On this week's What's At Stake, Penta Partner Bryan DeAngelis speaks with Penta Partners and campaign veterans Kevin Madden and Stacy Kerr about campaign communications in 2024, an unprecedented year of global elections. The guests offer insights into the shift from the intimate, hand-shaking days of retail politics to the fast-paced digital landscape that now dominates voter interaction. They dissect the contrasting communications playbooks of Biden and Trump who, despite their age, are vying to symbolize the nation's future. Kevin and Stacy break down the power of surrogates, targeted messaging, and the emotional tug-of-war that campaigns must master to mobilize their bases.
Finally, Kevin and Stacy lay out how companies can establish clear engagement protocols and fortify their communications strategies ahead of the coming uncertainty. Tune in!
On this week's What's At Stake, Penta Partner Bryan DeAngelis speaks with Penta Partners and campaign veterans Kevin Madden and Stacy Kerr about campaign communications in 2024, an unprecedented year of global elections. The guests offer insights into the shift from the intimate, hand-shaking days of retail politics to the fast-paced digital landscape that now dominates voter interaction. They dissect the contrasting communications playbooks of Biden and Trump who, despite their age, are vying to symbolize the nation's future. Kevin and Stacy break down the power of surrogates, targeted messaging, and the emotional tug-of-war that campaigns must master to mobilize their bases.
Finally, Kevin and Stacy lay out how companies can establish clear engagement protocols and fortify their communications strategies ahead of the coming uncertainty. Tune in!
Welcome to this week's episode of what's at Stake. I'm your host, brian DeAngelois, partner here at PENTA and here today to talk about communications on the campaign trail. I'm with two of my colleagues who are experts in this field. Kevin Madden, senior partner of PENTA. He's served as a senior strategist and spokesman on, I believe, three presidential campaigns, most notably the Romney for President campaign in 2012,. And Stacey Kerr, partner of PENTA, got her start in politics working on Bill Bradley's 2000 Democratic presidential campaign, before a number of congressional races and then Speaker Pelosi for a number of years. So welcome to both of you, thank you, thank you.
Speaker 3:Do we have any winning presidential campaigns among us?
Speaker 1:I don't want to name mine.
Speaker 2:Do I have to reintroduce my resident 2004 Bush reelection campaign?
Speaker 1:Very, formative experience. I'm John Kerry Christod. I always joke. I'm the guy who said no to Obama and Biden for Christod.
Speaker 3:They worked out. My parents are so proud of me.
Speaker 1:But I want to get into this and talk. I'm sure will naturally get into kind of this campaign and some of the back and forth we'll see in the next few weeks. But it's going to be a pretty big election year. It's going to be a very different kind of election year and a lot is changing. So, kind of taking a step back with the two of you, just maybe I'll start with you, stacy, tell me about the campaigns you've been involved with and maybe some of the biggest challenges and stuff you worked on back then that may be different from today.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, like you said, brian, in the introduction, my introduction to campaign politics was on Bill Bradley's campaign in New Hampshire in 1999 at the time, and communications then was literally like we were door to door communicating right, we were running field programs, we were.
Speaker 3:The line between what we called field operations and mobilizing voters in communications was much thinner than it is now, right, where we've seen a huge shift over the last 30 years, and you put so much more of the resources into broadcast and widespread and digital communications and far less into sort of that on the ground voter mobilization. So that's really the big thing. So my generation and our generation of folks in campaign politics were really doing retail politics door to door. You had the candidate in the state any number of times and having your candidate in the state was a huge momentum build and a driver for the communications and the work of the campaign. Now many of these states early in the US presidential election will be lucky if they see a candidate one time may never see a candidate. What we know of Biden's style of campaigning and even the role of surrogates coming in and then sort of that on in-person retail politics has just completely changed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Kevin, you've seen a lot of change, obviously from Bush to Romney to Romney A lot of change, and I think the thing that probably informed my perspective to in the most comprehensive way was the fact that I worked on local campaigns to start, as I started out and before I worked my way up to presidential campaigns and local campaigns. You know, when you're working on a city council campaign or a mayoral campaign or a state Senate campaign, you are battling for coverage. Yes, and in many cases I think particularly in like a mayoral campaign, you're also it's hand to hand combat, because you're actually you're working with reporters and media outlets that are covering you actually pretty intently.
