In the days following Virginia Governor Elect Youngkin’s upset, both national parties raced to claim the title of “the party of parents”.
While CRT and the curriculum debate was gaining traction prior to the Virginia gubernatorial, the race’s results (and the generally accepted notion that these issues played a decisive role in the outcome) immediately elevated and expanded the political stakes surrounding the government’s involvement in the lives of children and their parents.
These immediate attention shifts to new issues or events are demanding on local campaigns.
- At a minimum, campaigns need to craft a fast response so they’re prepared when asked about it (for campaigns in swing races, this likely means something other than the party line that was given to you).
- For other campaigns, an outlier issue can all the sudden become a top three campaign platform if the local response is obvious enough to demand it.
- For the majority of campaigns, there is uncertainty on how to adequately prioritize and message around popup issues and events. This is fundamentally due to the lack of understanding about the consequences they can ultimately have on the direction of the race relevant to the values and priorities of the electorate.
This is where modernized and more technologically advanced data products can really help campaigns make the right call on what issues, audiences and messages to invest in.
At Resonate, our massive voter survey based, AI-powered algorithms leverage the behavioral activity of online voters (covering 90% of the electorate online) to create a real-time predictive analysis on where voters stand on the most relevant and broadest set of campaign issues.
Our platform then looks deeper at the physiological-driven insights informing those policy positions. These deeper insights are designed to sharpen messaging and creative by identifying fundamental areas of human alignment between the candidate and voters.
Using our methodology, campaigns receive better segmentation and precise targeting. Because our A.I. observations refresh daily, campaigns are defending themselves against stale data and shifts in voter sentiment throughout campaign lifecycles, allowing their targeting to remain flexible to national media cycles and surprise political events.
Ohio parents of school aged children who are frequent midterm voters.
As an example, we’ll use the Resonate platform to create a real-time audience build of Ohio voters who will likely vote in the 2022 midterm who are also the parents of school aged children (18u). To deepen our analysis, let’s build a separate audience of Ohio frequent midterm voters who are not the parents of school aged children for comparison.
Source: Resonate Ignite Platform™, December 2021
Our data shows the Ohio parent audience is 44% Democratic and 34% Republican with the remaining 20% identifying as Independent. While political party is a basic insight, combined with other insights (e.g. parent of children 18u, frequent midterm voter, etc.) campaigns can build niche audience consisting of exactly the voters they need to reach (e.g. Democrat parents of school aged kids who are known midterm voters) and then serve them with the right message.
Now let’s look at our data to uncover the specific policies that Ohio midterm voting parents of school aged children would focus on if they were selecting their candidate now:
Source: Resonate Ignite Platform™, December 2021
What’s interesting is that when compared to the non-parent audience, the parental audience does not over index for concern over education policies. In fact, the data show that a candidate’s position on environmental policy, immigration, and taxes are more important right now than her/his plan for education.
Of course, this audience will likely be concerned or curious about education policy at some point during the campaign, but the takeaway here is that education not a critical issue to these voters right now.
If you want to be “the party of parents” in Ohio during the midterms next year, then make sure you’re speaking to the issues on the minds of parents today.
When it comes to the real physiological drivers – the values and motivations – behind our Ohio parent audience, the data show this is a highly creative, optimistic and adventurous group of voters. They are active in their communities and place a high premium on safety. Sometimes it’s nice when the data reminds you of the obvious….
Source: Resonate Ignite Platform™, December 2021
Messaging to this audience right now should be wrapped in positivity, safety, family and community values.
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Reach, Educate, and Drive Your Audience to Action
The segments analyzed above are just a few of the thousands of micro-segmented audiences that we can build, analyze and target immediately on your behalf across all programmatic screens and channels: CTV, OTT, Mobile, Tablet, Desktop, etc.
What are your top issues? What audiences sympathetic to your cause do you need to reach, educate and/or drive to action? Where do you need to build support?
We are here to help. Request a demo or give us a call at 855.855.4320.
