Campaign design takes cues from famous politicians, but it's changing
How political branding trends evolved in 2022
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at how candidates built off well-known political logos and made them their own.
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You’d be forgiven for mistaking Adam Frisch for a Republican. The former Aspen city council member who is running against Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) in Colorado’s 3rd district (as of publication, trailing Bobert by approximately 1,000 votes) describes himself as “Colorado first.” The issues page on his website lists inflation, jobs, veterans, and fiscal responsibility near the top. Scroll further down the page, though, and you’ll see Frisch is pro-choice. You’ll also notice that he is, in fact, a Democrat.
A progressive Democrat wouldn’t have a prayer of winning in Boebert’s expansive district, which covers rural western and southern Colorado. Instead, Frisch ran as a moderate, touting his business background and casting Boebert as self-promoting and anti-American. His logo, which features slanted text encased inside a rectangle punctuated by images of mountains and a U.S. flag, visually represents his position in political purgatory. It borrows some of the most recognizable visual elements from the left and the right—namely, the “AOC slant” and former President Donald Trump’s boxy outline—to communicate his middle ground politics.
Frisch’s logo is a prime example of how the midterms can serve as a precursor for political design trends to come. It’s a time when candidates can test different styles before a presidential cycle. The colorful campaign branding of the 2018 midterms presaged the explosion of nontraditional colors during the crowded 2020 Democratic primary. And in 2022, candidates are building off what came before.
Like all forms of branding, political campaigns use color and type choice as visual shorthand to communicate values. And increasingly, local candidates are borrowing design elements from prominent national politicians to convey their political values at home. A host of candidates aligned with Trump repurposed his design trope by setting their name inside a rectangle broken by stars. Progressives, meanwhile, are partial to the “AOC slant,” displaying their name in sans-serif type on an incline, like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s logo.
The “AOC slant” has been replicated worldwide since Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 win. She inspired a new generation of leaders, including Maxwell Frost, a 25-year-old Florida Democrat and the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress, and Claudia Zapata, who tailored it to her Texas campaign by pairing it with a pink, gothic-style font to communicate her Latina identity and Tejano roots. In Louisiana, Katie Darling, a long shot U.S. House candidate who lives on a farm and gave birth to her second child in a campaign ad, added a slanted blue and green pastoral landscape.
The poor showing by Trump’s endorsed candidates suggests the former president’s grip on the Republican Party is weakening. But if graphic design is any measure, his influence remains. Regardless of whether Trump is the 2024 Republican nominee, many Republican candidates are still marketing themselves in a party he rebranded.
Some 13 Republican candidates used logos reminiscent of Trump’s this year, up from nine in 2020 and two in 2018, according to a review of the Center for American Politics and Design’s database of campaign logos. While many of the Trump-inspired logos in 2020 were facsimiles of the original, many this year took liberties to make the look their own. Christian Zimm, a U.S. candidate in Georgia who lost to Democrat Nikema Williams, used a logo that set his last name like a bridge. It’s a style that Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, the first Republican to win a statewide election after Trump’s 2020 loss, used in his campaign, too.
Despite the persistent copycatting of Trump and AOC’s style, it appears there’s a new look on the horizon for the center-left. In states President Joe Biden won, candidates broke with convention, but only slightly, with blues, oranges, turquoise, and purple. Female candidates, like Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Arizona gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs, and candidates of color, like Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Wisconsin U.S. Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, used the red-and-blue adjacent palettes to speak to a more diverse electorate in their swing states.
This more localized approach is most apparent in gubernatorial races, where candidates have become bulwarks against the federal government in recent years when their party is out of power. With his “Don’t Beto My Texas” merch, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged pandemic-era worries about out-of-state liberals moving in and turning red states blue. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis proudly played up his state as a conservative haven, selling merch that swapped the snake in the Gadsden flag for a Florida gator.
In Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake campaigned using oversize yard signs that paid homage to the state’s burgundy license plates used in the 1980s and ’90s. Her rallies displayed the Arizona flag as prominently as the U.S. flag. In Massachusetts, Democratic Gov.-elect Maura Healey, became the first openly lesbian governor elected in U.S. history using Quincy, a friendly serif inspired by 1970s and ’80s movie posters and book cover type. Designer Connary Fagen said he liked the name of the typeface because it felt warm, smart, and approachable, and it stands out in a political design landscape that’s sans serif by default.
While many candidates this year built on visual branding and cues that are recognizable nationwide, Healey’s approach is a good reminder that political branding trends don’t stand still.
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I always wondered if Kari Lake's use of the classic AZ license plates was a dog whistle of sorts to those who gripe about "all the new folks" moving into the state? Along the lines of "we're the real Arizonans" or something like that.
(The irony, of course, is that Lake is a transplant herself.)