Speaker 2:There's a city hall beat in Yonkers, new York, where I grew up. So I was dealing with reporters who have had a very, very deep knowledge of the race and you know these are people that are also your next door neighbor at the same time. And then congressional campaigns and moving up to three presidential campaigns. But I will tell you the change from the 2004 campaign to the 2012 campaign that I worked on to the way campaigns are run today they give this 2024 cycle are dramatically different. It'd be the equivalent of if you went back and watched footage of the Daytona 500 in 1938, where you have these cars I don't know how long Daytona Daytona 500, but you went and watched car races you know amongst Model T's, yeah and then you watch car races amongst you know cars in the 1970s and then where they are today. It's entirely different and I think that analogy actually can be applied to the way campaigns are run today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you both mentioned retail politics. It's sort of where I got my start to and it is so much different running a governor's race and it's what I loved about New Hampshire that today, even in those states I mean, New Hampshire lost its kind of first in the nation spot for Dems. It's just not the same where much more national campaign, much more entrenched kind of voting box around some of the candidates and you also had like the advent of 24, seven cable news right and social media.
Speaker 2:It covers politics as its main currency. But now every single voter, every single reporter, every single campaign operative has a super computer in their pocket where the information and political debates are digitized and delivered in 24 second increments instead of 24 seven. And that's a huge burden on your strategy or has a huge component to how you think about strategy, but it's also it really does dictate the pace of campaigns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that tees up my next question of what you take from campaigns and some of those lessons to your work today at Penta and some of what you're saying. We would have a lot of clients and crisis or other issues where it now is 24, seven coverage on a lot of what they're doing and reaching different stakeholders way more than they did 10, 20 years ago. So how do you guys take some of the campaign experience lessons into your work today?
Speaker 2:Well, I think first is the change in pace and also the democratization of platforms. So, like I said, when I first started out on campaigns, you had to battle for coverage. You know a state-centered campaign is not going to get daily coverage in a local, regional newspaper, so you had to fight very hard for it. But now what you have is, with the digitization everybody having a smartphone in their campaign and everything you know, the 24-second digital news cycle. What you've done is you've given everybody a platform, a direct platform to the audience, so you can communicate much more directly to your constituents or your target universe of voters. So I think that is definitely changing.
Speaker 2:So what I've asked campaigns to do, or what campaigns are now, is essentially they are audience builders and then they are publishers, like they are publishing their message every single day to their known constituency, a lot of our clients. I try to have them adapt the same mindset right, which is like we have to think like executive producers of our own news cycle and we have to think like publishers. We have to curate a relationship with our audience about our issues and our priorities and very methodically communicate those. So you know a lot of, you know a lot of like. We want to have a robust digital footprint, we want to use video, we want to use social media, we want to use digital ads, we want to do audience building with our communications Very holistic in our communications Exactly right.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and that's around. I'd say one of the biggest things that hasn't changed from campaign, the campaigns we grew up in and the sort of the campaign principles that we apply to our work and our clients here at Penta, is that we are ultimately helping people you know better communicate what they want to say, but a huge piece is also helping to what others say about you, and that's a huge fundamental of campaigns is that what you say about yourself is important In campaigns. What others say about you, who those messengers are, who's validating you, is probably even more important. And that is something that we are. We a big part of our work that has been consistent and a big lesson from campaigns that we bring to that work that effective strategic communications. Especially in the 24 hour news cycles and the global environments in which our clients are communicating very much, it's very, very important to be monitoring and also helping to amplify what others are saying about you, stacy makes a most important point.
Speaker 2:If you, every single campaign that I've ever worked on has been won by the candidate, that fundamentally answered the question what does this candidate understand the problems of people like me, right? Clients, our clients, companies, nonprofit organizations, trade associations, you name it they can all adopt that same principle, right, which is like what is it that our customer, our audience, needs to know about? What we think, what we believe in, what our vision is? And then the other part of it is personalization and localization. Everybody like this happens on campaigns Like you don't talk about campaigns in this very like esoteric or broad frame.
