Your campaign message on one page, a five-box worksheet

Ask a first-time candidate what the campaign is about, and brace yourself. You will hear about the budget, the roads, the schools, the sheriff's office, the zoning board, the taxes, the sewer plan, the founding fathers and a long story about a pothole. Twenty minutes later you will have learned that the candidate is a fine person with strong views on everything, and you still will not be able to tell a neighbor in one breath why to vote for him.

Voters do not give you twenty minutes. They give you a doorstep, a mailer on its way from the mailbox to the recycling bin, a few seconds at a forum, a yard sign glimpsed from a car. Whatever you want them to remember must survive that trip. That is why every serious campaign, from a county commission seat to a Senate race, boils itself down to a short message and then says it until everyone on the team is sick of it. The voters will not be sick of it yet. They may have heard it once.

This post is a worksheet. It has five boxes, a one-line test for each, a worked example for a made-up county commission race, and a method for cutting a long answer down to one sentence. Fill it in with a pencil. Then fill it in again.

The worksheet at a glance

The five boxes, in order:

1. Who I am. Why a voter should believe this person on this subject.
2. The problem. The one thing that is wrong, in terms a family would recognize.
3. My solution. What you will do about it, specific enough that a reader could check later.
4. The contrast. How the opponent's record or plan differs, stated fairly.
5. The ask. What you want the voter to do, and by when.

The order is not an accident. It follows the way a person decides whether to trust a stranger. Who are you? What is the trouble? What would you do? Why you and not the other person? What do you need from me?

Budget about 25 words a box, and you land on roughly 125 words, which is a single page with room to breathe. If a box runs to a paragraph, it is not a box yet. It is a draft.

Box 1: Who I am

This is not your résumé. It is the answer to a voter's silent question: why should I listen to you about this?

Pick the one or two facts about your life that bear directly on the job and the problem. A small-business owner who has met a payroll has something to say about the county's fees. A retired teacher has something to say about schools. A veteran who spent years in logistics has something to say about managing a budget. A longtime resident who has attended every commission meeting has something to say about who is paying attention.

The test: Could a stranger repeat it back to a friend? "She runs the hardware store on Main Street and has sat through every county budget hearing for six years." Yes. "He is a dedicated public servant with a passion for community engagement." No. That is a sentence a computer could write, and nobody has ever repeated it back.

Rules for this box:

• Use facts, not adjectives. Name the store, the years, the committee. Do not claim a credential or an experience you cannot document.
• Only use what is true. Anything you say about yourself should be something a reporter could confirm in an afternoon.
• Leave out the family tree, the fraternity and the trophies, unless they bear on the job.

Box 2: The problem

A message that begins with a solution is a message nobody asked for. Start with the thing that is wrong, and make it a problem a voter has met personally.

Good problems are concrete and local: property tax bills going up faster than paychecks, a road that has been "next on the list" for ten years, a permit that takes months, a service that costs more and delivers less. Bad problems are abstractions: the direction of the country, a lack of leadership, the decline of values. Those are real concerns, and you may well hold them. But they do not tell a voter what you will do on the county commission.

The test: Would the voter say "that happened to me"? If the problem is stated at the level of statistics, translate it into a household. Our post on the win-number worksheet, how many votes does your race really take does this for votes, and the same habit works for any number.

Pick one problem. You may have five. Your message gets one. The rest go in the secondary materials and the answers you give at a forum when asked. A candidate with five top priorities has none.

Box 3: My solution

The solution box is where most candidates go soft. "I will fight for," "I will work to," and "I will be a voice for" are promises to try, not promises to do something. Write the action.

Good solutions have three features. They are specific, so a voter can picture them. They are within the powers of the office, which means you have read what a county commissioner, a school board member or a state representative can actually do, and have not promised a federal policy to a county board. And they are checkable, so that two years from now the voter can say whether you did it.

The test: Could an opponent, or a reporter, check next year whether you did it? "I will propose a budget that holds the property tax rate where it is and publish every line online before the vote." Yes. "I will bring a fresh perspective to the budget process." No.

If you are unsure what your office can do, read the statute and the county's published rules and talk to a current or former officeholder. Promising what the office cannot deliver costs you your credibility the day after you win.

Box 4: The contrast

An election is a choice between two people, and a message with no contrast leaves the voter to invent one. Write down what is different between you and the opponent, and keep it honest.

There are three kinds of contrast, from strongest to weakest:

1. Record. What the opponent actually did or voted for, with a date and a source. Public votes, public statements and public budgets are fair game.
2. Plan. What the opponent proposes, set beside what you propose.
3. Style or background. Experience, availability, willingness to answer questions. This is the weakest and the easiest to overdo.

The test: Does it pass the "would I say this to the opponent's face at a forum" test? If not, cut it. And is it provable? Every contrast should have a footnote in your own files, even if the mailer does not print it. A contrast built on a fact survives the other side's rebuttal. A contrast built on an adjective gets a letter from a lawyer, or a correction from the paper.

