I continue to muse on Hillary Clinton’s media strategy and remain baffled by it. I laid out in general terms the evidence of its ineffectiveness a couple of days ago (“Mr. Empathy“), but I think it’s worth taking a closer look because this is usually where campaigns are won and lost and hers sure ain’t firing on all cylinders right now.

I have not, of course, seen the Clinton campaign’s polling nor am I privy to their focus groups. I just have to assume they’ve got the best that money can buy in terms of data, experience, analytics and creativity. Which makes it all the more puzzling that they seem to be sputtering so badly in this department.

Let’s take Nevada as an example. Obama carried the state by 12.5 points in 2008 and by 6.7 points in 2012. In mid-August, Clinton was ahead in the polls there and had an 80% chance of winning the State according to fivethirtyeight. Since then Trump has led in every poll and now has around a 50/50 chance of winning there.

As in other swing states, Trump’s rising chances of a Nevada victory correlate with Clinton’s domination of ad buys there. There are only two TV markets in the state, and from the start of the their really major ad push in mid-August through September 15, 85% of the presidential election ad buys in Las Vegas and 78% in Reno were made by Clinton’s campaign or by PACs supporting her. That’s about a 5-1 ratio, an overwhelmingly dominating margin in paid media presence.

Still this advantage failed to move the needle away from Trump at all and his poll numbers remained roughly unchanged over that period. He was at 42% in the Suffolk poll on 17 August and since then he’s polled at 42, 44, 42, 43. Hillary on the other hand started at 44% in the Suffolk poll and subsequently has polled 41, 42, 39 and 40. The last figures are the Fox poll on 20 September. And while Trump did not benefit much from Clinton’s tumble, Johnson, the Libertarian candidate, did. He polled at 5 in mid-August and his numbers after that have been 8, 8, 11 and 8. So not only did her ad campaign not put a dent in Trump, support fled away from her to the third party candidate.

I spent a little more time watching Clinton’s ads to see if I could discern the root of this wet match of a campaign failure. Ideally, as a basic campaign media strategy, you want to energize your base, persuade undecideds and avoid energizing your opponents supporters.

Mark McKinnon, Bush’s media guy, says to do that–to be successful–campaigns need to tell a story and present it to voters in an “organized, compelling and simple” manner. Creating an effective campaign narrative, he says, entails identifying a threat or opportunity (generally, a denied opportunity), choosing either fear or hope as your lens, identifying a victim of the threat or denied opportunity, a villain, and presenting a resolution and a hero.

In the story he created for the 2000 campaign, the threat was cultural drift under Bill Clinton. The victims were society and falling moral standards. The villain was Bill Clinton; the resolution was a hopeful restoration of dignity and honor to the White House, and the hero of course was George Bush.

In 2004, hope turned to fear and the story elements were international terrorism, 9/11, al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, an aggressive foreign policy with Bush again as the hero.

One thing that strikes you when view Clinton’s ads en masse is that her campaign narrative certainly is not lacking in victims. In spot after spot, usually to the accompaniment of somber, down-tempo piano strains which I can only describe as disquieting and mournful, we’re presented with the disabled as victims, Latinos as victims, children as victims, African Americans as victims, veterans as victims, immigrants as victims, small business owners as victims. It’s a victim festival.

But beyond that, the narrative arc is muddy and badly off-track. All of these people are, you see, victims of Trump, so he serves as both the threat and the villain. The resolution is apparently not electing Donald Trump, or perhaps some structural approach like banding together and promoting bipartisanship (Stronger Together!). The few times Hillary shows up as hero we learn that she’s going to fight for children and families, but not much more. And the entire story line, to the extent there is any, is suffused with downbeat fear, instead of sunny hope.

But while the overall impression is that the ad campaign’s had one too many valiums–not exactly a great way to fire up your base to go knock on doors–it’s the overabundant, highly particularized “victimness” of the ads that is really damaging to her cause. Because if one tries to extract from this narrative architecture and its components the larger notion of what’s being victimized, it’s not the future of our economy, not our civil liberties, not even our families. It’s the self-esteem of the victims who have suffered at the hands of the villain.  Talk about playing to your opponent’s sweet spot.

Conservatives have made a cult of victimhood  Since the mid-2000s and even long before, the rank and file of the right have been fed a steady diet of fatuous victim memes on steroids telling them how threatened they are–by the war on Christmas, by gay rights assaulting their freedom of religion, by the liberal main stream media’s bias against their political beliefs, by affirmative action robbing them of equal opportunity for employment. Donald Trump enters the game and proceeds to stoke those fires with his stands against political correctness, on job losses to trade deals and immigration, on the havoc wreaked by domestic terrorism, and on and on and on.

And into this wallowing pit of defensive self-righteousness comes Hillary Clinton saying, essentially, you’re not victims at all, the victims are all these people who don’t look like you. Is it any surprise that the result of this communication strategy was that Trump’s support hardened among conservatives and that others of a libertarian mind–who believe there are no victims and everyone should just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps–walked away and got on the Gary Johnson bus?

If there is one truth in this entire election that needs absolutely no reinforcing, it’s what a supreme jerk Donald Trump is. He is his own walking and talking negative ad. Everybody gets it. The Clinton campaign needs to turn the corner, and soon, and start saturating the air waves with much, much more positive and inspirational messaging. What’s under threat is our prosperity, or our middle class, or democracy…big things. Really big things.

I’ve never liked the Stronger Together slogan, but if you’re going to use it, don’t let it’s meaning be we’ve all got to huddle together so we can protect ourselves from a big bully. It should be about uniting for the great future we’re going to build.

You know, what Bernie was saying.

[I’d be pleased as punch if you’d go to MY HOME PAGE and click on the “FOLLOW” button in the lower right hand corner.]