Stop Thinking About Persuasion. Start With The Bedrock Approach.
Democratic campaigns tend to organize around two goals: persuasion and turnout.
Persuasion is about convincing undecided or soft voters to support your candidate. Turnout is about getting your existing supporters to actually show up and vote.
Both matter.
But I want to make the case that both are already too late. Not because they’re unimportant, but because they assume the most valuable work starts later in the cycle than it actually does.
We need to rethink how campaigns build support from the very beginning.
A quick note before we go further: while this post is centered on electoral campaigns, everything here applies just as much to advocacy organizations and nonprofits trying to build support over time.
If that’s you, stick around. This is for you too.
Persuasion Isn’t The Beginning
Let’s start with persuasion.
In the traditional campaign model, campaigns spend much of the early cycle focused on persuasion. In this context, “persuasion” means the direct attempts campaigns make to earn votes — ads, mail, digital outreach, messaging designed to move undecided or soft voters toward our side.
Then, in the final weeks before Election Day, campaigns increasingly shift their focus to turnout, reminding supporters to actually cast their ballots.
In theory, this structure makes sense.
But in practice, persuasion is far less durable than most campaigns design for.
Not because people can’t be persuaded, and not because messaging doesn’t matter — but because the conditions campaigns assume persuasion happens in don’t really exist anymore.
Campaigns often treat persuasion as something that happens during a defined phase of the campaign: voters see the right message, make a decision, and carry that decision forward to Election Day.
But voters don’t experience politics that way.
They experience it in the middle of everything else, between vacation photos, local news, funny videos, community events, and whatever else is competing for attention in their feeds.
Which raises a harder question: In this complicated media environment, what if persuasion is less about a specific message and more about familiarity built over time?
When someone already feels like they know a candidate, a “persuasive message” stops functioning like persuasion. It just becomes confirmation of something they’ve already decided.
In that world, persuasion isn’t a moment. It’s a byproduct of familiarity built over time.
We’ve all seen campaigns spend enormous amounts of money trying to convince voters through traditional advertising. But all that spending still doesn’t mean people will feel anything for you.
Brand marketers figured this out decades ago. Coca-Cola doesn’t run ads trying to convince you of a product decision in the moment. Nike isn’t trying to persuade you from scratch every time you see an ad. They build presence, familiarity, and feeling — consistently, over years — so that when you’re standing in the store or lacing up your shoes, the choice feels obvious. They’re not relying on persuasion at the point of decision. They’ve shaped preference long before that moment ever arrives. Political campaigns could learn a lot from that playbook.
What you can do is spend time building familiarity, trust, and presence so that by the time Election Day arrives, voting for your candidate feels intuitive — not because voters were persuaded in one moment, but because a relationship has been built over time.
That’s the difference between traditional persuasion advertising and what I’m calling the Bedrock Approach.
Gabriella Zutrau worked on Zohran Mamdani’s historic New York City mayoral campaign. Here’s how she describes it:
“The Mamdani campaign understood social media for what it is — a longterm brand play and a familiarity engine. They understood that moving people on social is about showing up in their feeds again and again, so that you build trust with your audiences over time. And that’s where a constant drip of paid digital can help.
Our campaigns need to be showing up on voters’ feeds every single day, year round, from day one, whether or not we have the organic operation to support a high volume of quality content.”
That’s exactly what the Bedrock Approach is designed to do.
What Is The Bedrock Approach?
The Bedrock Approach is the practice of building a candidate’s presence over time — through consistent, authentic content — so that by Election Day, voting for them feels less like a decision and more like the obvious choice.
It’s not about persuading people in a single moment. It’s about becoming part of the environment they already live in.
Think about someone you genuinely enjoy following on social media. A comedian, a local reporter, someone who just consistently posts things you care about.
You didn’t decide to like them. You just… like them.
You see their content, you enjoy it, you share it sometimes. And if they asked you for a favor, you’d probably do it. Not because they convinced you. Because you feel like you know them.
Now imagine you’re scrolling your feed and you see an ad. It’s got the right colors and the right logo and the right message. But it feels like an ad. You know immediately it’s trying to sell you something. You keep scrolling.
That’s the difference between “content” and “advertising.”
And in politics, far too many campaigns are still making ads. Very few are creating content people actually want to see.
