Illinois Families for Public Schools Go To A Moms For Liberty Training Event
Recently the Leadership Institute, a group devoted to training right wing candidates to run for office, teamed up with Moms for Liberty for some training, and Illinois Families for Public Schools received some notes taken by a mom who attended. They are illuminating.
Messaging and media info:
They said any media is good media.
“My kid shouldn’t have to wear a mask.” Re: CRT, battle of CRT is being won by the Right. That’s because they are forcing the Left to explain. If you have to explain, you are losing.
Average person spends only seven minutes/week thinking about politics. You have to meet voters where they are, not where you want them to be. Voters aren’t stupid, but they are selfish.
Strategic research: you always want to be on the offensive. Jim Reavis likes the idea of running a positive campaign; Charlie O’Neill says that doesn’t work, says you have to draw contrasts between yourself and your opponent.
Before you run, clean up your social media. Do you have any bad posts? A candidate they worked with recently ran into problems because he didn’t scrub his social media.
Good idea to know everyone’s dirty laundry. You won’t necessarily use it. You should have someone – not you – do a vulnerability study for you. They advocate connecting unrelated facts when talking about your opponent’s record. “Read between the lines.”
Study your opponent (implication: to look for dirt): timeline of life, legal, financial, any comments they have made, associations, personal voting history, public statements, personal conduct. Find out who they gave money to. If new person just joined a school board and doesn’t have long record of votes to criticize and you want their seat, see if there is a way to tie them to the previous board – their “hand-picked successor.”
They gave a picture of what’s down the road.
Next campaign? Expel SEL!
Many are opposed to social-emotional learning in shcools. Woman in the back said that SEL initiatives started in 2013. They have seen a downward trend in academic performance since then. They said SEL is intentionally pulling students’ performance down.
Showed a video of a British man talking in a BBC interview, how he kept referring back to his simple message. Originally people had made fun of him for being such a one-trick pony, but this group thinks this was very effective messaging.
And the offered some key tricks of the comms biz.
Keys to Communications:
Earned media: free coverage in any medium (newspapers, local/national tv, social media, radio). “The protest outside gave us earned media”
Paid media: messages – offense vs. defense, message penetration, need to hear something 6-8 times to internalize it
Establish timeline: know what/when/where did s/he say it, know what reporters are missing when they cover an event.
The notes contain more interesting tidbits of right wing strategy. Well worth a look if election season is heating up in your community. Read the full post here.