Frank Underwood has it right — Politics is more than theater, it’s show business.

Why Donald Trump is the Republican front-runner.

Sunday I woke up to the realization that Donald Trump now has 384 delegates and has won 12 out of 19 states for the Republican presidential nomination. At this point, barring some catastrophic event to the Trump campaign or an all out coup by the Republican establishment at the convention later this year, Trump will be the Republican candidate for president. And as I sit there, a line from the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime goes floating through my head, “How did I get here?”

“Same as it ever was” — This is the more telling line. Trump is the same as he ever was. But how did he get to this point?

This is a question people have been trying to answer for months. Vox did a great story about how the authoritarian persona of Trump is what is appealing to voters and goes into why.

But the biggest reason Trump has gotten to this place is because he has perfected his brand — a brand that he himself values at $3 billion dollars. He has honed his brand to the point where facts just don’t stick to him. Last week, John Oliver had an interesting piece on Trump where he looks at the four pillars of the Trump persona:

He is a successful businessman;

He tells it like it is;

He is independent and not controlled by DC or corporate entities; and

He is tough.

While some great points were presented by Oliver as to why each of these pillars don’t stand up, Trump continues to roll on.

And it’s Trump’s brand that has been the magic bullet separating him from his opponents in the Republican primary — mainly Rubio and Cruz — the two remaining opponents that still matter. The biggest difference between Trump and Cruzio (Rubio + Cruz = Cruzio, other options were Ruz, Rubz, and Crubio) is that the familiarity the public has with Trump and his brand has spanned 25+ years, while with Cruizio it has only been 3–6 years. In addition to duration, the more telling difference is the type of brands they are projecting. Trump is something we haven’t seen in a higher office for a very long time; while Cruzio is more of the conventional politician who subscribes to the conventional and antiquated means of establishing his brand, i.e. yard signs, door knocking and shaking hands and kissing babies.

But to really understand how people perceive Trump you have to go back and look at how he cultivated his brand over time.

Trump Brand

For the past 28 years there have been rumblings of Trump running for president. Back in 1988 Republican activist Mike Dunbar proposed the idea after he didn’t like the slate of Republican presidential candidates. Since then, Trump for prez has been a thing that pops up every presidential election cycle — mainly when there is a wide-open field.

But while speculation around when or if Trump would run for president continued to swirl, his brand continued to grow and evolve. In 1990, Vanity Fair ran a feature on Trump and his divorce with Ivana Trump — who were already a very high profile couple in New York, but not necessary nationally. But the allure of a powerful couple and a tumultuous divorce got the public’s attention, and from there the true ascent of who Trump is today began.

In the Vanity Fair feature, there are examples of how we see Trump today — brash and telling it like it is:

“Trump was trying to be philosophical. “When a man leaves a woman, especially when it was perceived that he has left for a piece of ass — a good one! — there are 50 percent of the population who will love the woman who was left,” he told me.”

Powerful businessman:

“The Japanese still took Donald Trump to be the very image of power and money, and seemed to believe, as Trump once had, that this red-marble-and-brass monument was the center of the world.”

Already there were some foundational elements of the public persona that is Donald Trump. One of the more telling pieces of the Vanity Fair article was:

“He was already fodder for the dailies and the weeklies, but he was desperate for national attention.”

And what Trump did from 1987 — when he published, “The Art of the Deal” to today, is cultivate a brand that gets him the attention he craved back in 1980.

By far the most impactful thing Trump has done to shape his brand, even more so than his real estate dealings, was launching the television show The Apprentice.

There had already been speculation that Trump would run for president in 2000 and again in 2004, but instead of running, Trump looked to focus on building his brand and launch The Apprentice, which turned out to be the right move. The first season of The Apprentice had an average of 20.7 million viewers, with the season finale reaching 28.5 million viewers and being named the most popular show in 2004 (not by Trump but by outside sources). The Apprentice went on to have a couple other seasons, with season two averaging 16.5 million viewers and finally bottoming out at around 9 million viewers per week in season six, which eventually evolved into the very popular Celebrity Apprentice.