The Bedrock Approach is especially powerful in lower-information races where voters aren’t already being saturated with coverage about the candidates. In heavily-covered presidential or statewide races, campaigns are competing against massive existing narratives and nonstop press attention. But in local and downballot races — where many voters are hearing very little about the people on their ballot — familiarity itself can become the deciding factor.
The Bedrock Approach is not a substitute for a compelling candidate, strong organizing, or a message voters actually believe in. It’s a force multiplier. When those fundamentals are missing, no amount of content will fix it. But when they’re in place, Bedrock makes everything else work harder.
The question isn’t whether voters saw your message. The question is whether you were part of their world at all.
Rachel Karten, who writes one of the most influential and sharp newsletters about digital marketing, did an interview with Cody Larson, the owner of Little Joy Coffee in Northfield, Minnesota — a tiny shop that built a massive following and grew revenue 40% year over year purely through great social content.
His closing advice:
“Social media is replacing television. And just like in television, there’s the shows you tune-in to watch and there’s the commercials you suffer through. Stop making commercials. Be the show.”
He was talking about a coffee shop. But he could have just as easily been talking about a political campaign.
We should probably put that on a t-shirt, right?
The Candidate Is Not the Hero. The Voter Is.
Before I get into the mechanics, I need to share the most important mindset shift in this entire piece.
I tell every candidate I work with the same thing: you are not the hero of the story. Your audience is.
No one is going to fall in love with a candidate because that candidate talks about themselves constantly. People aren’t wired that way.
We care about ourselves. We care about our families. We care about our communities.
The best candidate content says: I see the same problems you see. I’m fighting for the same things you’re fighting for. And if you join me, we can fix things together.
You’re not a superhero. You’re a megaphone.
This is from a blog post and YouTube video I made comparing the content strategies of Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo.
The voters are the hero of the story. Your job is to show them that you get it — that you’re one of them, that you live in the same world they do, that you’re going to the same events, fighting the same fights, worrying about the same things.
When you do that consistently — and I mean really consistently — something remarkable happens.
Let me tell you a quick story:
A few years back, I was working a State Assembly race — a four-way primary. My candidate had strong support in his part of the district, but because of gerrymandering, the district stretched into communities he’d never even been part of.
We started running Facebook ads months before Election Day. He wasn’t on TV. He wasn’t sending mail. But he was showing up consistently in people’s feeds — over and over again.
He’d go out canvassing in parts of the district he’d never spent time in before. And people would open the door and tell him that not only did they know him… but that they were voting for him.
He had never met them.
But they’d been seeing him in their feeds for months.
It wasn’t the only thing shaping the race, and it wasn’t doing all the work on its own — but it did change the baseline level of familiarity he had with voters he’d never met.
By the time he knocked on their door, for many the decision was already made.
And come Election Day, he got just shy of 50% of the vote… in a four-way race.
That’s what Bedrock looks like in practice.
Bedrock Under Pressure
The Bedrock Approach doesn’t just build recognition — it builds a foundation that’s harder to shake.
Bedrock is the layer underneath everything else — what holds even as everything above it shifts. When you start early and stay consistent, you build familiarity that’s harder for attacks and breaking news cycles to cut through.
I worked with a candidate in one of the most competitive swing districts in his state — the kind of seat that could flip the balance of power in the chamber. We started his Bedrock program months before Election Day.
Month after month, voters in his district saw him in their feeds — at his farm, at local events, just living his life and talking about the things he cared about.
By the time his opponents started running attack ads in the fall trying to paint him as a dangerous radical, the foundation was already in place. Voters already knew him. They’d been seeing him for months. “Radical” just didn’t compute. Their reaction was essentially: that’s not some dangerous radical. That’s the grandpa with the farm.
He held his seat. And then, we did the same thing the next cycle — and he won again.
That’s Bedrock. You’re not just building name recognition — you’re building an identity that’s much harder to redefine.
It doesn’t make voters immune to attacks — but it does raise the burden of proof for them to believe those attacks over what they already feel like they know.
How It Works: The Mechanics
The Bedrock Approach isn’t theory — it’s execution.
In practice, it has two parts.
Meta is currently the clearest place to see it in action, because it allows campaigns to consistently blend content and distribution without relying on traditional advertising formats. But the underlying principle isn’t platform-specific — it’s about repeated, low-friction exposure to familiar content over time.
Step 1: Good content. And lots of it.
Good content doesn’t look like a campaign ad. If it looks like a car commercial, people will scroll right past it.
Good content looks like something your friend might have posted.
