A successful political campaign depends on several factors, many of which are the responsibility of the candidates themselves. Primarily, a potential candidate must create a good plan for their campaign that will include a list of the essential components (Priyowidodo & Sari, 2019). One of them is targeting. This is the process of purposefully identifying who the voters are, which ones will definitely vote for the given candidate, and which ones can eventually be convinced to vote for the candidate (Perloff, 2018). The latter, while working on identifying the target group, must create a list of registered voters. Otherwise, the candidate might end up wasting their time and energy on those who will not be authorized to vote whatsoever. At this stage, the candidate establishes the audience that will ensure the successful outcome of the campaign.
Another essential component is communications, where the candidate must create a list of the media sources to communicate their message to the public. They should also cover the campaign website, press kit, paid advertising, brochures, and newsletters that will be sent directly to the voters’ email boxes. (Subramanian et al., 2019). All of this is a process of reaching the voters and simply communicating the campaign’s main principles. For me, it is the most important part of the political campaign, as it shows the candidate’s concern for me as an individual voter, their genuine belief that my vote will matter. From the point of view of an average voter, the candidate’s effort to speak to each of us and express their desire to make us listen and participate shows their determination to run for the position and do their work properly. Thus, I think that the communications plan is the most valuable component necessary for a successful political campaign.
References
Perloff, R.M. (2018). The Dynamics of political communication: Media and politics in a digital age. Taylor and Francis Ltd.
Priyowidodo, G., & Sari, Y. D. (2019). Social media and political campaign. Petra Christian University. Web.
Subramanian, S., Cohn, T., & Baldwin, T. (2019). Target based speech act classification in political campaign text. Web.