By Steve Grubbs

In 2004, the junior senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, gave a compelling speech at the Democrat National Convention that propelled him onto the national state and ultimately into the White House.

In 1964, Hollywood Actor, Ronald Reagan, made a similarly impactful speech that launched his political career into the California Governor’s mansion and ultimately, the White House.

We know that a powerful and compelling stump speech can motivate and persuade both the party faithful as well as undecided voters. But not everyone can be Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. That being said, every candidate can - with preparation and practice - give a strong speech as they campaign for office. Toward that end, here are a few tips I’ve picked up over the years:

1. As you give your speech, think in terms of football commentators during a televised game. There are generally two, the play-by-play announcer and the color commentator. For the most part, color commentary fills up about 70% of the time and play-by-play 30%.  A speech is the same. Play-by-play is your analysis, facts and explanation of issues or the campaign landscape. Color commentary are the stories, humor and shocking facts that wrap around your analysis and facts. Ronald Reagan was a masterful story teller and because of this, his speeches were as much entertainment as they were dry political analysis.

2. Organize your speech in a framework that makes sense. First, a colorful introduction. Second, an explanation of the problem - which is probably the reason you are running for office. Third, define your solutions. Fourth, define your opponent’s wrong direction. And fifth, bring it home by painting a picture of life or a particular part of this world that is better once your solution is implemented.

3. Humor matters. People are more open to your message when they are smiling and laughing. Don’t limit your remarks to one canned joke at the beginning. Feel free to drop self-deprecating stories throughout with a smattering of one liners when the subject material begins to get dry. Humor can be hard so be sure to practice. Start by practicing in front of a mirror, then move onto a real crowd. Just because humor doesn’t work the first time you try it, doesn’t mean you can’t massage it and try it again. The world’s best comedians are constantly writing new material and testing it until it works. If it never seems to catch on, then pitch it and try something else. But delivering humorous lines is like everything else in life, the more time you invest into getting it right, the more likely you will be to succeed.

4. Study speeches that work. With YouTube today, it’s easier than ever to watch people who are good at giving speeches. TedX speeches are a good example and there are a lot of highly rated speeches to watch. But you can also search for the Reagan and Obama speeches that were mentioned earlier. But one of my favorite speeches of all time was actually given by a high school student and one you might know: Josh Gad. Josh is a very successful Hollywood movie star and the voice of the Snowman in Disney’s popular animated film, Frozen. But he really showed his future star quality when he was competing in the final round of the National Forensic League’s oratory finals. His speech not only won first place, but many seasoned high school speech coaches consider it the best they’ve ever seen. You can find it by searching on YouTube for ‘Josh Gad NFL Oratory Finals.’

5. Use questions to your advantage. Paloma Cantero-Gomez wrote a column for Forbes that had this to say about questions: “Get audience feedback in real-time. Finding out what your public is thinking while you are presenting can help not just to keep them awake but also to potentially slightly tweak the presentation as you go... Praise people's questions….Everybody likes to feel intelligent.  Answer every question. Even if you do not have a very clear response. 'I am not sure but let me consult it and come back to you' is always better than making people feel ignored. Ask them if it is okay to move on.

6. Personalize your remarks. Most of your speeches will have different and unique audience locations and will likely be in different locations and cities. Use this to your advantage. If you can personalize your remarks to the community or the people in the room, leave enough flexibility in your speech to do so. It might be a factory that closed, a shooting in a local neighborhood or a local hero that deserves recognition, but each of these instances give the audience a closer connection to the person speaking.

Without a doubt, the stump speech matters for a candidate. People take cues from what a candidate says and how it is presented. It’s easy to shortchange preparation for a candidate’s remarks, but great candidates find a way to invest the time that a stump speech needs to be successful.

Steve Grubbs is a former state representative from the State of Iowa, as well as State Party Chairman. He has consulted for six presidential campaigns as well as hundreds of state and local candidates. He also coached high school speech and debate for ten years.

