right choice. Conflicts can be internal or external, and great stories can be written about either type of conflict.

As mentioned above, people love to come to conclusions on their own. Storytelling is a medium that is interesting because it activates the imagination, allowing readers to fill in blanks on their own, create visuals out of words, and recognize

patterns, themes and subtext in the story.

The payoff from what is left unsaid but is inferred by the reader is so much more satisfying than the stuff that is spoonfed to them.

A satisfying ending is one that feels like it is earned by the characters in the story and brings things full circle.

Unlike a novel or a screenplay, however, in a piece of persuasive direct voter contact, the ending has not yet been written.

Your job, then, is to create a “call to action” that points to a satisfying ending – one that is earned by your hero, but can only be achieved with the reader’s active participation.

So in the example above, that may look like this:

With your help – with your vote – I’m eagerly looking forward to the day when I can push my son’s wheelchair up an accessible ramp to jazz band practice, or any one of the other extracurricular activities that made his highschool experience special before it became impossible for him to participate.

After the accident, when he was at his lowest point, I promised him that these would still be the best years of his life. A father’s promise to a son is a sacred thing, but I can’t make good on that promise without your help, and without your vote.

So I’m asking you to please vote for me at the Baker Memorial Arena on Monday, June 23rd, from 9am to 9pm.

There are many ways to make your campaign’s direct mail more effective – starting with downloading our resources and guides for political direct mail– but mastering the art of storytelling is one of the most effective ways to level up your campaign’s direct mail communications on your path to victory.