Why This Book Matters
There’s a lot of name dropping of characters none of us know, and it sometimes makes you feel like Napolitan is writing for an old boys’ club…if you know you know...
For most of my career, I have been operating on a working theory I’d absorbed from mentors on political campaigns, or with political campaign experience. I think if these mentors had written their own guidebooks, most would overlap with Napolitan, even if his 1972 book is dated in parts, and difficult to enjoy in others.
But it’s still worth the read, because it’s the first useful manual for running a political campaign, and because its central claim is still incredibly relevant today: that communication works by recall, not by argument.
It also contains a counter-intuitive argument that voters don’t vote on issues, and most campaigners make the mistake of campaigning on issues.
Napolitan cites private polling in which he finds that when you ask voters what they actually want in a candidate, they don’t tell you they want policy alignment. They tell you they want someone who is honest and who cares about their problems. By a margin of four or five to one over a candidate whose positions match theirs.
Voters vote for the person they trust. And the gap between what the practitioner thinks voters care about and what voters actually decide on is, in my experience, one of the most expensive mistakes in this business.
I also think this book is worth a read even if you’re not interesting in running a political campaign. And that’s because every business is in the business of politics, whether the CEO knows it or not. Regulators, employees, customers, governments, activists, investors — they’re all constituencies. They all form opinions. They all vote in their own way. The CEO who pretends otherwise is a political leader who doesn’t know they’re running a campaign, which usually means they’re losing one. And the discipline that would have helped them — message definition, channel selection, controlled versus uncontrolled communication, treating the work as a one-day sale — is the discipline Napolitan documents in this book.
That’s why this old, dusty book belongs in the canon.
What We Cover in the Episode
- The three-step method — define what you want the voter to feel, decide what you have to do to make them feel it, then do it.
- The core idea: the operator’s job isn’t to inform the voter. It’s to trigger what’s already in them.
- The recall mechanism — how the Muskie spot worked, why the Daisy ad worked, and how identity-protective cognition (from the McRaney episode) explains the same phenomenon from the cognitive science side.
- Polls as discovery — what a useful poll actually does, and the four-or-five-to-one finding on character over policy that the field still resists.
- Controlled versus uncontrolled media — the most practical distinction in the book, and the reason campaigns blow up after a single bad interview.
- The one-day sale — why elections operate on a logic corporate communications teams are structurally unprepared for, and how the same logic applies inside any campaign window.
- Three mental models to carry forward: the Trigger Not the Argument, Controlled versus Uncontrolled Media, and the One-Day Sale.
- Common misunderstandings — that Napolitan is teaching manipulation, that he believes issues don’t matter, that the book is about television, and that the book is cynical (with a digression on why I’d recommend Veep over The West Wing as a more accurate portrayal of this line of work).
- Modern application — the CEO as candidate. The story of the 24/7 video series I built at the PMO and its strange parallel to a Boston “political roundup” Napolitan ran in 1960. The mobilization and agency problem. And how we used Foreign Affairs as a domestic platform during the Baird years.
- The mastery lesson: discipline is invisible. The best operators don’t look like operators. They stay focused on the next campaign because the next campaign is where they get tested again.
Bonus: Ideas that didn’t make the episode
1. The Newspaper That Beat a Sitting Senator
In 1968, Napolitan was running the campaign to defeat sitting U.S. Senator Ernest Gruening in Alaska. The campaign was bootstrapping its way through Mike Gravel’s name recognition problem with a creative move: it produced a free, full-colour newspaper supplement called Today in Alaska, made available to every newspaper in the state. Advertising was sold. Articles were written. And, by careful design, many of those articles mentioned or featured Gravel.
Within months, Today in Alaska had become the highest-circulation newspaper in the state. It was a campaign publication that no Alaskan reader thought of as a campaign publication. Senator Gruening’s advertising team, apparently unaware of what was happening, even purchased full-page ads about Gruening for the final pre-election issues — unwittingly funding the format that was sinking him.
The lesson is straightforward format can do a lot of the work. People process content presented as a newspaper the way they process newspapers, even when they know the newspaper has a sponsor. The mental category does the lifting before the reader has time to question it.
Napolitan figured this out in a state of 300,000 people, sixty years before brand-as-media became the default corporate playbook.
If you’ve ever wondered why corporate brand journalism — the McKinsey insights, the Goldman Sachs research notes, the CEO podcast — keeps multiplying, Today in Alaska is your answer. The format triggers the response.
2. Napolitan’s Candidate Characteristics List
About halfway through the book, Napolitan lists what he thinks actually matters in a candidate and what doesn’t, and most of it translates directly to executive selection in any organization with external stakeholders.
Important: intelligence, honesty, the ability to make decisions, grasp of issues, understanding of media, ability to raise funds and ask for money, willingness to work hard, ability to inspire confidence, flexibility, ability to absorb ideas, ability to delegate, sense of humour.
Not important: age, physical appearance, experience in office, net worth, family situation, race, religion, ethnic background, political contacts.
And by the time they’re ready to choose, the choice has been made for them by events.
Read that list again with a CEO in mind. How many boards overweight what Napolitan calls not-important — net worth, prior title, the right schools, the right contacts — and underweight what Napolitan calls important? The ability to make decisions, in particular, is the trait most absent in executives I’ve watched flame out under external scrutiny. They can’t decide. They workshop, they consult, they build consensus, they run out the clock.
3. The 1970 Carr Lesson: Why Your Innovation Wears Off
In 1968, Napolitan produced a half-hour political documentary for the Gravel campaign that he describes as one of the most effective pieces of media in the entire race. In 1970, he tried something similar for another Alaska candidate named Carr.
It didn’t work because in the two years between the campaigns, every operator in the country had started making half-hour political documentaries. The airwaves were full of them. What had been a novel format in 1968 was a saturated format by 1970, and the Carr campaign got lost in the noise.
The discipline isn’t to abandon what works. It’s to know when the field has caught up, and to keep moving before it does.
Napolitan’s takeaway: when you do something that works, the field copies you. The window of competitive advantage from any new tactic is short. The operators who stay ahead are the ones who keep moving, knowing full well that what once worked has now become what everyone is doing.
4. The McCarthy Paradox
In the 1968 New Hampshire Democratic primary, Senator Eugene McCarthy ran an insurgent campaign against Lyndon Johnson, primarily on the issue of opposition to the Vietnam War. McCarthy did far better than expected, and his strong showing helped push Johnson out of the race.
The popular narrative is that McCarthy’s voters rallied to him because of his anti-war position. The data tells a different story. A post-primary survey revealed that half of McCarthy’s voters had no idea what his position on Vietnam was. Many of them thought he was a hawk.
It’s another example that supports Napolitan’s claim that people vote for people, not for issues. The voters who pushed McCarthy to a strong second-place finish weren’t endorsing his policy. They were responding to a candidate who looked different from the establishment, who seemed honest, who showed up and asked them for their vote. The policy was supposed to be the engine. Turns out, it wasn't.
And if the audience doesn’t trust the person, the most carefully argued policy in the world won’t survive contact with them.
For practitioners, the lesson is a bit one. The fact sheet, the policy paper, the position statement — none of it is doing what the policy team thinks it’s doing. What’s doing the work is whether the audience trusts the person delivering it.