Due to the miracle of the modern smartphone, you can now produce an ad that is high enough quality that it will look pretty decent. But this works as long as you don’t try to overreach on production. Here are the things you will need:

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Three Strategies to Move the Undecided Voter Your Way

By Steve Grubbs

In most elections, it is the undecided voter who determines the election. This group of voters may be partisan or non-partisan, but for whatever reason, they choose to hold an undecided position rather than stake their claim with a candidate. First, let’s understand these undecided voters:

• Early in an election, there are generally a lot of undecided voters, but the number will narrow dramatically the closer one gets to Election Day.
• Many voters are undecided as they stand in the voting booth or stare at their early voting ballot and will ultimately make a decision based on factors like party affiliation or name identification.
• Sometimes a voter will choose not to vote at all if they don’t have a firm opinion rather than cast an uninformed ballot.
• Just because a voter is undecided does not mean they are uneducated about candidates. While it’s easy for voters to have an opinion on the president or governor, races such as city council, school board and state representative are full of information gaps that voters rely on to form a judgment
• Undecided voters can be a a big risk to incumbents. Many pollsters use a rule of thumb that on Election Day, this type of voter will break 2:1 against the incumbent and for the challenger.

As a candidate, challenger or incumbent, it’s important to understand that there is a finite amount of time for voter contact and investing that limited time on undecided voters is critical. If you accept that premise, then here are some tactics and strategies as you prepare to win the vote of the undecided:

• SWING PRECINCTS.  First, assume there are geographical areas that are traditionally more likely to have undecided or ‘swing’ voters. These are not necessarily the same thing, but for this purpose, they are close enough. This exercise is fairly simple. If you are running in a presidential year election, you go back to the results of the most recent presidential year and look at the election results by precinct.  In each precinct, break the results out by the party affiliation you are running under. If you are a Republican, then you want to look at the percentage of the highest achieving GOP candidate and the lowest. So, let’s say the GOP Senate candidate received 72% in Precinct One and the US House candidate received 42%. Your swing in this district is 30%. But let’s say in Precinct Two, the Senate candidate received 82% and the House Candidate received 60%. This would be a swing of 22%. This means that you are more likely to find voters who are judging candidates by individual merits rather than party affiliation by 8% percent and therefore deserves your attention.

• DOOR KNOCKING. Most candidates will not have time to knock on every door and campaign one-to-one, so they prioritize. That prioritization may come from ranking swing precincts and it may come from common sense. For example, if you are from the town of Blue Grass and your opponent is from Green Grass, but neither is from Red Grass, well, you know you’d better get to Red Grass rather than spending your time in Green Grass or Blue Grass.  When you do, going door to door is the best strategy. This is an easy - but time-consuming exercise. In my first election, which as an upset victory against an incumbent, I knocked on 10,000 doors. I prioritized my door knocking. I approached a door with two things: a pamphlet and a notepad. The pamphlet was my persuasion piece and the notepad was the name ID builder. You see, I knew that my pamphlet was likely headed to the garbage within the first 24 hours they had it in their hand. But people don’t throw away notepads. My notepad - with my smiling friendly face and name - sat there for months, building name ID and identifying myself as a friendly candidate.

• POLLING SWING VOTERS FOR ISSUE MOVERS. If you are fortunate enough to have a polling budget, then it’s critical to break out undecided voters on issues that they feel strongly about. Here’s how you do it:
• Take a survey and ask voters the ballot questions: if the election were held today would they vote for candidate A or B. People will have opinions, but some group in the middle will declare themselves undecided.
• When you get to the section about issues, hopefully you have already identified some key issues that separate you and the person you are running against. These questions should be presented to the voter - described in a way that is similar to how they might hear about them on the campaign trail. Sometimes this means that you will argue the position from the side of each candidate and other times it means that you will just present the issue as a straight up one-liner.
• Voters should be given limited options as they make the decision, but it’s critical that you measure intensity. For example, you might ask about teacher testing. One candidate may love this and the other candidate may hate this. Your question to voters might go something like this:
• Jim Johnson believes that teachers should be tested for competency to reward the best one and root out those who are not competent. Mary Smith believes this is an unnecessary distraction and intrusion into schools. She is opposed to this practice.  Which candidate do you agree with.
• [at this point, you get an answer, but that’s not enough. You next want to push for intensity] And would you say you strongly agree with Johnson/Smith or just somewhat?
• You will likely find that some voters say they strongly agree with one side or the other. If the results lean your way, you next want to look at what those undecided voters said. What you typically find with polling is that middle-of-the road voters have their own preferences separate from what party-affiliated voters will believe. Once you find an issue that leans heavily to those undecided voters - you know what should go on your pamphlet.

