Hi everyone,
After this election, I thought it might be fun to talk about my time in politics. I used to work for a political campaign firm, about 8-9 years ago. My boss was a consultant for the Republican party, but I later found out that he also used to be a lobbyist and ran a separate business where he taught political hopefuls how to win elections (with a focus on winning a Republican position in a traditionally blue state).
I worked as a designer there on 16 different campaigns (14 candidates and 2 measures), and part of my job was taking an InDesign file that got deleted and recreating it from scratch from a hard copy of a book my boss wrote called "How to Win Elections."
It was about 300 pages long and this was long before I woke up, but having to read and hand-type this entire book was a big part of my process of waking up.
I wish I still had the book laying around, but I'll talk about some of the biggest eye openers to me at the time:
• The book contained a "Mad Libs" section of press releases for every possible thing your candidate might do or say wrong. So, if your candidate was caught cheating on his wife, the Mad Lib had blank spots for his name _______ and then the alleged woman he was cheating with _______.
The press release went something along the lines of:
"There has been an allegation against [candidate]. When we talked to [candidate], he was completely shocked and denies any claims that he ever had an affair with [woman] and says it's completely false. Reporters talked to [candidate]'s campaign manager and he said, "Look, I've known [candidate] for years. He's a good guy, he would never do something like this. I know him and his wife, they are close, and she's standing by him during the election."
The instructions were to send this out to all the newspaper and media outlets that we "had a hand in" and then work to find any dirt on the woman bringing up the allegations.
We had press releases for all sorts of things, affairs, attempted murder or assault charges, money laundering, etc.
• One of the interesting things I learned when re-typing up the book is that a politician, according to this book spends 90% of their elected time fundraising for NEXT election. Because of this, the book stressed the importance of developing a strong cabinet of advisors and workers that will do the actual political work for you while you, the candidate, smile, wave and be the trusted face of your organization.
• The letters-to-the-editor section was interesting. Back when I was a kid, my parents would read letters to the editor of newspapers and form their political opinions on them. They would usually be written by trusted people in our local community or someone you might have heard of, like the principal of the school your kids went to.
This book taught you to form your political talking points with your campaign manager, then hire a ghost writer to write a letter in a personal voice, as if it was a hardworking American and not a polished article in a magazine. Then, you'd find people in battleground communities that would support you, either with kickbacks from your campaign funds or for shared political gain. You run the ghost-written letter past the trusted community leader, have them read it and get them to sign it and send it into the newspaper.
• There was a section for all the ways to find possible dirt on your opponent and it got extremely detailed, I think this section was 20 pages long. Ways to contact the state bar association if the opponent was a lawyer for any bad cases or cases the opponent represented that you could use to discredit them or bring them down. Ways to check for malpractice or negligence if the opponent was a doctor, ways to look up former employers and interview form co-workers for dirt, etc.
• There was a section on wedge issues and how to slice up statistics to support your cause. The wedge issue they used as an example was abortion. According to this book, abortion as a whole didn't change much year-by-year over the last 20 years, but there were slices of the stat that did according to who was in office. My memory is fuzzy, but I believe it showed 2nd term abortions by teen moms having their 1st abortion as being a statistic that went down when George HW Bush was president, but went up when Bill Clinton was president. This way you could quickly flash this stat up on a TV commercial to get people that might not care about the election to come out and vote, because they believed that they were causing change in that issue. The wedge issues were a BIG deal, because they push people in the middle to either the left or the right.
• For some reason, the book was obsessed with Irish Democrats, saying they were the most likely swing-voters and talked about ways to persuade them to vote Republican. I really wish I could remember some of the techniques, but I can't off the top of my head.
• The book frequently referred back to Striking the Responsive Chord, I've linked to a PDF of it I found online.
http://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS234/articles/brader.pdf
There were several conversations I had with people there that worked in politics, one of the most interesting being that candidates base their talking points on the demographics that they called "active voters" which were people that had voted 4 out of the last 4 elections for their party. This is why some politicians refuse to address issues concerning younger voters, the biggest demographic still tends to be baby boomers and older voters that are consistent and vote in every major and non-major election.
