Leading campaign comms featuring Hari Sevugan
Pete for America’s fmr Deputy Campaign Manager shares advice on good campaign storytelling + breaking into politics
Welcome to Campaigner, a new weekly newsletter exploring the tactics that drive winning political campaigns and highlighting the players pushing the buttons. Produced by Arena & FWIW Media.
Understanding how, when, and where to tell a candidate’s story is critical to a winning campaign. From the early days of the Barack Obama campaign to the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, Hari Sevugan has been on the front lines of building campaign communications strategy. On Pete for America, his team was known for going everywhere and meeting voters where they were - whether that was in conservative pivot counties or on FOX News. We sat down with Hari to get his advice on breaking into politics, learn what communications teams should prioritize, and hear more about his time on the Pete campaign.
But first...
Arena Toolbox Highlight
Developing Your Message—This guide teaches you how to develop campaign messaging that is authentic and will win voters.
Earned Media Events—From planning to debriefs, this guide will help you tackle everything you need to consider when drawing the press to a campaign event.
Campaign Plan—The Campaign Plan Template brings together the essential elements of a campaign into a single document that you can continue to refer to and adapt from Day 1 until election day.
Q&A with Hari Sevugan
Thanks for chatting with us! You’ve worked for campaigns large and small - what was your career trajectory like and how did you get your start in politics?
I guess there are two parts to my story. A more fundamental part of who I am is that I'm an immigrant. I moved here when I was three years old, and I think like a lot of other immigrants, your love of country is fierce. I wanted to serve the nation that had given my family and I so much. So there’s always sort of been a sense of civic duty in my life. Career-wise, I suppose a more prosaic answer is that I began as a school teacher and a lawyer.
I was a school teacher in New York City and I saw firsthand the inequities of public education and a sort of lack of engagement in public solutions. That was always in the back of my mind, and I ended up going to law school with the idea of translating that into a career in public policy or something. I started working at a law firm after I graduated school, and around the same time a friend of a mine was running for the United States Senate in Illinois. He initially asked me to come on the campaign as a volunteer to help him think through some policy stuff.
One of the most important pieces of advice that I ever got as a lawyer at the time was from a senior partner at my firm. He saw that I wasn't very long for the corporate law firm world, and very early on said “You know, don't buy a car, don't get a fancy house, don’t get any golden handcuffs. You’ll have the flexibility to do what you want to.” So, essentially all I did was pay back my student loans for a couple years and did nothing else. It was 2003, we were about to go to war in Iraq. I figured that if I'm gonna serve and get involved, this was the time to do it. So I quit my job at the law firm. I volunteered on that friends' campaign, and we lost that primary to Barack Obama.
I'm sure your friend was alright, losing to Barack Obama?
Oh yeah. It was amazing right after the fact, he was like, he was the first guy to suggest that then-Senator Obama run for president - his name was Dan Hynes. He was the Illinois State Comptroller at the time. And Danny ended up being a very big supporter of Obama.
How hard was it to “break in” to other campaigns after that?
The thing about campaigns and the campaign world is that while getting in the door can be a little difficult and programs like Arena have made it much better by lowering barriers to entry, once you're in, to a great degree, it is a meritocracy.
If you show some level of skill people will give you other jobs. When folks ask me for advice about politics or getting involved in politics, one of the pieces of advice I always have is to get to know as many people as possible on every campaign.
“When folks ask me for advice about politics or getting involved in politics, one of the pieces of advice I always have is to get to know as many people as possible on every campaign.”
That involves essentially being willing to do anything, and that's the way you get to know people, and be exposed to people and different aspects of campaigns, but it's also the way you get your next job. Because if the person that you get to know on a campaign is going to go work on another campaign, they're going to remember you if you were good -- and they'll want to bring you with them.
That's essentially what happened to me. There were some consultants on that first campaign that really liked me. They hooked me up with a friend of theirs. That was a consultant on a different campaign who sent me down to a race in Kentucky where I finished out that cycle. And the thing is, politics gets into your bloodstream and you can continue to do it because you will get into its bloodstream if you're good and you get to know people.
What’s the most rewarding part about working on campaigns and leading communications?
It's definitely rewarding. You get to shape discourse and you get to shape how people feel about their government. Politics at its best is helping people connect with each other and their leaders.
Sometimes it's not a great lifestyle choice. Campaign life can be difficult. You’re looking for new jobs every nine to 18 months, and you're moving around the country a lot. Politics has become much more of a toxic environment as the country's become more polarized. When you're working in communications, you're kind of the tip of the spear in dealing with that sort of polarized environment and the most aggressive parts of campaign life. That certainly is an aspect of the work that you've gotta be prepared to accept, but the rewards are pretty astounding.
You were in a communications role back in the day for President Obama, and then last year you were in senior leadership on Pete for America. How has the internet specifically kind of changed the way that campaigns communicate with the press or with the public?
Well, Twitter has developed an outsized role in political communications. What’s important is to understand the utility of Twitter and what Twitter is not good for. Broad swaths of the electorate aren't on Twitter, but there is a “filter” to voters that is there and that filter often determines what the conversation in the mainstream media will be.
“Where people fail is when they think the conversation on Twitter is also the conversation that people are having at their kitchen tables -- it's usually not.”
But, often what you see on Twitter is not what voters are thinking about. So it's important to keep both those things in mind. You've gotta be able to manage both of those things and not conflate them, and both are important. But you know, where people fail is when they think the conversation on Twitter is also the conversation that people are having at their kitchen tables -- it's usually not.
