Successful political campaigns tell a story
“Successful campaigns tell a story”: wise advice from this still relevant mini-documentary on political campaigns produced by the New York Times a couple of years back:
Even complicated policy messages can be boiled down to memorable, emotion-moving stories. Though that is something which the Liberal Democrats are still not very good at, the Bollocks to Brexit example aside.
For more on how to tell successful political stories, and to run successful political campaigns, see 101 Ways To Win An Election. You can sign-up to free extracts from the book by email here.
One of the difficulties with boiling down complicated policy messages is that it is often difficult for us to understand our own fundamental reasons for supporting a policy. This becomes easier when we are deprived of something that we took for granted. However, even after last year’s Brexit vote it took me almost nine months to fully understand my own fundamental reasons for wanting the UK to stay in the EU – nothing to do with jobs or security, for me it was all about strengthening the European values of democracy, tolerance and free speech throughout the world – ultimately a simple and emotive message. Perhaps imagining the opposite of a policy helps to boil it down to a simple and emotive message – but it may not always happen quickly.