How candidates use narratives to win primaries
Plus: Democrat Dean Phillips just announced his presidential campaign. Here’s his brand.
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at…
How candidates use narratives to win primaries
Shepard Fairey’s Defend Democracy series will fund photojournalists and photo-based artists in 2024
Democrat Dean Phillips just announced his presidential campaign. Here’s his brand.
Scroll to the end to see: What the NHL player who defied the league’s ban on Pride tape said about it.
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How candidates use narratives to win primaries
If you want to win a primary, you need to tell a story. That’s the lesson of Primed, a new book that looks at winning narratives used by candidates in the U.S. and U.K. by Benedict Pringle, publisher of politicaladvertising.co.uk.
“I just started noticing the same electoral contexts were turning up time and again in primary elections, and I was noticing them on both sides of the pond,” Pringle told me. He organized what he saw into five archetypes — the Protector, Phoenix, Outsider, Achiever, and Egalitarian — but it’s more art than science and candidates can fit into more than one.
“I’m not saying that every election narrative must fit into these five, what I am saying is that I think these five are all good narratives that have been shown to be successful,” he said.
“Protectors” champion continuity against the threat posed by change, like Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Conservative Liz Truss in the U.K. in 2022, and the “Phoenix” represents optimism and a fresh start without the baggage and deadlocks of the past, like Pete Buttigieg in 2020. Former Presidents Barack Obama in 2008 and Donald Trump in 2016 both ran as change candidates, Trump as an “Outsider” (challenges the party’s mainstream, uncompromising, argues it’s time to do things differently; Labour candidate Jeremy Corbyn was also an Outsider, in 2015) and Obama as an “Achiever” (hope and change, duty-bound, frustration with the status quo). President Joe Biden ran in 2020 as the “Egalitarian,” a unity candidate with a high level of acceptability across the party.
No matter the primary archetype, candidates seek to satiate voters’ political needs, of continuity, renewal, change, or unity, and they argue they’re especially suited to take the party to victory in the general election, Pringle writes. Electability is among the chief concerns of voters in primary elections, which helps explain Biden and Trump leading their party’s respective primaries despite their relative unpopularity.
Biden remains a broadly acceptable Egalitarian who beat Trump and is seen as capable of doing it again. Trump is nevertheless polling competitively with Biden (and even if wasn’t, 51% of likely Iowa caucusgoers falsely believe Trump won the 2020 election, per an NBC News/Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll, so like….), so electability arguments from Trump’s Republican opponents haven’t broken through.
“What I find mind blowing about Trump’s [narrative] now is he’s running the Outsider narrative again, and I mean, the guy has been president already, how is he possibility getting away with running as the Outsider,” Pringle said.
In 2016, Trump positioned himself as an Outsider by campaigning not only against his primary opponents, but the entire Republican Party establishment. He ran against not just Jeb Bush, but the whole Bush dynasty, Mitt Romney, and John McCain. Today, Trump continues his us-against-the-world message with enemies like the “Deep State,” and his Outsider appeal is more believable than in 2020 when he wasn’t outside anymore. You can’t armchair quarterback the presidency when you live in the White House.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is also running as an Outsider and speaking to “a greater truth, like, a truth from the past which has been muddied, it doesn’t exist now,” Pringle said, while entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is running as an Achiever and former Ambassador Nikki Haley is “playing that sort of party unifier,” an Egalitarian.
Should 2024 be a rematch between two old candidates, it’s easy to see 2028 being a year of the Phoenix. That could be difficult for candidates who’ve run before since they’re no longer new.
“You need to think about which narratives are going to be open to you,” Pringle said. “If you get very cozy with the incumbents, it slightly rules you out of running either the achievement narrative or the outsider narrative. Thinking about your positioning really early, certainly four years out if not earlier, is a smart play, but it’s also hard.”
Predicting political environments years out is a fool’s errand. Still, in knowing their story, candidates can communicate more clearly.
“I think it's a sign of an organized campaign, a well-run campaign that knows what its story is and so therefore can execute it,” Pringle said.
Do you see any of these archetypes being used in primaries in your neck of the woods or in campaigns you’re working on?
Shepard Fairey’s Defend Democracy series will fund photojournalists and photo-based artists in 2024
