Illustration by Luke Bott
Roy Temple is a Democratic political strategist based in Kansas City. He ran former Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan’s 1996 re-election campaign and was senior advisor for his 2000 U.S. Senate campaign. Carnahan was killed in a plane crash before that election but elected posthumously.
You worked on your first campaign in 1986. How has Missouri’s political landscape changed since then?
The tools have changed. And there’s been a partisan drift in the state, which in some ways has magnified some of what already existed. There have always been challenges to having a unifying vision for Missouri: You have St. Louis vs. Kansas City, rural vs. urban, Republican vs. Democrat, all these ways of dividing up the state, and in some ways they’ve gotten starker. It used to be more liberal Democrats in the urban areas and more conservative Democrats in the rural areas; now it’s Democrats and Republicans, and you have partisan cleavages layered on top of the inherent geographic and ideological differences. There’s no compensating mechanism to keep dialogue going. It’s become very simple for people to see things as “other.”
Didn’t we have a few years where the landscape wasn’t so polarized?
If you look at the early ’90s, at the end of the Democratic majorities, there was some ability to look toward bigger picture solutions for the state. Part of that was the product of good economic times. The budget stresses add another layer.
One thing about Missouri, though, is that it so perfectly reflects what goes on in the whole country, except in a more muted way. We are not as extreme. We have that geographic diversity, that mix of urban and rural—we never have the boom-bust cycles other places have. We have a diverse portfolio. We may never have rapid growth, but the bottom never falls completely out, either.
How might Missouri politics look different if we were rolling in cash?
It’s always entertaining to do counterfactual thinking, but not necessarily terribly productive. Put it this way: Your fights are different when there’s lots of money—and the hard edges can be filed off. There’s no game of split-the-difference in times of scarce resources. In nominal dollars, we are now spending less on education than we were five years ago. In better times, I think we’d all want more investment in education.
What tips would you give a young political strategist?
“Don’t listen to what people say; watch what they do.” Best example? If you ask voters what they think of negative ads, they will tell you with great vigor how much they hate them. However, if you look at the curve of public opinion before the negative ads start and then afterward, you see that people respond to them.
How do you keep up with everything you need to know?
It’s a fire hose: You open up the spigot and try to get information from as many sources as possible. The common mistake is sequestering yourself off and only exposing yourself to information streams that reinforce what you already believe. One of the things the current media environment allows people to do is create a walled garden. That’s not only a danger to democracy, but it also makes you a very bad strategist, because you don’t understand what your opponent thinks and why. However small the middle is—and in a state like Missouri it’s not enormous—that’s where elections are fought: over people who at various times are persuaded by aspects of both mindsets.
Is that political middle shrinking as fast as the economic middle class?
There’s fierce debate about what the middle is. Is it an ideological middle? Is one side just really poorly articulating what it wants to do, and that is why those people are migrating to the other side? It’s a great question, and terribly hard to answer.
Have we reached a point at which we can ignore the undecided, the swing vote, the uncertain middle?
In a state like Missouri, you will have roughly one million more people show up to vote in a presidential year. In a nonpresidential year, you can win by getting a small sliver more of your side out to vote. If you take a no-name Democrat and a no-name Republican and give them both a threshold amount of money to be able to communicate with Missouri, the race will soon be within the margin of error, 46-43 one way or the other, and not usually 60-40 either way. If you go back to the Carnahan-Ashcroft or Talent-McCaskill races, neither side ever had a commanding lead. This fall’s U.S. senate race will pop into the margin of error and never leave it. The governor’s race probably will not.
What campaign mistakes make you wince?
The most common generic mistake political candidates make is letting the other side define them, either by not responding to attacks or by failing to articulate any reason why you are the better candidate. No candidate ever wins who allows the perception of them to be defined through the eyes of their opponent. Now, no candidate sets out to do that—yet it happens far more frequently than you’d imagine, either because you are under-resourced or because you fall into the pattern of being totally reactive, and you spend all your time saying, “No, I’m not! No, I’m not!” and you never characterize yourself or your opponent. All you are is a little less than what they accused you of being. Denying what you are is not the same thing as defining what you are.
You were one of the pioneers in using digital media—how has its use evolved?
I got interested because I saw it as an opportunity. Everybody who’s had to deal with the media has found a frustration in having to deal with the gatekeepers. The initial appeal was having an unfiltered way in which you could communicate, and as with anything, the virtues of the change are sometimes oversold. Done well, social media can be enormously beneficial; done badly, it can be an enormous waste of resources and energy. You can have all the tools in the world, but if you don’t have anything to say, nobody’s going to care.
When do you tweet, when do you blog, when do you issue a position paper?
I’m tool-agnostic. The iron hand of message discipline—keeping people focused on the issues you want them to think about—used to be the mark of a good campaign. Social media is in direct contrast with that. It’s “Let 1,000 flowers bloom.” When campaigns had a limited number of messages and effective mechanisms to communicate them, they had to block all that out and talk to the middle of the bell curve. Now, if you have a way to talk to people about something they care about, even if it’s not an enormous number of people, you’d be a fool not to try.
What if you’re communicating something complex and deep—how many people will pay attention?
I once heard a political consultant say, “The average voter thinks about politics about as often as they think about the valve stems on the tires of their car.” A bit of hyperbole, but not much. People tell reporters, “I’m just waiting for a chance to sit down and compare the candidates and study the issues.” When does that moment ever come? When is the laundry ever done enough and the dishes clean enough and the kids asleep enough?
What strategic moves, over your career, surprised you with their success?
There are things you can construct, and then there are moments and opportunities you just have to seize. You have a split second. Sometimes it’s not a matter of which things you choose but the speed at which you can make the choice. I remember calling a press conference in two hours, with a satellite uplink, back when that was unheard of. It was in response to something our opponent said—his foot was stuck so far down his throat he was gagging, and he didn’t even realize it, but we did. That’s how politics was different 20 years ago. Now, you say something to one group, and there may be 300 other groups who care about the same issue, and 299 of them may view what you said unfavorably, and those groups will see what you said almost instantly. It’s a steep cliff you can step off these days. It causes a lot of politicians to be too careful, because they live in fear of how things will be used against them.
And the down side to that caution?
A lot of folks don’t say things that need to be said. There’s no natural referee who comes rushing to the aid of a politician whose words are being misused or mischaracterized. There used to be people in the mainstream media who were really much more about calling balls and strikes. Of course, there’s a large group of people who won’t believe that—and an even larger group whose job it is to make sure they don’t. The war on journalism is a lot more real than the war on Christmas.
How has the political landscape changed in the last 25 years?
In the recent past, the most radical changes are the cost of campaigns—which has gone up exponentially—and the way they are financed. Independent expenditures, third-party groups—there are a lot more people talking about their viewpoints. As the candidate, you are much less the master of your domain. So, costs have gone up, control has gone down, and there’s a myriad of tools you have to understand. It’s just a much more complex task than it used to be. You are taking a lot more resources and aiming them at a much narrower slice of the electorate.
What keeps you in the game, maddening as it is?
It’s not formulaic. It stays interesting, because everything you learn just teaches you how little you knew before.
