In real estate, they say the three most important things are location, location, and location. Well, when it comes to presidential campaigns, the three most important things are preparation, preparation, and preparation. As anyone who has ever done it will tell you, running for president is difficult. It takes years to prepare the groundwork and foundation of a formidable organization. Most presidential candidates need to run for president multiple times to learn the hard lessons.
Hillary Clinton has been preparing for years. She ran once before in 2008 and pretty much never stopped. It is one of the main reasons why she is still the Democratic frontrunner despite a Sanders campaign that is running in a political environment that heavily favors outsiders and anti-establishment candidates. If Hillary Clinton didn’t have the campaign money, the staff, the infrastructure, and the process, it is likely that Sanders would be the presumptive Democratic nominee right now. Don’t tell Bernie this, but Hillary is already looking towards the General Election. In fact, her campaign is running ads in New York right now attacking Donald Trump.
{mosads}How are we on the Republican side? Compared to 2012, we are far behind. To put everything in context, Mitt Romney officially kicked off his campaign in June 2011. By April 5, 2012, Mitt Romney was the nominee and Romney Victory was established — a joint fundraising committee comprised of Romney for President, the RNC, and four state parties. Throughout the course of the campaign, Romney Victory raised around $500 million dollars. By delaying the choice of our nominee, the party’s chances of winning in November are crippled.
As a campaign segues into the General Election, the entire operation needs to scale quickly. One crucial challenge is onboarding high-level talent. Talent needs to be recruited, hired, assimilated, and integrated seamlessly into an organization. This takes time—not to mention a mountain of human resources work that needs to be done properly. Even the Miami Heat couldn’t win a championship right away when they assembled the “big three”. Likewise, campaign staff workers need time to acclimate themselves and learn to work with the current campaign structure. Some staff members will adapt quickly. Others won’t. Everyone has a unique personality and work approach. Time is needed to root out any dysfunction or iron out any friction. Just like sports, campaigns need a pre-season. For many nominees, the time between clinching the nomination and the convention acts as a sort of training period for the staff. Few mistakes can be made once in the General. Every day and week counts as you head into Election Day.
Along the same lines, as the size of a campaign’s staff grows, the campaign’s culture becomes more important. Every campaign has a culture. It starts from the top and reverberates to the lowest level staffer. Since general elections involve high-level complicated work, departments cannot remain hermetically sealed, but need to communicate often and seamlessly with other departments. Everyone can do their job effectively and minimize errors when information is shared. In addition, during a campaign, all staff members regardless of department will need to be redeployed to assist another department that has the highest priority work. For example, every department might be sent to help political in the field to help the ground game in a must win state.
While campaigns will always experience growing pains, the ones that have the time and opportunity to scale naturally will be put in a better position to win. A General Election brings complexity not experienced in the primary season. Events get more elaborate. More attention needs to be paid to accommodating press on planes and for increasingly large events. Schedules will be tighter as time is compressed. FEC reports will be bigger and capture a lot more activity. The demands on the legal department will grow. Procedures and process need to be created so that staff can execute in an orderly manner despite all the expected chaos.
Right now the Republican Party is in limbo. We don’t have a nominee yet, but we need to start preparing as if we do so that when we do have a nominee, we can spring to action and make up for lost time. The Hillary Clinton juggernaut is ready. Our party needs to take action today so that we can prepare, compete, and win in November.
Brad Crate is the CFO for Red Curve Solutions and is the former CFO for the 2012 Romney campaign