Speaker 2:Instead, you talk about, like, what the people of Iowa need to understand about where I stand on energy policy, healthcare policy you name it right. Same thing for when you go to New Hampshire. The same thing when you go to all the battlegrounds states, ohio, florida, nevada, you name it. It's talking about the issues that you care about and their impact through the lens that people understand the most, and that is their personal experience and the community that they live in, and making sure that clients are doing that too. Personalizing and localizing their message is a very important lesson to bring from the campaign experience into the corporate communications and public affairs experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What I'm hearing through all of this, though, is a little bit too of it's working around that filter of the media, which I think is a big change over the last 20, 30 years.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And it's telling your own story, having others tell your own story. As the media gets more focused on the kind of play-by-play of politics, how are candidates communicating to their constituents? How are companies communicating? I think?
Speaker 2:it's challenging the power dynamic, which is that we don't have to beg for the platform that a newspaper's op-ed section gives us, when, if we build our audience and communicate directly to them, we can have a stronger impact with our audience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you recruit the allies, yeah, and quite frankly, what do you report?
Speaker 2:What you have to recognize is, like on campaigns, you used to say, okay, what is it that reporters are going to write about? Well, they're going to write about money polls, screw-ups, and they also cover attacks. So one of the attacks meaning like the contrast messaging, which is like we know that we're going to get a lot of coverage for our candidate If we go hard at our opponent on issue X, that's going to generate coverage. Well, I think that's one of the things that you have to sort of realize that you know with a lot of companies is that you also have to take the, you have to understand what it is that they're going to write about, and reporters will cover you if you're putting together really good content, if you're offering industry-leading insights, if you are announcing something new and innovative and different If you have something to say Exactly, if you're localizing it, personalizing it yeah.
Speaker 3:And we say that a lot with clients, right, it's not enough to just explain. You have to have a perspective and you have to have a unique perspective and go out and be willing to go out and say that yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Let me shift then to this upcoming campaign, and we're still technically in the primary season, but I and we're talking about in the US, because this is the biggest election year globally in human history.
Speaker 2:Can I bet you one of our biggest audiences for this podcast will be folks in the EU.
Speaker 3:All of our friends in Europe.
Speaker 2:They are following this, connell can tell you.
Speaker 1:But we're likely looking at a general election starting pretty early and being two incumbents.
Speaker 3:Some people would argue that it has started.
Speaker 1:It might have already started.
Speaker 3:With all due respect to the voters in our early primary states. I think it's fair to say Biden wants a general election to start now.
Speaker 2:And he wants to engage Trump because that's the strongest contrast that he can have right now and he wants to see Nikki Haley start to ascend and gain some momentum. That becomes very problematic for this White House. The one candidate they don't want to run against, that they'd probably be the weakest against, would be Nikki Haley in a general election.
Speaker 1:I think that's right, yeah, yeah, let's assume it's Trump, though for a minute.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You've got two candidates, largely underwater but also well-defined. This is kind of unprecedented at least in my lifetime.
Speaker 3:We say it's an unpopularity contest. Right, it's not a popularity contest, it's an unpopularity contest, and you've mentioned.
Speaker 1:Biden's not really going to be out there much. In states, trump's not really campaigning hard. This is going to be a very different kind of campaign.
Speaker 2:And Matt McDonald, the president of the Pentecost, called this a double referendum. Yeah, you're talking about two candidates with a 100% saturated name ID.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And 100% sort of built in perspectives about the candidates, and the reason people are undecided is because they don't like either one of them, not because they can't choose between two good candidates, and so I think that's going to dictate the strategy and the communication strategies of these campaigns. For Biden to win, it has to be about presenting the hardest contrast about what people don't like about Trump the instability, the uncertainty, the unfitness for office, the idea that many of these legal issues are hanging over him and he wants to be seen as a guardian, a protector of stability, a democracy, the institutions of democracy and a sort of soothing bomb for a sort of like a very agitated national conscience right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, to your point, kevin. For Biden to do that, I think he really has to tap into people's people's anger, whereas Trump really is going to continue to play on people's fear. So campaigns also to take us back to our campaigns historically have been about the future and what's happening, and I think we're going to see communications and sentiment and tones coming from both of these candidates that are rooted in something very different anger fear.
