Modern Campaign Tactics: Lessons from the IAPC Conference

Porter O’Brien founder and partner Jordan O’Brien was recently accepted to the board of International Association of Political Consultants (IAPC). He attended the IAPC international conference in the Dominican Republic on November 9 to 12 where he learned about modern political campaign tactics and participated on a panel covering Canada’s spring election. 

This week, we interviewed him about the importance of political consultants, what we can learn from them, and how campaign tactics are relevant even after the campaign.

Q: Why hire a political consultant?

A: Political consultants are just as diverse and niched as the trades are. You might hire a plumber to fix the sink, while you hire a carpenter to fix your deck, and then there are general contractors. It’s the same in political consulting, where you have general consultants and then niche categories of candidate, policy, finance, communications, and organization. Their skills lie in getting candidates elected, and hiring that expertise could mean the difference between winning or losing by a couple hundred or thousand votes.

Q: What were some of the main takeaways from this year’s conference?

A: There were several presentations that stayed with me this year. First on AI: It’s integrating into every aspect of our lives and that includes campaigning. We heard that AI was being used to hire campaigners en masse, and track their progress as they move door-to-door. 

Second: Polling has become a lot harder to do in the modern day with all of these spam calls. It’s become more complicated to get quality polling data because of that. It’s easy to do second-rate polling, where AI writes your numbers and comes back with cheap results. It’s not recommended. But what we learned was modern polling uses a multi-pronged strategy to reach a representative sample. Good polling uses text messages, phone calls, and surprisingly advertises within in-phone gaming apps. Users can get in-game credits  as an incentive to do surveys. And this is what reaches that hard-to-reach demographic of young men. 

The presenter/pollster that used this for the 2024 American election actually correctly predicted the outcome, with 49 states’ results correct. And without the survey results from those in-app games, his polls were the same as everyone else. So it just proves that, as always, it’s important to consider your audience.

Q: What have you learned from attending four years of IAPC?

A: Political consultants from around the world travel to IAPC. There are about 50% attendees from the US, 25% from Europe, and 25% from other regions around the world. And because it’s only a conference of about 150 people, there’s the opportunity to connect and learn from a variety of diverse experiences.

In Canada, every four years there's about 20 elections where a consultant could be engaged and money is spent. The US, by contrast, would have 5,000. Plus, there's no spending limits. So for that reason, anything that you can try is done in the United States. It’s the place to learn from and every year there are a range of presentations from the US on cutting edge tactics and strategies.

Q: How can you use the takeaways from this conference in campaigns and Porter O’Brien’s other services?

A: Political consulting tactics can be used within and outside of political consulting. They’re highly relevant, from getting your message out there to collecting public opinion research before you start any type of campaign. These people are from all over the world and have a breadth of knowledge from across the political spectrum. 

During election campaigns, Porter O’Brien helps a lot of our clients try to get their message into the media, into political party platforms, and into the public dialogue to make their issues be something that people pay attention to when they vote and decide how to vote. We have a lot of people from multiple political backgrounds with campaign experience. All of these insights from IAPC can be used in that framework. 

A lot of countries look for political consultants externally because they may have a different way of doing things. We’re open to working with these clients to bring that diverse perspective that they may be seeking. Porter O’Brien is very client-oriented and results oriented. We can offer a different perspective, a different way of doing things, and we have that Maritime friendliness. 

Q: You’ve mostly recently been nominated and appointed to be on the board of the International Association of Political Consultants. How do you see your position on the board contributing to Porter O’Brien and our services?

A: It’s a great honour and as the only Canadian on the board I also feel a great responsibility too. One of the association’s primary values is to promote democracy. We give out the Democracy Medal every year, which is the oldest international award of its kind, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we spend a fair bit of time in the next year or two talking about how we can use our organization to advance the promotion of democracy in the world. 

The opportunity via IAPC, and now being on the board of IAPC is two-fold: the professional development side, as well as the access to this network of experts around the world. We've had opportunities to do work for clients that need support in multiple countries. I can go to the IAPC network and find that support in minutes from people that I already know and trust as opposed to rolling the dice on a cold call to somebody. It’s truly a great, and talented, group of people.

For more information on Porter O’Brien’s political consulting services, visit politics.porterobrien.com.