Marketing guru Seth Godin notices a major shift in candidates and the campaigns they run:
When TV was king, the secret to media was money. If you have money, you can reach the masses. The best way to get money is to make powerful interests happy, so they'll give you money you can use to reach the masses and get re-elected.
Now, though...When attention is scarce and there are many choices, media costs something other than money. It costs interesting. If you are angry or remarkable or an outlier, you're interesting, and your idea can spread. People who are dull and merely aligned with powerful interests have a harder time earning attention, because money isn't sufficient.
Thus, as media moves from TV-driven to attention-driven, we're going to see more outliers, more renegades and more angry people driving agendas and getting elected. I figure this will continue until other voices earn enough permission from the electorate to coordinate getting out the vote, communicating through private channels like email and creating tribes of people to spread the word. (And they need to learn not to waste this permission hassling their supporters for money).
Mass media is dying, and it appears that mass politicians are endangered as well.
I'm iffy about Godin's repeated use of "angry," but agree completely that today's candidate requires a wholly different approach to reach today's voter. This explains the success of those candidates with a compelling narrative over those with merely a powerful pedigree.
We saw this across the nation in the GOP primaries (Rubio vs. Crist, Miller vs. Murkowski, Lt. Col. West vs. Brady) and appear to be seeing it again for the general election (Angle vs. Reid, Bielat vs. Frank, McClung vs. Grijalva). While Godin mentions the need for money, the interesting candidate can now use small-donor moneybombs to erase the seemingly insurmountable financial advantages of incumbency.
Let's face it: a massive TV buy won't cut it in an age where many of us rarely turn on the TV. Saturating a local market via print and radio won't reach those of us on our iPads and iPods. But an interesting story will find us wherever we are. And it will move us to tell everyone we know.
The future belongs to the compelling, not just the connected.