This campaign was a winner of AAPC Pollie Awards for Direct Mail, Innovative Tactics and Best Candidate Media Campaign
We were engaged by Spirit of Democracy PAC to run an independent expenditure campaign to help Republican Catharine Baker win a California Assembly seat that seemed unwinnable. No Republican had won a partisan seat anywhere within the San Francisco Bay Area in almost a decade.
The Democratic primary had been divisive with labor-backed candidate Sbranti defeating moderate Democrat Steve Glazer. To attract “Glazer-Democrats” to vote for Baker, Spirit of Democracy launched a surprise summer attack against Sbranti, featuring the Newsweek-style magazine “Anatomy of a Smear,” rehashing Sbranti’s nasty primary campaign against Glazer in the form of a “Special Report” to district voters. Baker’s name appeared nowhere in the mailer.
“Anatomy of a Smear” broke through to the district’s highly-educated voters by defying all the rules of the conventional mail piece. Instead of short, we went big, instead of late, we struck early.
Attention to detail: We spent a month on research and refined it over 29 drafts.
Smear’s rehash of the divisive Democratic primary told a story that successfully attracted thousands of moderate Glazer Democrats to consider voting Republican for the first time.
“Smear” was so effective at winning crossover Democratic votes that it helped Republican Baker win a district that – if it were a Congressional seat – would have a Cook PVI of D+15. To put that in perspective, no Republican represents a Congressional seat more Democratic than D+6.
CASE STUDY: AD16
Anatomy of a Smear: An innovative mailer that broke all conventions and delivered an “unexpected gift” win for our client.
It’s not often that a single direct mail piece is so powerful in impacting a race that it forces an opponent to respond on network television, but that’s what happened with Smear. In the closing days of the campaign our opponents bought four network World Series ads to rebut our “Smear” mailer - a piece sent to voters over two months earlier.
We created a digital web promo for the magazine and website that matched the magazine’s content, complete with documentation and long-form video.