When I was designing palm flyer cards, those mini posters that people take door-to-door I didn't actually know a lot about veterans and what issues they face. I talked to my boss, several people I worked with, and our candidates about that issue, and nobody could give me an honest answer. One candidate literally said, "Well you should know what my position is, it's whatever will get me the win. Just write some stuff down there that will get veterans to vote for me."
My boss was obsessed with candidates last names. He said the most important thing about a political poster is the last name and to make it "as big as possible" because most people honestly forget about the issues with some of the smaller candidates, the ones that aren't running for governor or senate, so if people just see a certain name a bunch on the road, studies show they are most likely to vote for that person, regardless of party affiliation.
Anyway, I got fired after a short period of time, no reason given, but I'm pretty sure it's because my boss started to realize that I had a conscience. I worked there for about 6 months, didn't get to work on an entire election cycle end-to-end but it was eye opening, enough that I fully swung to Democrat before resting in an Independent position several years later.
I've never really told anyone about all these details because every time I started to, nobody believed me or wanted to listen, but I figured y'all might actually be the right group to hear it.
Wow, thanks modblot! Yeah, your in the right place to share and not be judged as crazy. Its pretty common sense stuff around here that they play mind games and just run statistics to get what they want. The advertising market wouldn't even exist if it didnt have a huge return on profit. There has been hundreds of millions spent on psychological effects of everything from colors, spacing, grouping, verbalized sound interpretation of the subconscious to music, flicker rates, micro muscle movements and on demand releases of biochemical to enhance memory, desires and euphoria states. They constantly take all of these studies and focus them towards everyone to sway you to buy, believe, like, dislike, remember, ignore and love whatever they want you to. Why would elections be any different? Lol
Thanks for sharing! I'm sure it will help open the eyes of others who haven't been heard of such information before. At the very least you had a chance to get it off your chest, know you have shared it and have been heard and accept what you say is true. I would think there has been volumes more written with even more research added to provide mych better results. For example, look at how divided our country appears to be after this election. Many Hillary supporters seem totally brainwashed and ready to fucking snap.
One of the conversations I had about the national voter vault, something I never got access to, made it sound like it wasn't anonymous. My biggest worry right now is that someone will hack the voter vault and expose who voted for Trump and I think we will have a national crisis at that point.
I doubt they will do that, it would show the true result numbers that was even more favorable towards Trump plus it would show who voted for Trump but are involved in protests against Trump. In addition to that it would prove a complete lack of ability for them to keep things secure, not to mention at would be obvious that they were just stoking the fire and trying to cause a civil war.
But if they did do that, it would definitely suck! I never thought about that. Great thinking. Can you share any other things they might do? I would be very interested in hearing more of your ideas.
I too will thank you, modblot. Quite informative.
What do veterans want? Veterans are all over the map. Oh, and no one need thank me for my service. I was duped into joining up by uninformed and under-informed folks just like most folks. With no integrity in the forth estate, no one gets enough of the picture to make informed choices, certainly not most military aged young men and women. I am a 69 year old Viet Nam veteran and I didn't start piecing the puzzle together until my stretch in the military was almost over. It's taken a lifetime since my service days to sort the political scene to the point where I can say, if it's up to the elected to fix things for us, we just need to see what part of "we're fucked" that we haven't figured out as yet.
This is a great place to gather information. Greg's interviews and posts like yours will be of help in that endeavor.
That's how they pull the strings all right! Whisper sweet nothings to everyone, and have your lackeys sell them down the river.
Well, Satyagraha, I, for one, am ALWAYS interested in your opinions, thoughts and insights and thank you for all that you add to this forum. I just figure if I tell you so on every thread you might think I'm a little too interested in you. 😉 lol
This is a great place to gather information. Greg’s interviews and posts like yours will be of help in that endeavor.
....and posts like yours as well, Satyagraha.
@Satyagraha: Yes, at this point, I can say now that I have a brother who is a veteran and I understand the issues they face much more, I was much younger working at that job, but man, it was scary that nobody could answer that question for me.