Speaker 1:This is what I wanted to ask about. Yeah, I mean, we talked about it. Most candidates. It's about how I feel, that's how you go vote for them. It's about personalizing. But these are two candidates where and I was impressed by this piece by Carlos Lazado right before the holidays you can boil down both of their messages to two words. Trump talks about again making America great again, like pulling into that nostalgia of like something's gone wrong and I can fix it. Biden uses the word still constantly. America is still a leader. America is still a light for democracy. America is still best workers in the country. And it's this debate about are we still invested in something or is something wrong and going? And how much of that is where voters are going to ultimately decide.
Speaker 3:And it's a really like. You know, people say campaigns come down to how people feel about the issues. We may see this may be something that transcends that and they really feel how they feel about the direction of the country, trump's, how they feel on individual issues. I mean, I think right now Trump is leading on every single issue, with the exception of abortion, including national security, over a president who four years ago ran on his standing in resuming America's place in national security and credibility in the world. I mean, that is just a dramatic shift and a really really so. That tension between how people feel about individual issues and how they feel about the state of the country, and whether or not they're retaining the past or moving forward into the future, is going to be, I think, something that that may be in tension.
Speaker 2:There's a reason why that the nobody in the country wants this matchup it's because, you're right, every single election is a contest for the future, right. And the two people waging that battle for the contest for the future are 79 and 81. Right, right.
Speaker 2:It's very, it's very like the people, like I do want people are basically saying I want to debate about the contest of the future of this country. I don't want it between two people who might not be here for very long, yeah, and so that's a very, very difficult sort of consideration for the American electorate and I think it's a challenge for the campaigns right now and the candidates because, like Joe Biden trying to talk about the future, that happens, something that primary candidates could tap into, like you haven't really seen anyone catch fire like in Obama, did you know?
Speaker 2:in a way, the two most consequential things in the I'll speak to the Republican primary. The two most consequential things that happened were was Trump choosing not to debate and not giving anybody the platform or the oxygen they needed to to take him on, or even the stature to take on to take on essentially a nominal incumbent Right.
Speaker 2:And the second was was when all of Trump's legal problems started to emerge really emerge and come to a head that nobody went out and made the case that we cannot go into a general election with this flawed a candidate or is burdened a candidate here, and they all hoped every, I would say every other candidate hoped that the other campaign would make that argument for them. And that was the conceit of the 2020, that was a conceit of the 2016 field. Everybody thought Trump was somebody else's problem.
Speaker 3:Do you think it would have worked if, if somebody tried it?
Speaker 2:I think, I think it could have worked and it had worked because the nomination went through Trump, like you had. There's. There's no scenario in which you can't take on.
Speaker 3:So the mistake was to not try.
Speaker 2:The mistake was to not try and to not put a very strong, precise message together that, over time, eroded Trump's support and brought forward. The very, very important choice that voters have to make is do you want to go into a general election against Joe Biden with a compromised candidate? Yes, if you don't, I am your candidate.
Speaker 3:And I think what we've seen and, brian, you know this you and I don't make, don't, don't retain our friends on the democratic side when we say this but there has just been, with all due respect, a failure to understand how to talk about Biden's age, how to communicate about it, and of all of the things that we are talking about globally, across the country. All of the things that could happen could not happen. What we might see in the economy, what we might see with issues, there is one thing that cannot change, and it's the age of the president and the age of Trump. And to have not figured out already how to talk about that, I just wish I had a big problem.
Speaker 2:I get asked this question all the time, stacey, I don't necessarily have a brilliant, clarifying, obvious answer on that. Well, I think like how do you solve something that you can't fix?
Speaker 3:I, I'll tell you. I'll tell you what if you're a communicator, I'll tell you maybe what you shouldn't do is disparage the people asking the question, because it is fair and obvious question when people want to think about the future. Yeah, and I just think it has been a mistake to have not solved that yet. It is going to have to be.
Speaker 2:I think you don't solve it. I think it's one that you. I think it's one that you minimize, you try, which is what is it that we can do to minimize this or deemphasize this as best possible, and even that is a hard thing, I mean, you need what does that look like?
Speaker 1:That's a.