It can be a short video (short-form video is by far the most effective format right now), a photo, or a simple graphic. It doesn’t need to be expensive or heavily produced. I’ve seen lo-fi phone videos outperform professionally shot ads by a wide margin — because the message matters more than production.
What matters is what it shows: the issues people care about, the community you’re part of, and the places you actually show up.
I worked with a candidate who posted a simple video from an Oktoberfest event. Nothing polished. Just him, at a community event people already cared about. When we promoted it, it took off — not because it was clever, but because it felt real.
You don’t need to solve every issue in every piece of content. In fact, you shouldn’t try. Voters want to know you understand what they’re living through.
The goal is simple: familiarity through repetition, built with fresh content over time.
You’re showing up in their feed like a friend who always has something new and interesting to say.
But this only works at scale.
You can’t post once in a while and expect people to feel connected. And repeating the exact same message over and over will eventually make people tune you out — or worse, actively dislike seeing you.
You need a steady cadence of new content that reinforces the same identity in different ways.
There’s research behind this in advertising — “ad wearout.” Repetition of the same creative doesn’t just stop working; it can create negative sentiment. But repeated exposure to consistent themes through different content formats builds familiarity without fatigue.
That’s the difference.
Step 2: Put money behind your content. Strategically.
Good content without a budget is like a tree falling in the forest. It might reach some people, but it won’t expand your audience!
The goal of the Bedrock Approach is simple: every time someone in your district opens up Facebook or Instagram, you want them to see something from your campaign.
To do that, you need to put money behind your content — consistently, throughout the campaign. Not just in the final stretch.
You don’t need massive budgets to make this work. What matters is consistency and repetition, not scale.
Here’s a very rough sense of what I’ve seen work in practice: In small local races — city council, county board — I’ve seen budgets under $1,000 make a real difference. For state legislative races, somewhere in the range of $1,000–$2,500 a month is a reasonable starting point, though that varies based on district size, media market, and competitiveness. For congressional races or smaller statewide races, a few thousand dollars a month can move the needle.
If you’re running a statewide race in California, New York, or Texas, these numbers of course don’t apply. But the principle scales even when the budget doesn’t.
A Note on Facebook Ads (and how I actually run them)
This is not a guide to Meta ads — it’s an illustration of how the Bedrock Approach shows up in actual campaign execution.
When I run Facebook ads for a campaign, I’m almost never putting a set budget on individual content. Instead, I take a Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO) approach.
I put all the content I want to promote into a shared budget and let Meta allocate spend toward the pieces that perform best.
That can mean running 5, 10, or sometimes dozens of different pieces of content concurrently (the larger the daily budget, the more ads you can A/B test at once). Facebook takes all of them, looks at how each one performs, and over time shifts more spend toward the ones that are working best.
If a post isn’t getting spend, that’s not a problem — it means something else is working better. I want the system making those decisions, not me.
We’re never going to outsmart Meta when it comes to Meta ads. Stop trying to over-engineer it.
As needed or useful to the specifics of the campaign, I’ll sometimes allocate a specific budget to a specific piece of content, or target content to a specific area within the district. But as a general rule, I go as wide as possible with as much content as possible, and let the algorithm do what it’s built to do.
While microtargeting by party and interest has gotten harder over the years, Meta keeps telling us that the content has become the targeting. Create content that speaks to your values and let Meta find the folks who share those same values.
A Word About Targeting
Here’s something that might surprise you: I never target only the voterfile.
The voterfile (the list of registered voters in a district) is important, but it’s incomplete. In practice, match rates between voterfiles and Meta’s audience data are often much lower than campaigns assume. Which means relying on it alone guarantees you’re missing a significant portion of your actual electorate.
In practice, relying only on the voterfile doesn’t just limit reach — it also tends to over-concentrate frequency within a smaller universe of voters, while leaving large portions of the district underexposed.
If a campaign I’m working with has access to the voterfile — and many don’t — I typically split spend between the voterfile and a broader geographic audience in the district.
From there I adjust based on reach and frequency. The exact split varies by race, spend level, and list quality, but the goal is always the same: expand reach across the district while still using the voterfile as a high-frequency base.
Some would call this wasteful spending.
Do we waste money when we run TV ads? Even CTV ads, matched to the voterfile, are going to see waste. My kids and I live in the same house — Hulu and YouTube have no way of knowing which of us are currently watching (I’m pretty sure I love Bluey as much as they do!).