The point is, during that three year time period, Trump was on primetime television looking like an executive that was commanding, decisive and brash. In essence, he couldn’t buy better promotion. I remember sitting in my apartment with my best friend yelling at the television and cheering when Trump said, “You’re fired” to one of the poor suckers on the other side of the table. At that point, Trump did something that impacted his viability as a candidate like nothing else had previously — he made himself entertaining and likeable. Since 2004, Trump really hasn’t been off of television — be it a new season of The Apprentice, Celebrity Apprentice or just riffing on some perceived slight.

And that is why nothing seems to stick to him.

Failed mortgage company? Bankruptcy? Class action suit for Trump University? Who the fuck cares — at least that is the manta of the people who support Trump. What they see is the guy who sat behind the conference table saying, “You’re fired” to people who couldn’t get the job done.

And it is that brand of Trump that is leading him to the Republican nomination.

That’s the difference between Trump and Cruzio, no other politician has had the same path that Trump has. The closest comparisons could be Arnold Schwarzenegger who used his fame and catch phrases to win two terms as California Governor and Ronald Reagan who parlayed his fame and folksiness into two terms as President and a reputation as one of the best politicians of the modern era.

So what does this mean going forward? The best way to put it is what Frank Underwood said in the most recent season of House of Cards, “Politics is no longer just theater, it’s show business.”

Politicians need to develop their brand and manage their campaign in a new way. For as long as I can remember, there is a certain equation of establishing yourself as a politician — wear red or blue ties, develop some conventional looking logo, stick to red, white or blue colors and try not to do anything that offends anyone.

But since President Bill Clinton went on Arsenio Hall and played the saxophone, the nature of how we perceive politicians has evolved and truly escalated to new heights in the 2016 election cycle — and this is mainly due to Trump.

So what needs to change to keep up in this hyper-political word full of too much noise to make an impact? For politicians, both high level and newly minted, there are three essential pieces, persona, exposure and logo.

Persona and Exposure

Persona and exposure are by far the most important pieces of a politician’s brand. With Trump, his persona has been solidified by his 28+ years in the public eye. With Cruz and Rubio, their personas are still being developed and both have had limited exposure to the public — which is why “Cruz has no friends” has stuck everywhere and “Rubio Robot” stuck so well in New Hampshire.

But with the advent of new technology this shouldn’t be the case.

Candidates have the ability to directly and instantaneously talk to their constituents, something Trump does very well. Since joining Twitter in 2008, Marco Rubio has tweeted 5,177 times, Cruz joined in 2009 and has tweeted 14,600 times and Trump who also joined in 2009 has tweeted 31,000 times — double Cruz and six times as much as Rubio. In addition to volume of tweets, Trump has the most followers, with 6.62 million, Cruz at 800,000 and Rubio at 1.2 million. Again, this is no surprise, Trump has been in the spotlight for a long time. So what’s the point? The point is, like a startup with a new product, politicians have the tools available to them to rapidly scale their brand — the issue is that they aren’t doing it or they just don’t know how to.

Cruz, who has the least amount of experience of all the candidates, has been one of the few who has done a good job of scaling up quickly. Cruz was relatively unknown nationally until the federal government shutdown of 2013 — that of which Cruz was nearly solely responsible of orchestrating. Using his hatred of the Affordable Care Act as his base message, and embracing the “haters gonna hate” philosophy, Cruz has rapidly scaled his brand through Twitter and media-grabbing headlines to where he is today, second place in the Republican presidential nominating process.

Rubio on the other hand is suffering from limited exposure. The most memorable thing Rubio has done to date is give the Republican response for the State of the Union in 2013, where he sweat profusely and drank water mid-speech, something Trump has latched onto and hilariously exploited. The other brand issue Rubio is having has to do with who he is aligned with, the Republican establishment. At this point, the Republican establishment is looked at as “do nothing obstructionists” — and it doesn’t help that he was in the Senate during the least productive and second least productive Congress in modern history.

In order to achieve success going forward, more politicians need to embrace technology, increase exposure and direct contact with constituents — something that will come with a new generation of candidates. And when I say, “embrace technology,” I don’t mean spamming the shit out of possible voters. This is something the Democrats had a real problem with last election cycle — especially the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee[1]. Email headlines like[2] “Breaking: Impeachment”, “Kiss all hope goodbye”, “email, email, email, WHY?”, “missed emails”, and “we keep emailing” are some of the actual emails I recieved. Some days I would open up my inbox and have at least 10 new emails a day from Democrats in some capacity. Granted, I know how email lists work; there are few things that are as valuable as voter and/or donation email list in a campaign, especially if your campaign is small. But what campaigns still fail to understand is that email fatigue is a real thing — and leads to animosity and lack of support from your previously supportive and happy voters.

