(Page 2 of 28) - Campaign Best Practices: Do They Work? authored by Brooks, Stephen., Marion, Nancy. and Farmer, Rick.

Introduction

Winning political campaigns is something that's of interest to both scholars and

practitioners since the first candidate threw his hat in the ring. As the practice of running
campaigns has become more professional questions have been raised on what generalized
practices win campaigns. There have been many research studies in which the authors
have attempted to identify the best techniques for running and managing a campaign for
public office (Agranoff 1972, Napolitan 1972, Brown and Seib 1976; Hershey 1984;
Beaudry and Schaeffer 1986; Sabato 1981, 1989; Salmore and Salmore 1989; Diamond
and Bates; Johnson-Cartee and Copeland 1991; Hall Jamieson 1998; Ansolabehere and
Iyengar 1997; Selnow 1994; Swint 1998; Grey, 1999; Hess 1998: 38; Bailey et al. 2000;
Faucheux 1998a). Most of these studies focus on Congressional races, since there are
many of them and they receive large quantities of attention (Arrington and Ingalls 1984:
118). Few of these studies focus on non-partisan, local campaigns (McCleneghan and
Ragland 2002; Arrington and Ingalls 1984: 118; Fleischmann and Stein 1998). This is
unfortunate because most voters care more about local issues, as they are the issues that
affect them the most (Bailey et al 2000:3). In addition, state and local governments have
substantial influence over voters’ everyday lives (Bailey et al. 2000:24). This idea was
often reiterated by the legendary Speaker of the House Tip O”Neill, who wrote that “All
politics is local” (O’Neill 1987).

Current Study

When it comes to understanding who wins a campaign and why, there are no rules

(Faucheux 1998a: ix). There are no set methods that, if used, will guarantee a win.
However, there are techniques that seem to be more effective in helping a candidate win a
race for office. The current study is a preliminary look at two local school board races in
two different counties in Ohio (described in this paper as the Akron candidate and the
North Canton candidate). It will analyze the principals of strategy and techniques used
by the candidates to win seats on local school boards. It is an attempt to fill a gap in the
current literature on local campaigns, to help us understand more about campaigning
techniques in local races. It will provide a descriptive analysis of the races (i.e. the
candidates, the demographics of the counties in which the races were held), present five
principals of strategy for campaigns, and provide a description of how those strategies
were used by the candidates to win their campaigns.

Race Characteristics

The two campaigns examined here were both races for school board in the fall of

2005. The first race in North Canton, Ohio was in a upper -- middle class outer ring
suburb of both Akron and Canton Ohio. The other contest was for the school board of
Akron, Ohio, a medium-sized city in northeastern Ohio.

Political Environment

Because geography helps determine the geopolitical characteristics of voters it

also helps determine successful campaign tactics (Shea and Burton, 2001:36; Guzzetta,
2000: 89). These two political campaigns were run in very different geopolitical
environments. One campaign (North Canton) was run in a community of 23,000 while
the second (Akron) was almost 10 times larger (210,000).

Table 1 shows the contrast in not only the school districts but also in

communities. The North Canton school system is only a fifth of the size of Akron and