Do not attack private lives, families or anyone's health. Argue the record. That is what voters have a right to judge, and it is the part you can win. For how to handle the disclaimers and legal rules that attach to printed material, see yard signs, mailers and disclaimers, the rules of the road answered.

Box 5: The ask

Every piece of campaign communication should end by asking for something. For most of the campaign, the ask is a vote. Sometimes it is smaller: put up a sign, give an hour on Saturday, come to a meeting, give a donation, tell one neighbor.

State the ask in the imperative and put a date or place on it. "Vote on Election Day for Dana Whitfield" is clear. "Please consider supporting..." is not. Candidates who feel awkward asking for things lose to candidates who do not.

The test: Does it tell the person exactly what to do next, and when? If the voter could finish reading and not know what you want, rewrite the box.

A worked example, with a made-up race

Everything in this section is a hypothetical. The county, the candidate and the details are invented to illustrate the worksheet. They are not real people or places.

Imagine Dana Whitfield, who is running for a seat on the three-member Harlan County Commission. Dana's first draft of a message, spoken at a coffee shop, ran for six minutes and touched on the sheriff's budget, the landfill, the courthouse roof and zoning. Here is the worksheet.

Read the right-hand column aloud. The whole thing takes about half a minute. A voter can repeat the first line to a friend, the second line is something that voter has seen with his own eyes, and the third line tells the voter what Dana would do in office.

Now count it. The sharper version has five boxes, each under 30 words, about 100 words in total, and it fits on one page with a photo.

Cutting a long answer down to one sentence

Once the boxes are filled, you need a single sentence, the one you say at the door, at the forum when someone asks "why are you running?", and at the top of every page. A reliable recipe is to take one phrase from each of three boxes and snap them together:

"I'm [Box 1], and I'm running because [Box 2], so I will [Box 3]."

For Dana: "I run the feed store on Route 9, and I'm running because our tax bills keep rising while our road keeps flooding, so I will publish the budget before every vote and fix roads first."

That is 35 words, and a person can say it in about fifteen seconds. If it runs longer, cut from the left. The subject matters more than the biography.

To cut a long answer in general, try this four-pass method:

1. Write it the long way. Get everything out. Do not edit yet.
2. Circle the one point. Cross out everything that does not support it.
3. Cut every adjective that you cannot prove, and every phrase that begins "as you know."
4. Say it to someone who does not follow politics, and ask them to repeat it. If they cannot, it is still too long.

Four ways a good worksheet goes bad

The same four failures wreck otherwise decent messages, and you can catch every one of them with a pencil.

The kitchen sink. Box 3 swells to six solutions because each one came from a supporter who cared. Every solution you add makes the others harder to hear. Keep the best one in the box and move the rest to a second page, labeled "if asked."

The borrowed message. A national talking point gets pasted into a county race. It sounds big and means nothing at the courthouse. If your message could be printed unchanged for a candidate in another state, it is not yours yet. Put a local street, a local budget line or a local deadline in it.

The mood board. The page is all adjectives: strong, proud, fresh, committed. Voters cannot picture an adjective. Swap each one for a noun and a number you can document, or cut it.

The shifting target. In August the message is about taxes, in September it is about crime, in October it is about whatever the paper wrote last. A voter who has heard one sentence three times may remember it. A voter who has heard three different sentences once remembers nothing. Change the delivery all you like, such as the stories, the photos and the setting, but hold the sentence.

Test the whole page

Before you print anything, hand the page to three people: one supporter, one skeptic and one person who does not care about politics. Ask each of them the same four questions.

1. What is this candidate running for?
2. What is the problem they say they will fix?
3. What would they do about it?
4. What do they want me to do?

If all three can answer all four, you have a message. If they get different answers, the message is not clear yet, and a clearer message is cheaper to fix on paper in August than on a mailer in October.

Then use the page. It is the source for the door script, the yard sign, the mailer and the speech. Put it where the campaign can see it. Our post on door-knocking that works, a walkthrough from the turf map to the thank-you shows how the same sentences carry into the field, and running for local office, the first thirty days, step by step places this worksheet in the first month of a campaign. A candidate on a budget will also want a campaign budget worksheet for the candidate with no money and no staff, since the message decides what the money buys.

The bottom line

• Voters give a candidate seconds. A message that does not fit on one page will not fit in a voter's memory.
• Fill five boxes in order: who I am, the problem, my solution, the contrast, the ask. Give each one a test and hold yourself to it.
• Choose one problem, make the solution specific and checkable, and keep every contrast provable. Argue the record, never the person.
• Cut a long answer to one sentence: "I'm [who], running because [problem], so I will [solution]." Then say it to someone who is not a political junkie and see whether it sticks.
• Print the page, put it on the wall of the campaign office, and make every sign, script and speech start from it.