But that’s fine. Because precision isn’t the goal — exposure is.
And more importantly, this isn’t just about efficiency. It’s also about reach.
If you only target the voterfile, you will miss people who are not on it but still vote — or could be persuaded to show up if they feel connected to a candidate.
Yes you’ll have bleed. But if you want to talk to your voters, along with potentially expanding your base, target everyone in your district. At least with part of your budget.
The Bedrock Approach is Not Fundraising
Bedrock and fundraising can exist in the same ecosystem, but they should operate as separate layers with different objectives.
The Bedrock Approach is about one thing: laying the foundation.
It is not fundraising.
Facebook ads can absolutely be used to raise money, build email lists, and drive people to take specific actions. I do all of that for many clients.
But that is a different objective than what Bedrock is designed to do.
When you try to combine the two — when every piece of content is also asking for something — you undermine both.
The relationship changes. Instead of familiarity and trust building over time, every interaction becomes transactional.
Bedrock only works if people feel like they’re getting to know a candidate — not being constantly asked to take action.
That doesn’t mean fundraising and organizing don’t matter. It just means they need to be built on top of this layer, not mixed into it.
The Mindset Shift: You’re Not Running Against Your Opponent. You’re Running Against the Couch.
Here’s something not enough people in political advertising internalize:
You’re not really running against your opponent.
You’re running against everything else competing for attention.
The funny video in the next scroll. A friend’s vacation photos. Local news. A funny meme. We’re competing for attention in the most crowded feeds in the history of media.
The campaigns that treat this like a traditional persuasion exercise are fighting an uphill battle. Because Facebook isn’t a persuasion environment. It’s an attention environment. People are there to be entertained, connected, informed, or just to pass time — not to be “persuaded” in the way so many campaigns tend to design for.
But people do want to be entertained. They do want to feel connected. They do want to feel like the content they’re watching actually speaks to them.
The candidates who win with the Bedrock Approach aren’t the ones with the best arguments. They’re the ones who feel like someone worth paying attention to — someone people genuinely like — long before Election Day.
When Should You Start?
The short answer: immediately!
Ideally, this starts years before a candidate ever declares they’re running for office. You don’t need to be putting money behind your content, but if you think you might run for office… someday… start posting today. Create a Facebook page in your name and start talking about the issues you care about. Start building an audience who knows and trusts you. It takes time, but it’s worth it.
You don’t need campaign financing to post content. You don’t need to have filed paperwork. You just need a phone and something worth saying.
The same is true for advocacy organizations — you don’t need a campaign or a legislative push on the horizon to start building your audience. Start now.
Assuming you’re already running for office — and didn’t start building this before launching your campaign, which is most candidates — the answer is still the same: start now. The earlier you begin, the more time familiarity has to compound.
The earlier you start, the more people will feel like they already know you by the time you’re officially asking for their vote.
For active campaigns, six months is a good minimum. Smaller races — a city council seat in a small town, for example — can sometimes see real movement in just a few weeks. But for a congressional race or a larger district, you’ll need time. The whole point is that familiarity builds slowly. You can’t cram it in during the final weeks of a campaign.
So How Does The Bedrock Approach Fit with Persuasion and Turnout?
Think of it as the foundation everything else is built on.
Persuasion is what campaigns do when they try to change minds.
Turnout is what campaigns do when they try to activate supporters right before Election Day.
The Bedrock Approach is what makes both of those efforts more effective — because it builds familiarity and trust long before either of them begin.
With Bedrock, persuasion doesn’t have to work as hard in a single moment, because recognition and familiarity are already there.
And turnout doesn’t start from zero, because the relationship has already been built over time.
Everything sits on top of that foundation.
By the time Election Day arrives, you’re not introducing a candidate or re-activating supporters.
You’re building on a foundation that already exists.
Josh Klemons is the founder of Reverbal Communications, a digital storytelling and strategy firm working with progressive campaigns, brands and organizations.
In upcoming posts, I’ll be diving deeper into the content side of this — including how to develop a core message that runs through all of your content and how to build a community your audience actually wants to be part of.
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I’ve spent years building exactly the kind of audience I’m describing on TikTok, without ever asking for anything in return. It works. You can find me there if you want to see this approach in action, or on LinkedIn where I talk about this kind of stuff all the time.
I also host Hello Merge Tag — a podcast about where social media and politics intersect.
And if you want help putting any of this into practice, let’s chat.