Speaker 2:I think you need smaller you need smaller groups, shorter interactions with audiences. You need to rely heavily, heavily, heavily on a very, very effective surrogate.
Speaker 3:Surrogates yes.
Speaker 2:You need to have as well developed of an advertising plan on how you capture and atomize all of Joe Biden's sort of strongest attributes and pound that home with advertising as much as you can, as pos as and as relentlessly as possible. But but those are. Those are all tactics that could be demolished in one instant by Joe Biden on the campaign trail, I mean, and there's a 0.0 chance that we don't have a wholly blank moment during the campaign with either one of these candidates that says, like, maybe we shouldn't be, maybe these aren't our best candidates, maybe you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tomorrow I think it's tomorrow and we're recording this on Friday here but Biden's gonna do a speech marked around January 6th where, for kind of for the first time, because he's kept his hands off of this go after Trump hard again on some of the legal issues. I mean, is that to me that might be part of the?
Speaker 3:answer. He's taken on Madden's strategy. It took a Democrat to take on Madden's strategy.
Speaker 1:He's come down to age versus criminality and like is it a better advertising campaign, a better message of this guy's unfit for office? Shouldn't be on the ballots Like we can't let democracy go.
Speaker 2:So this is a good question and it really brings to ahead the most like the concentrated serum of what this election really comes down to is. This is going to be a super, super, super close election that comes down to a handful of metropolitan areas around the country, in battleground states, and about 100,000 vote well, not 100,000, but like several hundred thousand voters. So four to 500,000 voters in Atlanta suburbs, suburbs of Maricopa County, phoenix, right, yeah, milwaukee and okay, choose another one. So maybe, yeah, maybe, reno or Las Vegas or Philadelphia, harrisburg area or Detroit, okay, so like around four or five, but we'll be on election night watching vote returns come in and that'll be the balance of power. So the focus has to be, I think, on the campaign is that's why he's in Pennsylvania right.
Speaker 2:That's one reason he's there and it has to be on. This is making the Trump brand as toxic as possible in those areas, so that those voters right now they're like I'm really not sure I want to vote for Biden that they move on a scale of one to 10 for their support from Biden, from a four to a six or a seven. They don't need them to be 10s. They need them to be six or seven.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the word toxic.
Speaker 1:There is good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was just gonna say we all know from our days as campaigners and even the work we do now. What you're doing in this moment is starting to energize your supporters, energize your base, and again it's fascinating to me that it's energizing again around anger and fear, and that is just a different dynamic than we've seen in our national.
Speaker 2:I would agree, because I just remember the 2004 campaign, ken Melman was our campaign manager and he's like brilliant, brilliant. But also he had an important fundamental to how we communicated every single day. This was threaded into every single thing that we did, which is campaigns are always fundamentally about being for something versus just being against something, and we have to be the campaign that wins the contest. What? Who has a better plan for the future? And so everything that we did every single radio interview I did. Every single interview I did with an AP reporter or a local reporter or a national reporter, you name it that was threaded into the DNA of my message. And every other spokesperson that was on that campaign, as well as the people who are knocking on doors, making phone calls you name it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let me jump there. I was gonna save this towards the end, but if you're able to give advice to the next generation of communicators, so not necessarily the lead spokesman for Biden or Trump, but there's gonna be 50, 60, 100 junior communicators, press staff, and they're gonna do the next campaign and the campaign after that. What should they be focused on?
Speaker 2:Five lessons, or whatever yeah, I think the thing, the most important thing, is to get out of the bubble.
Speaker 2:Do not think that, because you're going to an arena that had Robo call 20,000 people to show up who are already your known supporters in order to get the optics that you want for that particular event, that that is the electorate the best reporters do this as well which is they get off the bus and they go and they talk to people.
