Hey, John, so I had a meeting with my campaign team earlier this week to hash out a design for a new palm card. It’s a little thing (literally—my top request was to make sure we ended up with something small enough I could carry them around in my back pocket), but it matters.
We had a pretty spirited debate about how to present our central message of opportunity and investment to best appeal to the voters we need to win over, and the decisions we made will inform how every part of this campaign communicates with voters over the next few months. But the most interesting part of the discussion wasn’t actually about the words we used—it was about, of all things, font size.
See, we were sitting there trying to figure out how to make the amount of text we wanted actually fit in the size of the card I wanted. You can’t go too small, or you’re going to run into issues with folks whose eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be, but to get something that would fit in my pocket, you’ve either got to cut words or some other part of the card.
And then one of my staffers said something that stuck with me: at a certain point, if someone is actually reading through the palm card far enough to care about the font size, then we’ve already won our first battle with that voter.
(We did find a way to keep the text at a reasonable size, because even if that’s true, accessibility still matters. But bear with me, I’ve got a point here.)
Common wisdom says that when you hand someone a piece of campaign literature, you’ve got about two seconds of their attention before they throw it in the trash or stick it in their pocket never to be seen again, so if someone is actually reading through the text on the card, then your message has already gotten through to them.
And more broadly, as I’ve said throughout the campaign, the biggest hurdle is just getting our message out in front of voters, because we know that when they hear it, it works. People are ready for a government that believes in them. They’re ready for a Treasurer that invests in them. They’re eager for a North Carolina that leaves no one behind.
But getting a message out to an entire state isn’t cheap, and especially in a year like this, when the Gubernatorial and Presidential elections are going to be absolutely blanketing the airwaves, cutting through the noise to make sure voters here about us ain’t going to be cheap.
That’s part of why we’re making such a serious effort to get our general election campaign literature together so early—we need to hit the ground running now. It’s a worthwhile expense, but it is an expense, and I could really use your help to cover the costs of designing and printing so that we can keep up our momentum and do even more as we head into the Fall.
So if you believe in this campaign, I hope I can count on your support. Will you contribute $25, $50, or whatever you can afford today so that we can get our message out the way we need to and help take our state back in 2024?
