Is This a Good Marketing Strategy? – IOTW Report

Is This a Good Marketing Strategy?

Saturday, 30 January 2016, 10:04 BFH Uncategorized 64

A GOP candidate sent these alarming looking notices out –

You are receiving this election notice because of low expected voter turnout in your area. Your individual voting history as well as your neighbors’ are public record. Their scores are published below, and many of them will see your score as well. CAUCUS ON MONDAY TO IMPROVE YOUR SCORE and please encourage your neighbors to caucus as well. A follow-up notice may be issued following Monday’s caucuses.vdvdvs

Who do you think sent them?

See after read more.

Ted Cruz.

64 Comments on Is This a Good Marketing Strategy?

  4. I am really, really disappointed in this. This is the sort of crap I would expect from Democrats. With winning Iowa in your sights, why resort to a tactic that would surely piss off conservatives.

    This is like that old cartoon, “The Wacky Races”, where Dick Dastardly has his car inches from the finish line, the rest of the pack 5 miles away and yet he sets up some hair brained scheme to insure victory instead of just moving ahead those few inches. What happens, the plan backfires and Dastardly finishes dead last.

    I’m hoping this is the case of idiot campaign staff and not done with Cruz’s endorsement.

  6. I don’t want the people who aren’t voting to vote.
    Generally the people who do not vote are not very informed, and uninformed people make bad choices.
    Let the low info crowd stay home staring at the idiot box and drinking a Starbucks. They are harmless in that capacity.

  7. The only way for this crap not to be a big negative for Cruz is if he were to fire the campaign person/persons responsible. I’d like to think that he didn’t know about this and would have hollered NO if he had known.

  8. What a dick move by the Cruz camp! Not only cuz it’s an attempt to intimidate people but also because THE DEMOCRATS DID IT in a prior election! That’s probably where they got the idea. It was creepy then & it’s creepy now. WTF? I’d be passed if I got one of those nastygrams.

  10. IJ Review had this comment …”Cruz spokesman Rick Tyler confirmed to IJ Review that the mailer was theirs in a phone call Friday evening, saying that the targeting had been “very narrow, but the caucuses are important and we want people who haven’t voted before to vote.”

    How freaking stupid. A subtle message with your views and asking to go and vote on Monday would have been the simplest thing to do. Also said MoveOn did the same thing in 2012 for Barry and people were pissed off about that.

    I’m just set to bunker down and watch it all fall apart at this point.

  17. Can’t force people to vote!
    We see the trend though: “What? Can’t have the PERFECT candidate? Well I’ll just STAY HOME!”
    (2008/2012 elections were this way)..
    If this fits you, PLEASE don’t do this-go VOTE!
    Surely there is one candidate that shares SOME of your views.

  18. Well, he did let Beck swear him in. Ecch. And I think he has another event with Beck today.

    This “notice” is extremely assy, and even if he didn’t have the slightest idea, it will still hurt him. It just smacks of the unsavory.

  19. I personally know many in the Iowa campaign for Ted Cruz and every one of them denies this saying that it is false. Check your sources, the post that started this came from an Anti-Cruz blog known as Conservativetreehouse.com. Rick Tyler is Ted’s national campaign spokesman, he wouldn’t respond to this, that would come from the Iowa campaign since it was in Iowa only.

  24. This is not good. If this really came from the Cruz camp and he knew about it or even ok’d it, I will be very mad and disappointed at him. If he didn’t know, he must fire those responsible. If it came from an anti-Cruz group, they must be found and sued.

    No matter where this came from, legit or not, the damage has been done.

  26. At this point, what difference does it make? To me, none at all. Still in Ted’s camp. I’m for the candidate and his virtue not the moron’s that cook up hair brained schemes.

  27. Rancid Prius sent me a “Past Due Notice” for my RNC dues.

    I returned a detailed response with a “sample check” of what I’d likely give if the GOP decided to actually grow a pair and oppose one-man, unilateral rule in this country.

    The GOP has fallen strangely quiet via my phone and mailbox. Was it something I said?

  29. No time to verify now but:

    Cruz is using the voter psychological messaging and voter manipulation group for his campaign. Is it his benefactor Mercer who owns that campaign resource yet? Also, I think I read that obummer did this during one of his runs.