So what I mean by technology is using targeted digital ads though Google or Bing. I remember being on a small campaign with the candidate raising nearly $100,000 with $80,000 of the budget going towards direct mail. In case you don’t know, direct mail is the analog version of Google display ads — targeted ads delivered through the mail. And the crazy thing is that it works. It increases a candidate’s exposure with very little barrier. So why not use the same theory of targeting specific messages to hyper-targeted audiences?

For instance, use interest targeting to go after voters who have previously searched for topics related to “jobs” or “economy” and have your display ad on the pages that person is browsing and follow the targeted person until they click — so then the candidate is associated with jobs and the economy. No one did this better than the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns — other campaigns should focus on this being a key component of their campaign strategy.

While 2008 and 2012 campaigns of President Obama have been held up as a gold standard of integrating new technology to effectively reach voters, it was not just the President’s use of technology that grew his brand rapidly, but also his unconventional embrace of nontraditional design elements in his logo and campaign content.

Logo

In 2008, the most iconic piece of political design of the last 20 years was on full display with Shepard Fairey’s “Hope” poster. While designs like the “Hope” poster have been used in other countries to depict political candidates and leaders, it is not something we had seen in the United States. Maybe it’s because he’s not American (only kidding), the Obama Campaign did something fairly unconventional; they embraced the design of an independent artist and made it a major piece of their branding strategy — which helped evoke the emotion of the voters they were trying to reach.

And that’s what made their brand so impactful — the acceptance and embrace of emotion — it was memorable. What typical campaigns miss is the idea that design should evoke some emotion — a feeling. Instead, most campaigns play it safe and stick with red, white and blue, some type of big text and are done. Not every campaign will have the same level of success as the Obama campaign, not every design will have the emotional appeal like the “Hope” poster, and there is some risk-taking political candidates have to embrace in doing so, but the payoff could be huge.

I’ve been on a campaign where the candidate didn’t bow to conventional political design. I was doing field in New Hampshire for the 2006 election cycle and my candidate was running for State Senate. She had previously worked in government, serving under multiple governors as the Deputy Commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services and had never previously run for office. In addition to her government background, she was also a talented artist — and with that, she designed her own campaign sign (pictured below).

The signs themselves aren’t a groundbreaking piece of artwork, but there are some unconventional aspects of the sign, mainly the colors. I remember when I went down to the State Senate’s Democratic Campaign Headquarters — reactions ranged from “Purple and black, really?” to “What the fuck is she thinking” to “Who the hell said yes to that?” But as campaign season went on, it was her signs that really stuck out — be it on the side of the road or at polling places doing viz. And in addition to sticking out among the crowd of signs, the design evoked a message of an outsider, of someone who hadn’t run for office and wasn’t part of the establishment, and of femininity — all of which were important at the time[3].

Getting back to Trump and Cruzio, all three have fairly conventional logos — with Trump evoking bold, in-your-face with his all caps logo, which match his persona — like he is yelling at you, Rubio embracing youth and startup design trends — like he was built in a startup lab — by having his name in all lowercase with no space between the first and last name and finally Cruz’s logo looks like something an oil company would use.

The point being, a candidate’s logo should embody the essence of the campaign, it should evoke emotion and effectively link back to the persona the candidate is portraying.

So where are we with all this?

Trump is seemingly unstoppable at this point because he is the master of show business this campaign season. The Apprentice was the smartest business move he has ever made, and Mark Burnett (Executive Producer of The Apprentice) should be credited with Trump’s assention. Trump, knowingly or not, has embraced this new style of campaigning and flourished in it.

Over the last four election cycles digital advertising and microtargeting have taken a front seat in how campaigns are executed. What now needs to catch up is the way candidates — in both big and small campaigns — portray themselves, molding their brand through increased exposure, adoption of technology and better design.

The only risk we run at this point is ushering in a generation of Trump politicians — which should scare all of us — I think one is enough for a lifetime.