Speaker 2:What's driving your sentiment right now as it relates to the economy, as it relates to national security, the direction of the country, and what do you want to hear from the candidates? You learn a lot from that as a spokesperson, as somebody who's driving communication strategies, because there is such an easy reflexively, it's very easy to give into the urge of thinking that the five yards in front of you is the entire campaign, when instead there's a mile ahead of you. That is much more important, a big picture. Just take a step back and don't worry about, like, what the latest blog post on the latest partisan blog says or what somebody tweeted, and instead ask yourself the fundamental question every single day what matters most to the voter who has yet to make up their mind, and why and how do we speak to that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think my advice would be to give up your mic. I think I wouldn't be a spokesperson out there. I'd be finding real people to do it for me. I'd be finding people impacted by the policies of both of these, because this is sort of two incumbents running. I would be finding local officials who have been impacted by these policies and I would, if I was any of these campaigns and I was these spokespeople out in these states. I would be finding I would be making sure that I was never on television, with all due respect to people like Kevin-.
Speaker 2:No, it's exactly right. This is the thing that I have actually been shocked about with the current campaigns is the lack of a surrogate network that localizes and personalizes the message of the candidates. When I worked every campaign I worked on 2004, 2008, 2012 presidential race we had a robust, comprehensive.
Speaker 2:I'm trying to think of all of the right words to describe how big and important this was to the work we did. It's like you're right, nobody wants to hear about from Kevin Madden at headquarters in Boston, about Mitt Romney, but you know who's great the county commissioner or the local state center.
Speaker 1:Let me press. Why isn't it happening? Is it because Biden can't excite people yet and Trump's too toxic?
Speaker 2:Those seem like the obvious answers, but I don't know other than, for some reason, in the last four to eight years, we've lost a generation of people who were really, really top communicators, going into campaign work, and they To the candidates. To the candidates I mean they like.
Speaker 3:They're working for us now. They're helping us do our jobs better. No, that's right, we'll take them, but I have.
Speaker 2:I do three to four TV hits a week on CNN, msnbc, you know and I never hear from any of these campaigns. Now, when I was working on campaigns, if I knew I had people who were doing regular cable hits, I would constantly call them up and be like, hey, here's what we're working on and here's our message and why you need to know Kevin.
Speaker 3:super interesting because, credit to the Biden administration, I have gotten twice weekly Invitations as a Democrat TV? No, I've gotten I've gotten them really regularly and whether or not that's Translating into the people that are talking, but there is. I think there has been a real effort. What will be interesting to watch is does that translate in a campaign environment out into these local?
Speaker 2:in their defense I would say, okay, maybe cable television, linear cable television, is a less important right, but I'm still talking to reporters in print to yourself.
Speaker 2:I'm still talking to put reporters that are sort of Sort of have an impact on this, the overall sort of narrative and what the new cycle is right and so I just I think that there's not as much of an emphasis on that, and the only thing I think that speaks to is like as how they just don't have as comprehensive of view of how you do this anymore and they are, I think, lost in the idea that this is all happening on Twitter and it's just not yeah, and I think my, my, my advice that I would give to those spokespeople hand over your mic.
Speaker 3:I would also extend to the Biden campaign. I think there's a serious question as to whether or not you ever put Joe Biden in an ad. I might be. I might be running a campaign that is Visually a campaign without the candidate, or I'd be putting Joe Biden in someone's living room talking to them.
Speaker 3:I mean that that is the, that's the Joe Biden that people elected last year and that people love and trust. So I'd be finding a way to, visually and through the communications, make sure that people are seeing the humanization and the real people behind it.
Speaker 2:It's a great point. I think if I were in the strategy room, I would try to clarify it this way. I would say people are not gonna vote for Joe Biden because Joe Biden asks them to right. They're going to vote for Joe Biden because People that they trust tell them it's the right thing to do. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yes, I mean he has right now the weakest approval rating according to Gallup In the December before an election year ever 39 percent. So are you gonna run an ad of Typically communicate incumbents? Have the power of incumbency. You walk down the halls of the White. House you're out behind a podium Flags. You're in a suit and tie what we call the power of the incumbency right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Is that visual if? If people knew that vision, people know that visual of Joe Biden. They've had that visual of Joe Biden is 39% approved, so are you going to? Put that in that, or are you gonna put Joe Biden and the people that His policies are impacting on your screen?
Speaker 1:right right into some of the earlier conversation. You know you're making the contrast with Trump's. You know issues and criminal issues and you're doing that kind of future of America Campaign yes, yes, and I'm not sure there's any American.
