I can’t remember what question I asked that prompted this, but Rep. Ben McAdams’ answer has stuck with me. It was during the campaign last year, something about the moderate Democrat’s strategy to topple Republican incumbent Mia Love, and how he planned to pick up momentum after a fairly low-key summer.
“Most campaigns are actually run backwards,” he said matter-of-factly. The former mayor said they figure out what victory would like, analyzing tons of voter data in the district, then reverse engineer the campaign to deliver that result — in his case, targeting enough purple precinct voters to tip the scales in his direction by 700 votes.
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