Hal Malchow Is Going to Die on Thursday. He Has One Last Message for Democrats. [View all]

That vow hung over Malchow for decades as he helped to pioneer the specialty of direct mail in political campaigns, first with letters seeking donor contributions and then glossy flyers hunting for votes. Malchow oversaw mail programs for five Democratic presidential nominees and built one of the country’s largest voter-contact businesses. Along the way, he transformed his lo-fi field into an unlikely realm for high-tech innovation, including the emerging technique of microtargeting and the use of randomized field experiments in campaigns.

But in 2019, Malchow was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and last year began to show signs of real decline — his short-term memory would fail him, and he would get irritable or cranky where he had once been able to regulate his emotions. So around his 72nd birthday last year, Malchow began communicating with an assisted end-of-life organization in Switzerland to make plans for the end.

Before scheduling his death, Malchow made sure he had time to launch a final salvo at the way campaigns are run. Malchow built his career championing marginal improvements to existing tactics, like rewriting a leaflet’s wording to improve turnout among recipients by 1 or 2 percentage points. But now, as he faces his ultimate deadline, Malchow is taking aim at a much bigger piece of electoral strategy: winning minds via mass media.........

Political communicators are sticking to approaches developed for an era when ticket-splitters and swing voters composed a sizeable chunk of the electorate. But with a body politic that has sorted into two highly polarized parties — with just one-tenth of voters torn between them — the logic of persuading voters to support a candidate has grown obsolete. Ad campaigns should instead promote the Democratic Party itself, Malchow proposes, particularly at moments when news events might help it win new adherents, such as after a mass shooting, when gun-control policy is thrust back into the news and voters might be ready to reconsider their allegiances.

“Ninety percent of voters are choosing parties,” he writes. “Yet our approach to advertising has not changed at all. Almost 100 percent of our advertising dollars are spent on candidate choice. The decision driving 9 out of 10 votes is not being addressed at all.”



https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/03/16/hal-malchow-scheduled-death-democrats-00147362