  32. That’s why I put this in the bullpen this morning.
    OUTRAGEOUS!

    Here it confirms IT WAS CRUZ’s GROUP
    http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/01/30/unbelievable-ted-cruz-campaign-sends-out-personal-shaming-letters-to-iowa-voters/

    §§§
    DISCLAIMER
    For me, what steams me about this is NOT the candidate.
    §§§

    Yes, I’m older than a bunch of you.
    Today it’s called “doxing” (and to H*LL with anyone who says, “meh, it’s public information”)

    I know it as a fundamental violation of privacy – and worse – the right to a private vote.

    Don’t even THINK of arguing on semantics/details.
    GO LIVE UNDER COMMUNISM
    (I have enough relatives who did and KNOW)
    AND FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF.

    This is the first step, intellectually, to having a “required” vote (as in China)…and you KNOW that THEY KNOW whom you vote for.

  33. That’s why I put this in the bullpen this morning.
    OUTRAGEOUS!

    Here it confirms IT WAS CRUZ’s GROUP
    http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2016/01/30/unbelievable-ted-cruz-campaign-sends-out-personal-shaming-letters-to-iowa-voters/

    §§§
    DISCLAIMER
    For me, what steams me about this is NOT the candidate.
    §§§

    Yes, I’m older than a bunch of you.
    Today it’s called “doxing” (and to H*LL with anyone who says, “meh, it’s public information”)

    I know it as a fundamental violation of privacy – and worse – the right to a private vote.

    Don’t even THINK of arguing on semantics/details.
    GO LIVE UNDER COMMUNISM
    (I have enough relatives who did and KNOW)
    AND FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF.

    This is the first step, intellectually, to having a “required” vote (as in China)…and you KNOW that THEY KNOW whom you vote for.

    (I hate these stupid new “reply” buttons!)

  34. This is the ‘brilliant’ ground game being run by Rick Tyler. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg. Mercer, one of Cruz’s hedge fund Wall Street backers (he is one of the two major financial guys who started up the Keep the Promise super-PACs) who either owns outright or controlling interest in a targeted psychometrics/psychographic profiling company called Cambridge Analytica, a U.K.-based geek squad which has been mining FB (and other social media?) for personal data without FB users’ knowledge or explicit permission. One way they did this is through the use of a phony survey. Using this data, they send “personalized” messages to individual users and their friend groups. Apparently, though I’m not entirely sure how it works, this is why people were getting unbidden messages from the Cruz campaign at the Brietbart site — since Mercer also owns a share of that online presence.

    The use of social media and online data in political (or any other kind of) campaign is something I’ve been interested in for the last couple of years. At first I was disappointed the Republicans hadn’t learned how to use the same strategies as the Dems. After learning how this data comes into the hands of mere campaign managers, how they use it and how manipulative it is, I’m not so sure now. It’s pretty creepy.

    That a campaign would say “it’s all public information”, makes me think they are glad they have that to fall back on instead of the more sinister “we got your info off your Twitter account”. Public versus Twitter (which is also public), sounds more benign.

  37. Speaking of “creepy”. Please tell me otherwise, Rick Tyler seems like a real sleazy creep to me.
    Backpfeifengesicht – great German word meaning – “A face badly in need of a fist”

  38. The reason it’s not good is that it is not transparent to even those of us who know about it. The first rule of any media is to control your choices, thoughts about those choices and your favorable decision for what they prescribe. On Madison Avenue, it’s called marketing. But when Wall Street is manipulating the outcome, it’s an entirely different story. It’s not the brand of toothpaste you end up using, it’s the very ideology that runs your government and all the friends they have who aren’t necessarily your friends.

    That’s why I’m making an obvious choice to vote for Trump. He has no strings attached to him and he’s not using psychometric/psychographic data, obtained through questionable practices, to manipulate me.

  41. As much I respect Cruz, this is a terrible, terrible decision. There’s nothing that will get people to hate you more than to practically call them irresponsible assholes, while releasing their private information. What the hell were they thinking?

  43. Response to FreedomCat (what’s up with the reply buttons?)

    Yes, it could just as well be Beck. He’s got it in his head he’s going to be a Kingmaker (Oprah wanted credit for that with obama, remember?). Being a Kingmaker is even better — from a power grab standpoint — than being a mere king.

