Instead of competing on policies, perhaps the competition is on brands.

Ideas come from the most interesting sources. In this instance, from The New York Times Reveals the Real Reason Why Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Can’t Gain Traction by Streiff. The actual article is a shallow rebuttal of an equally shallow original argument made by someone else.

But in amongst the words is this:

All in all, I think this theory is one of those self-pleasuring exercises to which our media is prone. If you look at the coverage given any campaign by the media, you will actually find next to no coverage of any significant issue. If you’re getting your economic commentary from any outlet that employs Paul Krugman, you’re really doing it all wrong. Quite honestly, the media are not at all reticent about pushing outlandish ideas when their reporters are sympathetic to the cause. If you’re trying to tell me the media did not push homosexual marriage and are not agitating for a pride of place for transgenderism now, you’re nuts.

Neither Warren nor Sanders failing to excite the masses is a mystery. Everyone knows Warren is a fraud and a liar. Even if you think President Trump is also a fraud and a liar you are forced to admit that Trump is, at least, an entertaining one who doesn’t care how you spend your money or how many sheets of toilet paper you use per bowel movement. Sanders is a communist. He’s a guy who honeymooned in the USSR while it was aiming nuclear missiles at the United States. No number of position papers and supporting experts is going to get that past a majority of Americans.

As to some of the other specifics. Americans aren’t, at least for another few decades, going to support a “wealth tax” because most Americans hate the IRS much more than they hate rich people. And a lot of us have a sneaking desire to be wealthy one day. Americans aren’t going to support Medicare for All because we saw how the government’s ability to make a soup sandwich out of a functioning program by the Obamacare debacle. Seniors don’t want the system changed. People who have other means don’t want to be a part of it.

The idea this sparks is that each politician has perhaps 3-5 markers which end up branding them in the popular mind. Not everyone will ascribe the same 3-5 markers to a given politician, but among the population, there will be 3-5 most popular markers which everyone will recognize. They become the emergent brand of the individual politician.

The markers may be more or less grounded in reality, but that does not obviate their relevance as markers. I presume they are not immutable but, as products of emergent order, they are also not easily changed.

The media bury themselves in the quotidian effluvia of a campaign, in the policy details, in the scandals, in the perceived claims of facts, in the debates. While that drives clicks, it is noise on top of the basics. Each voter, by a process of accretion, has created a 3-5 point brand for each politician and all the media attention gets filtered through those markers.

As an example, one of Trump's brand markers is almost certainly Successful Businessman. Now whether or not he is a successful businessman or whether he is the most successful businessman among his opponents is not especially germane. What is germane is that is his brand marker.

Trump is not the only businessman in the field. John Delaney, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer all have at least as good claim to the brand marker of Successful Businessman. Delaney and Bloomberg perhaps a better claim. But for reasons of timing and circumstance, my sense is that they don't have the marker Successful Businessman but the marker of Billionaire, a much more ambiguous brand. Oddly, the current candidate with the next closest brand to Successful Businessman is Andrew Yang who is frequently paired with the marker Successful Entrepreneur even though his ventures have been far less consequential than the three billionaires and the centimillionaire.

Left leaning journalists are inclined to argue that Trump is the beneficiary of a major inheritance and therefore more dilettante than businessman. They argue that he was only actually an adequate businessman, his fortune increasing with the market. They argue that he has had business failures in addition to his successes. Fair arguments but not pertinent. The more they talk about Trump as a businessman, the more they reinforce the brand element Successful Businessman.

How do brands get created? Well, who controls the narrative? Trump has been, explicitly or intuitively, defining his public brand for decades. For many of the others, it is more of an afterthought. For some, their brand is pretty close to just who they are. Bernie Sanders probably does not think a lot about branding and positioning. He is a Committed Socialist and therefore that is the brand marker which has emerged.

The individual contributes to their own brand by their own decisions and actions. They can invest, through advertising, in buying a brand, though that is usually not particularly successful. The media, of course, and often inadvertently, contributes to a candidate's brand by focusing on particular aspects of the candidate's persona.

Another thing to note about brand markers is that they say nothing about the comparative reality. If Candidate A is perceived as corrupt by more people than Candidate B, but Corruption is not one of the 3-5 markers for Candidate A, but is for Candidate B, then discussing corruption will always be damaging to B rather than A, regardless of the facts.

I think this is part of why the Russia Collusion campaign by Democrats and the MSM failed. In part it failed because there was no collusion, but that is just the factual aspect of the issue. Even if the accusation is false, it can still do damage. It is not that Trump couldn't have colluded. But his entire brand is so anchored in the US and on other markers that trying to introduce International Corruption or Russian Allegiance just did not easily fit. Ironically, it fit a lot more closely with Biden both because there was actual corruption but also because it was far more of a fit to his brand of Wise Older Statesman.

How might one determine a given politician's brand markers? There are actually four elements. What are the markers? How commonly are they held? How strongly are the held? And what is the relative prioritization of those markers (ordinal ranking)?

Extensive focus group testing and surveying would be one way, though terribly expensive and easily manipulated. Nexus has a feature which allows you to find conjoins which would be helpful - what are the adjectives and adverbs which are most often associated in print and media with a particular name.

The reality is that there is no quick and easy way to do so. Or not an obvious one.

Here is my top of mind, fact-free, stream-of-conscious, association for some of the major names. These are the attributes I think many/most might associate with each of these names regardless of whether they are actually true.

Trump - Successful Businessman, Gauche, Good Times, Street Fighter, MAGA

Clinton - Tired, Sleazy, Health, Corrupt, Passive Aggressive

Warren - Fresh Faced, Academic, Works the System for Her Own Advantage, Naive Technocrat, Fake

Sanders - Genuine Conviction, Angry, Socialist, Enduring

Harris - Insular, Narrow Focus, Insider, Racist, Incompetent

Biden - Good Old Joe, Creepy Uncle, Corrupt, Wise Older Statesman, Old Ways

Buttigieg - Youth, Accomplishment, Smart, Wide Experience, Shallow Experience

I don't know whether these are indeed the most commonly held markers (on average), whether they are in the right order, how widely they are held, or how strongly they are held. But they might be in the ballpark.

And of course you have to apply all of this to the simple name recognition in the first place. For people who are paying close attention, the above markers for Buttigieg might be more or less accurate. However, probably 70% of the voting population could not at this point yet identify Buttigieg by name or picture.

None of this was the point of Streiff in his article but this is where his article drove my thoughts.

I think it is an interesting model. What are the candidate's brands and how does the noisy MSM coverage reinforce or degrade those brand markers?

Instead of competing on policies, perhaps the competition is on brands.