I think one of the main agendas right now with Brexit and the Trump victory is the media pushing this idea that people shouldn't be allowed to vote, because they don't make good decisions. All the news networks right now are practically saying, "You dumb people don't know what's good for you," at this point with many young people agreeing. That worries me.
This election has really opened my eyes to the power of propaganda and the media. I mean, did any of these people read Wikileaks? Clinton was a dirty candidate, but if you talk to these people, she's an angel. One of the big trends in media for the last 5-10 years has been zombies. I wondered if this was predictive programming somehow and how it would manifest and I think we are seeing some of that now. People that are mentally zombified that are being controlled by the media to the point that they are rioting now.
I live in a city that's having protests every night and it's been a nightmare. I run my own business and time = money. I can't tell you how many hours I've lost trying to get around because roads are closed from anti-Trump supporters laying down in the streets screaming like crazy people. And nothing has even happened yet, I didn't vote for Trump but people need to give him a chance.
I've been trying to figure out what the new big change in 2020 for America will be due to Austin Coppick's podcast and my guess is a big change to how government is run. My best guess is the Electoral Collage being removed. I can't tell you how many people in my facebook feed are DEMANDING it be removed, even though Hillary only won the popular vote by 200k votes or so, which is the size of 1 medium city in the US. If Hillary won 5-10 million more votes but Trump won the election, sure maybe we should re-examine it, but at this point, I don't think so.
Both Trump and Clinton are near 70 years old which concerned me before the election even started ramping up. The position of President of the US has melted previous presidents' faces like candle wax, if you search on Google for "President before after" you'll see how much the stress ages people, so having someone going into the job at 70 worries me that we will end up with the VP in charge for some/most of the presidency.
I agree modblot. Its my opinion that "they" saw that Trump was going to win when he was pulling 10's of thousands of people when campaigning but Hillary was barely pulling enough for a decent close camera shot to make it appear like a lot of people showed up. So they decided to play it off in the media, lie about predictions and pre-polling to make enough of the masses that Hillary was more popular than she was. So they kept bashing Trump and then adjusted the poll results in major cities just enough to show that Hillary won the popular vote so they could use the media outlets to continue the mind control Trump bashing. The only chance they have is to get people to riot and act like mind controlled idiots by paying certain people to start the protests and use trigger tactics to get people to act like morons even more. They are using social media as well as mainstream media to push this narrative as much as possible. They wanted, and are trying to, rip our country apart with this nonsense.
There's also the "Enough is enough" card from the Illuminati card game that has an image that looks like a lot like Trump with the quote "Our snipers can drop you at any moment... have a nice day."
I have friends that didn't vote for Trump saying, "Let's see how things go with Trump as president" getting unfriended and threatened on facebook. It's a whole new level of division in this country.
It's also really frustrating to have many of my friends from other countries weigh in on the situation, considering all they have seen is mainly media blasts. Like, I wouldn't give my opinion on social issues and elections in New Zealand, but I have a friend from NZ telling me that there's only bigots, racists and idiots living in the midwestern states that voted for Trump; the very states that were hit hardest by NAFTA.
Thanks for this post, always fnd it insightful to hear an insider's experience.
Whether the elections got rigged or not, I do feel Trump's win represent the peoples wish to abolish establishment politics, regardless of whether he'll deliver that.
Lately though, and While I'm not an US citizen, the whole plot to me sounds like a shortcut towards martial law and fema camps.
I also feel the negativity in the air since the elections. Our co-creative collective consciousness is certainly taking a hit. Lets keep our heads cool. Peace.
I know, most people are giving him a chance but there are some completely mind controlled and loosing their shit over this. I fear the next step is to overturn the results and give it to Hillary. Thats when the whole country REALLY looses it and things get widespread and dangerous.
Nice find on the Illuminati card! Interesting.
The media proclaimed Hillary won the popular vote before they even finished counting all the ballots, even though it was too close to call and the late comers still counting were in Republican heavy areas. They wanted to kick off this division of the people or they would wait until all the results were in. Its a total psy-op.