    But I don’t think this is Beck. This is funded, I’m sure, by the same Robert Mercer super Pac, Keep the Promise (II, III). It has the imprint of their same use of personal info to hone in on voters. They’ve completely misunderstood how much people hate being “outed”, especially if they thought their info, even so-called public data, was closely held.

    It is a “by hook or by crook” move that makes Cruz’s campaign appear desperate to do just about anything to win an election. Not a great message, but his people will defend it as being an effective mean-to-an-end. I hope they consult their conscience about fair play and integrity.

  46. This business of using the excuse that Cruz may not have known about it is bunk. Superpac $$’s are used for this purpose to create that super-dishonest wall called plausible deniability. But this is a campaign-directed effort. He knew about it. I don’t want a president who is going to fall back on shifty, technically correct but dubious sleight of hand tactics like plausible deniability. I want a stand-up guy who isn’t afraid to take the heat. And Trump has taken more heat than any dozen politicians combined.

  47. Plain Jane — Oh my, thank you. I really appreciate your thoughtful comments here, too.

    I’m just a dweeb who likes to run to ground certain things. I was curious about how social media was being used by the obama campaign. And it’s ugly, ugly, ugly. Voters don’t stand a chance if elections are turned into which candidate knows the most personal habits about each individual voter. It’s anti-American for starters. And now this, coming from a guy who has been portrayed as George Washington, Benjamin Rush, Abraham Lincoln and the Minute Men militia combined.

    My views are vindicated. I’ve spent too much time on this planet to be duped by obvious tells.

  48. JohnS, You mean the “lofo’s” who are persuaded by candidates who tell Fox News to take a hike and hold an event for veterans instead of being fear-mongered into showing up on the next voter grade report with an ‘F’?

    Sorry, friend, I couldn’t help pushing back on your logic a little. 😉

  50. Anonymous — I thought we were talking here about Cruz’s use of voter data to put out a really crappy campaign mailer.

    I don’t follow CTH. I don’t follow anyone’s blog (except Fur’s). I make my own decisions based on the candidate’s own information. I know that Cruz is attached to some Big Money donors who have their own agendas. When is the last time we had a candidate who wasn’t attached to Wall Street, the big unions, Planned Parenthood, the Chamber of Commerce and etc? Like, never. At least not since, maybe, the 3rd or 4th American election. Anyone who doesn’t see how unique that is is missing how utterly unique that is in the annals of U.S. history. It’s like lightening in a bottle. George Soros has been manipulating U.S. policy behind the scenes. We’re incredibly fortunate to have a billionaire who is on our side.

  52. cruz is the worst in my inbox for begging for money. Multiple times a day, different “groups.” I was sick of him months ago just for that. But there are plenty of other reasons to dislike him. Remember when michele bachman had dual citizenship and the feces hit the ceiling fan? rafael was a Canadian until last year.

  58. “Asked Saturday evening by THE WEEKLY STANDARD for his reaction to Pate’s rebuke, Cruz defended the mailer. “Matt Schultz is a former secretary of state, he’s the chairman of our campaign, [he] put out a statement saying these mailers are routine,” Cruz said. “The Iowa Republican party has done so in the past in past elections. And I will apologize to nobody for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote.”

    These type of “voter grade” mailers have been used by party organizations and political action committees, and political scientists have found they are effective in increasing turnout.”
    —
    http://www.weeklystandard.com/cruz-on-controversial-mailer-i-will-apologize-to-nobody/article/2000837?custom_click=rss

  60. They are effective in increasing voter turnout, but the same social scientist who created and ran the experiment concluded that it pisses people off and they vote against the progenitor(s) of the mailing. Someone in the Cruz campaign didn’t bother to read all the experiment results.

  62. If they get enough of those sent back along with instructions to stuff it up their asses, sooner or later they will stop sending them.
    I get anything even close to that kind of format and I send it back with a loud “fuck you!!!” note attached to it every time. I don’t give a shit who it comes from. 8>]

    Wish I had photographed my last return letter to the GOP last time they asked me for a donation. Might save me some work next time they try to scam me out of some bucks.

  63. I had been a member of the NRA for years and recently quit over emails, not unlike this, that never stopped even though I had requested they stop sending them, and after going through all the channels available to stop them.
    I won’t send money to a fucking machine.

    (Still wear the NRA hat, just to piss of progressives). (It’s worth joining just to get one of those hats).

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