Case Study: Engaging Male Voters on Abortion
CHALLENGE: FOR MEN, ABORTION MAY BE SOMEONE ELSE’S ISSUE
It’s no secret that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs upended the 2022 election, but at first it wasn’t entirely clear how things would shake out. One of the earliest public indications of the power of the new reality unleased by that decision were the stories women shared online about the gut punch feeling they got — and one of the earliest indications of the difficult work to be done to leverage that power was the frustrated stories women shared of the men in their lives (husbands, boyfriends, and more) not initially getting why this moment was different from other political moments around abortion.
It soon became clear through more rigorous research that in contests like the Minnesota governor’s race, Democrats had to make the election about abortion if we could. Polling showed that the abortion issue could produce the biggest movement for Democrats, and focus groups gave some signs of hope that even non-progressive men could be moved on the basis of abortion if they understood it a little better.
But the devil was in the details of how to get male voters to understand and engage with the abortion issue. After all, it would be hard to make an issue dominate an election if you couldn’t talk to half your audience about it. And getting men to care about something they had often seen in the past as a “women’s issue” would be no easy task. The track record of approaches like framing abortion as a family/economic issue affecting men (complicated argument, might still not be relevant to everyone’s circumstances) or positing what would happen if we banned Viagra (too hypothetical, requires adopting someone else’s perspective) haven’t proven particularly effective.
We knew that in order to make this issue matter to men and keep them from tuning it out, we had to show them ads that would make it “about” them — or at least give them a role in the story they could understand.
METHOD: MAKE THE AUDIENCE THE HERO
Everyone wants to think of themselves as the hero of the story, so one of the hardest best practices in advertising and brand positioning to remember is that you can’t be the hero yourself. You might want to get to be Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star, but if you want your audience to be interested, you have to let them take that role. That doesn’t mean you can’t still be important — but your role as advertiser needs to be the guide and mentor. Luke could never have succeeded without the help of Obi-wan Kenobi, after all. (And if Star Wars isn’t your thing, think of Harry and Hagrid or Neo and Morpheus or RuPaul and Michelle Visage or whatever story you like.)
In this case, making men the hero in these ads had an even more important connotation. Since the men we needed to win over were unlikely to be the most progressive in their gender views, we knew we had to tap into their more traditional understandings of masculine identity — and what more powerful traditional masculine fantasy is there than the knight in shining armor saving the damsel in distress.
Of course, we still wanted to strike a balance of utilizing the powerful parts of that traditional masculine identity without taking on the bad parts like reducing women to bystanders in their own lives. But we found a way to thread that needle and still find a way to give undecided male voters a role in this story that they would understand.
So we made videos that used male messengers to implicitly emphasize this is an issue men have to think about. We emphasized that the consequences were tangible and real and closer to you than you might realize. And of course we emphasized that it’s your duty as a man to step up — while emphasizing that this was about winning self-control for women.
RESULTS: AN OPPONENT DEFINED AND DAMAGED
The good news is this strategy paid off in a major way.
Pre-flight panel testing showed the direct-to-camera testimonial video made male voters 6 points more likely to vote, 5 points more likely to choose Democratic candidate for governor, and 12 points less favorable to the GOP candidate. The cheeky plumbing tutorial made male voters 8 points less favorable to the GOP candidate, and importantly it also made them 5 points more likely to say the Dobbs ruling would personally impact them or someone in their lives. Interestingly, these videos were also quite effective with female voters, just at slightly lower numbers than their male counterparts.
Even better, as part of a comprehensive, multi-channel strategy, these videos helped define the terms of the election — and ultimately push the Democratic candidate to victory. And best of all, by making voters the hero and delivering victory, our client still got to be the hero of their own story.