Speaker 3:Voting age and otherwise. That is not aware of Trump's issues right. So is that the the strategy to continue to play on those issues, or do you have to find the way that the Trump campaign knows?
Speaker 2:this too, which is that there's a burden of incumbency right and the their message is all focused on being the alternative. Yeah the alternative to the border issue, the border crisis, the alternative to the Conflict that we see around the globe, yeah, and the alternative to what people's perceived A trend lines are on the economy yeah, and I say proceed, because if you look at some of the macro economic indicators, like they were actually tech ticking in the positive direction.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but people don't feel like they don't feel it yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know there's a great substantive argument to be made. A bit Well, some of this was problems that Biden's dealing with, problems that were left behind by yeah, trump, they, they'll, they'll make that argument, but they do have a much. The Trump folks have a have a much lower burden of Proof here because they're an incumbent at a time where the president's approval ratings are so low.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let me wrap up with maybe they're the challenger. I'm sorry, hardest question, but you know Biden's the most unpopular incumbent, as you just said, in in years. Trump's got a number of Criminal issues, other issues. How do companies approach this next year, in 2024? You know, between the conventions and other stuff, I mean, how do they navigate a race of Unpopularity, as you put it?
Speaker 3:you know, I will say, I think that what we've seen already in the back half of 2023, and I think we're absolutely gonna see more of in 2024, is companies stepping back from having a perspective on social issues, come seven, companies stepping back from having a perspective on things outside of their core business, and the reality is that you, us businesses and global businesses are going to move forward with either of these candidates. So I think it's about companies positioning for, as Kevin said, what is going to be probably the closest election, having plans For either scenario, but really putting their head down and doing their core work right and staying out of politics, yeah.
Speaker 1:Keeping it in there for walls, I would agree with that I'll say it differently.
Speaker 2:I think the first thing that companies have to recognize is the culture wars are here to stay. There's going to. The thing that is is most interesting, I think, about the campaign strategies that are going to impact how companies and other organizations look at 2024. Is that both campaigns are convinced that the culture wars work in their favor? Yeah, and so?
Speaker 1:that is.
Speaker 2:That's an issue that means it's going to be here to stay, and. But the other thing is, is companies, a lot of companies don't have a very well-developed criteria for what they talk about and why, and they have to develop that criteria and stick to it, because 24 is good, like instability and volatility as far as the eye can see. So you just have to very have a very core under a very, very well-developed core understanding of who your company is and what you and your business right how these things relate to your core business right, not to your place in America or your place, is it?
Speaker 3:but really, how does it come back to the effect on your core methodically communicated to your internal stakeholders as well?
Speaker 2:as your Out external stakeholders. Yeah, because that every single through line on all the corporate. Flashpoints that we've seen or the crises that we've seen has been a couple things lack of internal communication and not a very an undeveloped criteria for what we talk about and why. Right, right, and how are we prepared for it? Yeah, correct, yeah, and it's. I think the people who have survived it have, you know, have.
Speaker 2:Have survived crises, have have done all the right things when it comes to preparation, and the ones that haven't are the ones that first of all, didn't have a lot of Problem because they're not doing enough monitoring or measurement of their, their brand sentiment, or what's coming next or right, or internal listening and yeah, you know with their employees or key stakeholders investors, that type of thing, yeah, and then, once it hit on them, Once it hit on they, they had a yeah.
Speaker 2:They didn't have an authentic reply because they didn't hadn't done the work. And there are solutions now right.
Speaker 1:Those solutions are in place, and the most sophisticated. Companies in companies and companies that are.
Speaker 2:Working with are already starting to do that work.
Speaker 3:We're very engaged in scenario planning, tracking, as Kevin said. What? Are those sentiment, and what are those tools that they have in place? Yeah, to track to track people.
Speaker 1:Sentiment about that Well.
Speaker 3:I think. I think we'll certainly need it this year, but we'll leave it there. This was a fascinating conversation. Thank you both for your time. We'll talk about down ballot races next time. Yeah, great ideas, good to our listeners.
Speaker 1:Remember to like and subscribe, wherever you listen to your podcasts, and follow us on Twitter or X at Penta Group.
Speaker 3:I'm your host, brian, as always Thanks for listening to what's at stake.
Speaker 1:Thank you.