Scenario planning for political campaigns

Politico, April 12, 2020

So for the coming weeks, if not months, the traditional campaign is gone. No rallies, no kissing babies, no knocking doors.

"All of that will have to change, and that is new territory for us," said Peter Ubertaccio, a political scientist and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Stonehill College.

- Candidates Adapt To A Socially Separated Campaign Season, WBUR, March 19, 2020

It’s been over two months since the United States started locking down to fight the novel coronavirus. But we are no clearer to understanding how politics will look in this environment than we were when WBUR wrote the above story in mid-March.

In part, that is because many campaigns are ramshackle affairs.

Many people think of political campaigns as multi-million dollar juggernauts, full of crammed offices overflowing with rapid banter. Blame Aaron Sorkin and cable news networks that turn into presidential campaign diaries for two years at a time for that image.

In reality, most campaigns are low-budget startups, reliant on volunteers, a rotating cast of consultants, and candidates who may never have run anything before.

Many people running for local and state office, such as Feagan, are not full-time candidates. Many of them are parents whose lives are now in flux because of school closures or job losses, said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps recruit young people to run for elected office. “Many of them work in jobs that might be considered first responders right now,” she told me. “That means they are now balancing working from home or really high-stress jobs with taking care of their kids [and] with campaigning. That was hard enough when campaigning meant going to events at night and knocking doors all weekend. It’s 10 times harder now.”

- It's Not Just the Presidential Race Adjusting to the Coronavirus, Adam Harris, The Atlantic, March 26, 2020

The simple math of campaigning

Winning an election means winning 50% of the votes plus 1 (or less if there are multiple candidates). Most campaigns will try to create a buffer and shoot for 52%-55% of expected turnout. So if you are in a Congressional district with an estimated turnout of 250,000 voters on Election Day, you are shooting to gain 137,000 votes.

In campaign jargon, this number is your vote goal.

This makes campaigning is relatively straightforward task. It’s a difficult one, to be sure, and every campaign veteran has stories of all the things that go wrong. But from an operational perspective, the job is linear.

If we need X votes to win, then we need Y number of doors knocked and $Z amount of funds raised. For any day of the campaign, we can track whether we are our Progress to Goal targets. The challenge for campaigns is to execute their plans well enough to overcome the opposing side and reach that vote goal.

What happens when the plan stops working?

Campaigns are hugely difficult, but a solid strategy and tested tactics can give guidance on the general direction.

But what should campaigns do when those volunteer shift numbers are blown up by a lockdown? Or when fundraising lags because your supporters are living through an economic collapse? Do we write off Progress to Goal numbers entirely? Do we cram everything into a shorter time window? Do we expect that a second wave comes back in the fall so October should be written off as well? Do we pivot to a virtual strategy? Invest more in digital media? Mailers? Candidate call time?

These are the questions that all candidates are asking themselves.

Unfortunately, I do not have an answer, because there is no one answer to give. What this country will look like over the next few months is unknown. We don’t even know which letter the economic recovery will take.

Scenario planning on the campaign trail

While there is no easy answer for how to run a campaign in a time of coronavirus, there is a technique that can help.

Scenario planning helps to map out what the future might look like when uncertainty clouds our vision. As a practitioner once put it,

It simplifies the avalanche of data into a limited number of possible states. Each scenario tells a story of how various elements might interact under certain conditions. When relationships between elements can be formalized, a company can develop quantitative models. It should evaluate each scenario for internal consistency and plausibility; for example, high visibility and heavy snowdrifts are an implausible combination. Although a scenario’s boundary might at times be fuzzy, a detailed and realistic narrative can direct your attention to aspects you would otherwise overlook.

Scenario planning has been used by companies to see what investments they should make, by the military to evaluate which systems to build, and has even been said to have helped push a mining company to argue against apartheid in South Africa.

It is a process that takes the various constants, trends, and variables that might affect your organization and turns them into coherent narratives. You can then stress test your current plans to see how well they succeed in each scenario, and see whether there are opportunities that you might missing.

A good scenario planning process provides you with a playbook for what to do in the event of the unexpected and guidance on the most resilient route to go down now. In the below scenarios for a Senate candidate in a medium-sized state, we see what the final weeks might look like depending on the state of the economy and COVID-19.

While the scenarios do not prescribe a single path for us, they suggest that large rallies should not be the foundation of a campaign, and that a digital campaign and direct literature might be a better use of funds.

The above blurbs are only the headlines for a scenario. Each one should have a full narrative attached, with implications for each department, trigger points, indicators, and second-order consequences.

The process does not need to be long - a half-day workshop is enough to begin with - but it should be thorough. From start to finish, it takes less than a week, and the result is a campaign that is future-proofed through November.

Get in touch

Campaigns are marathons at the pace of sprints, and the best time to start a scenario process is as soon as possible.

Let us know what you need and how we can help facilitate the scenario process to make sure that your campaign is ready to head into Election Day, no matter what the world throws at it.