What if someone is gearing up to build out their communications plan for next year's election, what do you think would be some of their most important considerations, in sort of thinking through an earned media strategy?
You should really ground your earned media strategy in your overall campaign strategy. First, how do you get to 50% plus one of the vote? The second part is [once] you understand your path to 50% plus one, who is your base audience and who's your persuasion audience and where do they get their information from? That’s how you start planning out your strategy.
How should campaigns think through engaging with the press?
Campaigns should make sure you don't approach doing press as a transaction where you are essentially having transactional relationships with the reporters. Build real relationships with the reporters, have deeper relationships that are going to be long-lasting and not short-term. That's how you go get your best stories. That's where your pitches are more likely to land. That's where you might be able to kill stories, because you have a real relationship with a reporter, and you're not just making transactions.
Along those lines, Pete for America was known for a “go everywhere” media strategy - having the candidate appear on tons of different outlets and mediums. Can you talk a little bit about that? Why did you all go that route, and is that something that all campaigns should do or attempt?
By the way, the “Go everywhere” strategy was the idea of my colleague Lis Smith, so I wanna make sure she gets credit for it. The idea is based on the first rule of campaigning when you're trying to persuade people: to meet people where they are. That's what organizers are taught and it is also what communications people should be taught. And so you've gotta go to where people are getting their information - they’re not getting their information from Twitter, and maybe not even from MSNBC. Maybe if your target audience is a Democratic primary in a very urban district, then, yeah, that's maybe where you should get your information.
But remember the first piece of all media strategy is understanding who you're trying to move, where they get their information, and what they care about. So, you know, part of the strategy for us was to recognize that the number one issue amongst all Democratic primary voters was who can beat Donald Trump in 2020. Part of demonstrating that you can beat Donald Trump is to show that you can win independent and Republican voters. If you think back to 2016, people were thinking a lot about what we called “pivot counties,” which were Obama counties that switched to Trump. On the Pete campaign, we created a program to show that Pete is someone who could appeal to voters across the spectrum, including Republican voters, independent voters, voters in these sort of pivot counties.
So when we went on FOX News, we were talking to those voters and our message didn't change. We carried the same message on FOX News that we did on MSNBC, and our tone was always respectful. We never talked down to anyone, you know, we didn't take the bait very much and in doing so, we got a really good response when Pete went on FOX News for a town hall and got standing ovations. I believe that when Democratic primary voters saw Pete getting standing ovations on FOX News, they're suddenly thinking, “this guy can win those voters.”
That helped credential Pete as someone who should be a top-tier candidate and gain permission. It created a permission structure for people to look at Pete and say like, oh, this guy could beat Trump. He can win, so let me listen to what he has to say. So it wasn't just that we were talking to the people that were watching FOX News. We were talking to other voters to make them realize that he could win the FOX News voters.
What else did you learn on Pete for America about running effective campaigns?
First, I think you should make sure that your communications staff are not siloed from other departments. Frankly, any functioning campaign shouldn’t be siloed and communications especially needs to be integrated across departments. A campaign’s finance team needs to know how to talk to donors, your digital team wants suggestions on what they're producing, you need to know what your field team is gonna ask at the door.
Another lesson is that campaigns should really, really focus on good storytelling and understanding your audiences. The tactics of our media and communications are always going to change. For example, 20 years ago, speechwriting was probably much bigger than it is now. But digital was not, and we don't know what it's gonna be 20 years from now. So the key to all this is understanding storytelling and narrative.
Last question - last week’s election in Virginia showed us how Republicans sometimes rely on disinformation to radicalize and mobilize voters - how can communications teams on the left navigate this landscape moving forward?
There are three things to think about:
First, make sure the facts are out there and being pushed aggressively on all channels by the right people. The right people is critical. The most important thing in this fact checking function is to make sure you have trusted messengers sharing the information. AOC saying “no one is teaching CRT in Virginia” probably isn't going to persuade a soft Republican or even suburban independent. Neither is a campaign (like McAuliffe’s) with a vested interest in saying it's false. Find people from the community that you're hoping to reach to be the carriers of your fact-checking, and make sure you're reaching people on the channels they're getting the misinformation. You're organizing team has to be your partner in this.
Second, understand why people are accepting the misinformation. They're not stupid or gullible. Too often we fall into condescension in pushing back. There's an underlying emotion that's giving themselves permission to accept whatever's being thrown at them. It's usually fear. You have to speak to that in pushing back on the misinformation. Otherwise it will be blocked out. With CRT for example, if a suburban parent believes that America isn't inherently bad, nor is their child destined to be racist, saying “CRT isn't taught in schools” doesn't do much. Saying “having honest conversations about race is important, and America and Americans are strong enough to handle it,” might be a better way to start, and hopefully gives permission to people to accept the new information you're providing.
If you have a friend that's scared of something and there's someone who is stoking that fear, you wouldn't call them stupid for being scared or listening to the person stoking the fear. And you wouldn't hit them with a bunch of facts and think you'd allayed their fear. You'd first recognize they're a friend and approach them in that way. And you'd speak to the emotion first before you addressed the facts. The same applies here.
Third, and this is bigger than a single campaign: the right has an entire network of media outlets and platforms, and traditional press has been cowed by the right into both-sidesism. So, there's a structural piece, where we have to create our own channels of pushback.
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