What makes presidential campaigns successful?

Since the 1970s, the most critical factor in American presidential campaigns has not been candidate qualifications, name recognition, financial backing or the burning issues of the day. As important as these may be, the hallmark of successful campaigns over the last 50 years has been effective campaign strategy, usually led by effective campaign managers.

Their skills have helped defeat candidates with superior qualifications and achieve success under unfavorable campaign odds.

Donald Trump offers a rare example of a self-strategized campaign. Prior to his campaign announcement in June 2015, Trump had no public service experience and only about 4 percent approval in popular polls. One month later, he led 16 credentialed Republican candidates.

A  flurry of media and academic analyses have sought to explain Trump’s election in 2016  in the face of behaviors that would have derailed any candidate in the past. A 2022 search on “Why Trump won the 2016  election” in Google Scholar yielded 53,000 titles. Writers have focused on a  variety of causes such as populist appeals to disaffected working-class whites, alienation against an elitist culture in America, social media and disillusion with a dysfunctional political system. But the role of effective strategy in his campaign has not been highlighted. Trump saw opportunities that the pollsters did not recognize when they predicted a Hillary Clinton win in 2016.  

The first campaign in U.S. political history clearly won by superior strategy was that of Abraham Lincoln. It was described in extraordinary detail in an award-wining book by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It was also the first presidential election campaign in which campaign strategy assumed importance. Candidates could travel to various parts of the nation through the rapidly-growing rail network, and by the 1840s to 1850s, speeches could be transmitted by telegraph.

Beginning far behind three other candidates for the Republican nomination, Lincoln travelled and spoke extensively, seeking second preference in states dominated by other candidates. When no candidate won on early ballots, Lincoln gained votes and ultimately swept the nomination. Democrats, concentrated in the less populous pro-slavery South, were soundly defeated in the election of 1860.   

From the 1970s, the electronic revolution transformed campaigns. Instant electronic communication increased competition for audience by media. The proportion of the population that was informed about politics, measured by being able to name the three branches of the federal government, reached a low of 25 percent in 2017. These factors added complexity to effective messaging with the voting public.

Jimmy Carter was described by Stephen Phillips as having a “Gentle-Jesus mien”, but also ”ambition, flinty resolve and bulletproof self-assurance.” But Carter would have never risen politically without the political genius of Hamilton Jordan, who at age 26 had managed Carter’s successful campaign for governor of Georgia. In 1972, at age 28, Jordan presented an unconventional, 70-page game plan, which Carter largely followed in his successful candidacy for the Democratic nomination and President Gerald Ford four years later.  

Sixteen years after Carter's election, Bill Clinton was already a sophisticated campaigner in his own right. He was powerfully aided by James Carville in the uphill campaign against incumbent President George H.W. Bush in 1992.

Bush, coming off a wave of popularity due to the successful expulsion of the Iraqi military from Kuwait, seemed unbeatable early on. But Clinton ultimately prevailed in a campaign marked by Carville’s now-famous dictum, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Carville’s role was featured in an Academy Award-nominated film, “The War Room.” 

Two years after Clinton acceded to the presidency, Karl Rove played a critical role in electing George W. Bush’s governor of Texas. He would help guide Bush’s policies as governor and then manage Bush’s successful 2000 campaign against Vice President Al Gore (D), and then again against Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004.

Bush had an appealing persona, although is presidency is not favorably remembered. In 2008, 61 percent of a group of historians voted him as the worst president in U.S. history, yet effective strategy helped him win two presidential elections. Rove’s unrelenting mastery of detail was demonstrated in the final phase of the 2000 election. Bush gained a narrow lead in Florida, but Democrats claimed potential errors associated with punched card ballots and the notorious “hanging chads”. Rove helped defuse the furor when he observed that the City of Chicago, controlled by the Democratic Party, used the same punch-card system.  

In January 2012, polls showed that only 18 percent of the public felt that the country was on the right track. Historical precedents showed steep odds against reelection of President Barack president when the public registered less than a 39 percent “right track” rating. Barack Obama arguably would not have won the election in 2012 without the database concepts and assistance of David Axelrod. Axelrod had become hooked on politics as a teenager, selling buttons for the campaign of Robert F. Kennedy at age 13. 

In 2016, Trump became a rare successful architect of his own campaign. With skill in gaging the public mood and generating media coverage, Trump embraced ideologies as opportunities for political advancement.

In a book supporting his aborted campaign as a candidate for the Reform Party in the presidential election of 2000, Trump had espoused a single-payer health system and a 14.25 percent wealth tax on the most affluent. He had also supported Democrats up to 2009 and extolled Barack Obama’s first year in office. He then suddenly switched to a conservative campaign with a book whose subtitle was "Making America #1." Trump’s final campaign book in 2015 revealed brazen confidence in his ability to exploit the media’s hunger for sensation. He wrote: “I don’t mind being attacked. I use the media as it uses me – to attract attention. Once I have that attention it’s up to me to use it to my advantage.”  

In March 2020, Jen O’Malley Dillon, a deputy campaign manager in Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, assumed charge of campaign management in the Biden campaign after a disastrous New Hampshire primary. She is credited with helping rescue the former vice president’s campaign and striking the moderate tone that gained him the presidency. She subsequently became deputy chief of staff in the new administration.  

The conclusion from presidential campaigns since the Ford-Carter campaign of 1976 is that skilled campaign strategies have been a critical factor in successful political campaigns. A key requirement for campaign managers to be effective is the willingness of candidates to accept advice that may be counter to their natural instincts. That was the fatal flaw that doomed Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012.

Frank T. Manheim is affiliate professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.