Situation 

In the leadup to the 2022 elections, the Democratic president’s approval rating was deep underwater, with inflation reaching historic levels and record numbers of Americans saying the country was on the wrong track. History suggested these frustrated voters would send the unpopular president a message by punishing his party’s incumbents in the midterm elections. 

In a state like Michigan, where Donald Trump won in 2016 and Joe Biden prevailed narrowly in 2020, reelecting a Democratic governor in 2022 looked like a tall order. But on Election Day, Gretchen Whitmer won by double digits, and the campaign’s coattails enabled Democrats to flip both state legislative chambers, delivering a trifecta for the first time in decades.

Here’s how we pulled it off.

Strategy: Proving Democrats can Walk and Chew Gum 

Too often, Democratic campaigns leave votes on the table by failing to communicate on both cultural/social and economic issues simultaneously. Our campaign demonstrated how Democrats message effectively in both arenas – and do it well.

We spent nearly $7 million on digital channels including YouTube, Hulu, ESPN, social & programmatic media, and more to drive home three different messages, targeted to the audiences each message would resonate with:

• First, we filmed Governor Whitmer speaking directly to the camera to deliver our core economic message: that during her term in office she took concrete actions to deliver tax relief for Michiganders who had to cope with global inflation. 
• Second, we made a series of ads highlighting Tudor Dixon’s desire to ban abortions with no exceptions for rape or incest. These spots included Tudor Dixon in her own words saying the words “no exceptions,” a position far out of step with the vast majority of Michigan voters. 
• Third, we made several spots highlighting the dangerous implications of Tudor Dixon’s “tax swap” as she called it in her own words – giving tax breaks for billionaires like Betsy Devos and raising taxes on working Michiganders who were already dealing with inflation. These ads repeatedly tied Dixon, who was not very well known over the summer, with the well-known and extremely unpopular Devos, who funded Dixon’s campaign. 

Across all three message lanes, the spots we made were informed by an enormous amount of polling and ad testing. We used sophisticated targeting techniques – using both custom voter modeling and polling about voters’ media consumption habits – to ensure our ads were targeted to the voters most moveable by each message.

In an age where voters are skeptical of the claims they hear in political spots, our ads were believable because they featured Tudor Dixon’s own words. And we used our biggest asset, the Governor, to deliver our positive economic message.

Result

By contrasting Governor Whitmer’s record of delivering for Michigan with her opponent’s extreme and unpopular positions on both social and economic issues, we defined Tudor Dixon as out-of-touch with Michiganders and made the case for reelecting Gretchen Whitmer.

Testing platform Openlabs stated “You” was the clear winner moving support 5.4pp towards Whitmer which puts it among the best testing governor ads across all our work. This ad did especially well moving support among Republican subgroups like Trump voters, New Trump voters, and Reliable Republicans. 

Our messaging strategy both persuaded swing voters and activated the Democratic base.

Whitmer racked up huge vote margins in urban areas, made massive inroads with blue-collar voters, and improved her vote margin in critical swing counties like Macomb from her (already impressive) showing in 2018.