Keady: What New Jersey Republicans Can Learn from Our Virginia Victories
In a CJN Exclusive, a leading GOP operative lends his insight to New Jerseyans fighting for a freer and more prosperous home state.
Opinions expressed in CJN’s op-eds are solely those of the author.
From a political perspective, New Jersey and Virginia have a fair amount in common. As two of the few states with off-year state elections, politics stays at the forefront of people’s minds more than in other states.
In both states, last November’s elections were by and large decisive wins for the Democratic Party. In both cases, Democrats came away with a majority in both of their states' respective legislative houses.
Despite this, our Republican political consulting firm, JLK Political, had victories in six of our seven races– including a win in a mostly urban Biden +11 House of Delegates district. While New Jersey is a considerably more Blue state than even Virginia, there are lessons in our Virginia victories that could yield dividends for New Jersey Republicans.
Perhaps one of the most significant of these lessons is the principle of narrative control in communications. When running a competitive race in a district in which the partisan voter index is heavily slanted to the opposition’s party, too many candidates will attempt to craft arguments, compromises, and other persuasive rhetoric to convince voters to change their opinions on divisive hot-button issues.
The problem with this approach is that opinions on these issues are usually “baked”-- voters are, for the most part, rigidly cemented in their views on these issues. They are unlikely to move on deep-seated and long held positions, especially given the limited amount of communication and voter engagement opportunities most campaigns will have with voters.
A better approach is to focus on consensus, kitchen-table economic issues that highlight a candidate’s ability to tangibly improve the day-to-day lives of their constituents.
It is crucial for a candidate’s messaging (both directly and through consistent communication vehicles such as social media, mail, email, TV ads, etc.) maintain narrative control and are stalwartly focused on these kitchen table issues, regardless of what the candidate’s opponent (and even the candidate’s own party) is focused on in their messaging.
For Virginia Delegate Kim Taylor, our candidate who won in November in a Biden + 11 district, focused throughout her campaign on talking about her tangible accomplishments, such as the removal of a large, dilapidated and blighted building at the entrance of Petersburg, Virginia, and on her economic and entrepreneurial bona fides. This messaging resonated with her constituents, who are much more concerned with job creation and the issues that directly affect their wallets, than on more divisive issues that tend to dominate most campaign rhetoric.
But messaging is ultimately only as effective as the audience it reaches. In large part, determining the right audience hinges on successfully employing sophisticated and complex data research techniques to ascertain a race’s individualized circumstances and micro target accordingly.
But understanding the continually changing landscape of voter behavior and conditions is also crucial. Since the COVID pandemic and the widespread shifts in early voting and mail-in voting procedures, the strategies for winning elections have changed considerably. In New Jersey (as has been the case in races across the country), Democrats won many of their victories this last election after blowing out the mail-in votes.
Addressing this issue means not only implementing strategies to bring in a competitive share of the early and mail-in votes, but also recognizing the adjustments that are required in election day targeting. Traditionally, campaigns have focused their targeting on high-propensity voters (those historically most likely to vote in elections for their parties).
But these high-propensity voters are already tuned in and very likely to vote, regardless of GOTV messaging. Therefore, we shifted our voter engagement efforts to low and mid-propensity voters who would vote in a high-profile race, but might stay home in an off-year, midterm election. By reaching these voters with innovative, A/B-tested messages, we motivated this group of voters and solved our turnout problem.
Every race is different and there is no one-size-fits all answer to winning elections. But implementing sound, data-proven strategies and employing approaches such as those described here is crucial to bringing victories in even the most challenging races.
If New Jersey Republican candidates employ these approaches, it will lead to key victories that could shift the political landscape of the historically blue state.
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Jimmy Keady is the founder and President of JLK Strategies, as well as a partner at Point1. Keady has worked on and advised campaigns at every level for the past ten years. Keady has worked for federal agencies, JJ state house campaign caucuses, as a Chief of Staff on Capitol Hill, and as Senior Advisor for Members of Congress. In Virginia’s 2023 statewide elections, Keady won major contests throughout the Commonwealth, including an incumbent Republican in a Biden+11 District by 55 votes.
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