This is pretty smart, IMO. Blanche Lincoln put out an ad touting her success in “saving” 1,700 jobs at the Cooper Tire and Rubber Company plant in Texarkana, AR. Instead of a response by the Bill Halter campaign with some well-paid VO narrator intoning “Blanche Lincoln is wrong… in fact, the company’s own workers claim otherwise… Blanche Lincoln, wrong for Arkansas, wrong for America,” the Halter campaign highlighted this video of some Steelworkers effectively rebutting Lincoln’s claims.
It greatly concerns me of Sen. Lincoln’s recent ads, where she’s taking credit for helping save the Cooper Tire and Rubber Company plant in Texarkana, Arkansas, and 1,700 jobs, when indeed the members of that plant took $31 million dollars in concessions to keep that plant open. And it’s Sen. Lincoln’s trade record and her votes on NAFTA and CAFTA that actually have cost us thousands of jobs throughout the state as well as hundreds and thousands and millions of jobs across this country.
It’s simply more powerful to hear from the workers themselves, with their personal story of sacrifice, making Lincoln’s claim about “saving” the Cooper plant absurd.
While this rebuttal was not officially connected to the Halter campaign (though they blasted it on their Twitter feed), it’s their use of microtargeting, long used on the Republican campaign side, that could prove innovative and effective in toppling Lincoln.
“The Halter campaign is smart to do this,” said Brent E. McGoldrick, a microtargeting expert who works for Financial Dynamics, a business and financial communications company. “And the Lincoln campaign would be wise to [do] something similar.” McGoldrick, who has developed microtargeting and market segmentation business for political campaigns and corporate and public affairs clients, added, “This is exactly the kind of race where a campaign needs microtargeting.”
In Arkansas, voters don’t register their party affiliation, which makes microtargeting both more difficult and potentially more rewarding. Moreover, campaigns typically look to past election data as a model for what to expect, but the high-profile nature of this race means past voter turnout numbers offer limited guidance.
“That makes turnout hard to predict,” McGoldrick said. “In that context, how does a campaign identify the true liberals and the conservative Democrats? Microtargeting helps answer of all these unknowns.”
It’s good to see Democrats trying something new to reach voters. Essentially this is an echo of the “snowmobile voters” kind of targeting campaigns used by Karl Rove in the Bush years.
You can read some of Halter’s issue positions here.