• BUILDING NAME IDENTIFICATION. In some races, voters are faced with races with low-profile issues or non-party affiliated candidates. In this instance, there may be little to be used in the decision making process. This is when name identification becomes very important. Some candidates may be a high profile member of their community and have high name ID, but in my years of experience, we find that most candidates need to spend some money and use some shoe leather to establish that name identification. Here are some easy ways to build name ID:
• Knock on doors, introduce yourself and leave behind a notepad.
• Cover the district or city in yard signs. Make sure the neighbors neighbor has a yard sign. In doing so, you have deployed little standing endorsements in yards across your voting area.
• Use inexpensive ads in social media to get a message out to voters. $1,000 on Facebook is usually going to reach 10,000 - 25,000 voters.
• Decorate your car and the cars of others. Bumper magnets, car door magnets and car toppers will be seen by thousands of voters over a period of months. This will establish name ID very quickly (but be a polite voter)!

Winning the undecided voter is critical to winning elections - that is just as true for the President of the United States as it is for the candidate running for city council. No campaign should chart it’s course for victory without having an understanding of how to approach the all important undecided voter.

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Steve Grubbs was elected to office at the age of 24 after defeating a well-liked incumbent. Since then, he has gone on to assist more than 500 candidates win election to office.

In the hierarchy of winning a campaign, the ground floor is name ID. It leads to fundraising, volunteers and ultimately, an edge with undecided voters. It’s true that if you have a million dollar budget, most of your name ID is going to come from paid advertising, but for the 95% of campaigns with limited budgets, it must be earned in other ways. 

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From the 1950’s to the 1990’s, HM Perry School served elementary children from Davenport, a river town on the Mississippi in Iowa. In the 1970’s, one particular student, Steve Grubbs, was traversing its hallways learning all the basics.  Miss Ellis would teach him to read, Mr. Christman demonstrated the basics of square dance and a proper pull up and Mr. Sharp explained the mysteries of the Solar System as well as some basic chemistry. Of course, learning was done with chalkboards, books (with real paper pages) and of course, the inimitable #2 pencil. It was good. It was a different time.

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Raising money for a political campaign is not a guarantee of victory on election night, but it sure helps.

As a candidate, you will need money for mailers, digital media ads, yard signs and a lot more. So, how does a novice candidate raise money? Direct mail is one proven method.

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Yard signs bring viability and votes to a campaign, all the while forcing it to rise up and accomplish its organizational goals as well. For those candidates wanting to even the playing field with an opponent who has an advantage, making yard signs a central focus in your next local or legislative campaign can play a part toward that goal.

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There’s no silver bullet for winning a campaign. It requires hard work, strategy, money, name ID and issues that matter to voters. Here are 22 tactics and observations to help organize these in your plan

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Grubbs’ power over the signage, as well as his politically convenient location, has made him something of a prominent figure in the political world. It also makes him a creative mind to be reckoned with. Just ask Rand Paul, who hired Grubbs as a consultant in 2014."

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Aѕ wе mоvе іntо аn еlесtіоn уеаr іn 2016, a nеw ѕtudу finds lawn ѕіgnѕ that ѕhоw uр bеfоrе elections саn асtuаllу mау mаkе a dіffеrеnсе, especially іn сlоѕе rасеѕ.

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There are certain campaign tactics that are used in almost every campaign: Yard Signs, Bumper Stickers, a literature piece, broadcast advertising, etc. However, this article isn’t about those. Instead it’s about 11 of the best ideas I’ve run across over the years that don’t happen to get used in most campaigns.

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