Trump: "Pretend, please, that I am on the ballot. Just pretend."

The election was a referendum on the person at the center of our politics, Donald Trump.

Hicks' campaign got his opponent elected.

Denise Krause should send thank-you notes to Hicks' campaign donors. 

"Good news. After 13 long months the ads, the texts, the mailers, and the phone calls are finally going to end."

In Senate District 3, Democrat Denise Krause defeated Republican Brad Hicks by about 13 points, 54.9 to 42.1 percent. Clay Bearnson, the Independent and Green Party candidate, got 3.9 percent.

The Senate District 3 race was a natural experiment testing my theory of political marketing. The theory is that a candidate’s denoted message is less important and less persuasive than the meta-message, that unspoken, often-unintended brand expressed by tone, image, identity, and the form of a message.

Brad Hicks had near-infinite money to spend defining himself and his opponent. He ran so many ads that he certainly reached a point of sharply diminished returns. If a voter hears a single message, let's say 157 times in the six weeks before Election Day, is there any positive value in the iterations after the 100th or the 120th? Maybe. If one has infinite money, one gives it a try. Why not?

My suggestion to Hicks, offered openly in this blog as good advice, was for him to donate most of his campaign money to a couple of appealing local charities. I preferred Krause, but I had no worry that I might be helping Hicks with my advice. I knew his campaign would ignore it and would instead raise and spend money on ads pounding the idea that Denise Krause was a morally flawed Democratic rubber stamp and Portland-loving extremist who would join in the failed, job-killing policies of the Democratic majority. And moreover, they would claim Hicks is a friendly, nonjudgmental, unpretentious citizen of bipartisan nature eager to work cooperatively with the Democrats he had just trashed. 

And that is exactly what his campaign did. 

Great wealth blinds people. Surely more is better. What is advertising for if not to persuade? His campaign saw money’s power to deliver a message, but failed to see that its meta-message contradicted and overpowered the message. The natural experiment was a good one, because they had the capacity and will to run a full-on brute-force campaign. 

My theory and proposition was that the real brand Hicks communicated to voters contradicted his denoted message. The sheer size of the campaign marked him as part of an aggressive Republican army. The experiment would have been a cleaner test of my theory had Hicks stuck to nothing but friendly assertions of bipartisanship, two million dollars of it. Would voters have noticed the heavy GOP hand if the denoted message had been  solely positive? We don’t know. In fact, the Hicks campaign expressed disapproval and contempt for Democrats in the front half of its ads, so voters did not need to infer bare-knuckle partisanship. They absorbed the meta-message from the entire context.

His campaign showed Hicks to be a Republican scrapper at the worst possible time, the year voters rejected the Trump-led GOP. Hicks never broke with Trump. A few words of public disagreement with Trump might have changed everything, but he is a loyal Republican, as voters saw clearly in the meta-message. He clung to the Republican ship and went down with it. He is who he is.

A brute-force campaign, no matter how big, even with that 157th iteration, is not persuasive. 

Here is the irony: Denise Krause won this election in significant part because the Hicks campaign was so very effective. They showed voters who Hicks was; it showed them what they did not want. His ads won the election for her.

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