With just days to go before the US presidential election, and the eventual result still very much too close to call, PRovoke Media’s EMEA editor Maja Pawinska Sims grabbed an hour with MikeWorldWide founder Michael Kempner – a lifelong Democrat fundraiser and a key figure in the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns – to talk about what he’s learned from his fundraising efforts for Kamala Harris, and what marketers and communicators can take away from this extraordinary campaign trail.

MPS: Tell me a bit about what you’ve been doing for the Harris campaign.

MK: I’ve been fundraising on and off since I was 19 for the Democrats. I fell into it by accident, but it's become huge for me. We’re coming to the end of the Kamala campaign now, but really since she announced, it has been non-stop fundraising on her behalf. It’s been a combination of hosting events – the Monday after the Democratic congress I hosted Kamala’s husband Doug Emhoff at my home in the Hamptons and raised $600,000 – and helping out on other events, like Kamala’s one big New York City event a few weeks back, which raised $27 million. The funny thing about fundraising is that you often have no time to prepare. That’s the nature of the beast – the schedules change so often, often even the principals themselves don’t know where they are going to be. Typically a candidate would have many events, but it’s been an odd campaign, a 90-day sprint, so there’s not time to go state by state, she had to be in swing states campaigning. Obviously Kamala has been a significant fundraising focus, but so havethe US Senate and the House of Representatives – it’s critical for the Democrats to win the presidency and also, at a minimum, retain one of the two houses.

MPS: The Harris/Waltz ticket has raised something like $1 billion in record time, have you been surprised by the totals?

MK: When she announced after Biden dropped out, the enthusiasm was even more than I saw for Obama – it was Obama Plus. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s unprecedented raising this amount. The enthusiasm has been off the charts, not only in large donor dollars, but the real money: small donors online. A great deal of money goes into TV and digital ads and polling, but a huge amount goes into fieldwork: touching voters and bringing out the vote, especially in swing states. Trump doesn’t really have any money – he has outsourced that to Elon Musk’s Super PAC – so Kamala has a huge money advantage.

MPS: What have been the biggest lessons for marketers and communicators from the Harris campaign?

MK: Money is such a core component here. The fact is that whoever loses, almost the next day people begin to jockey about who is going to be the candidate for the losing party four years from now. It’s a crazy cycle. Kamala has shown you don’t really need two years to run a campaign, but also: can you create this level of enthusiasm without this compressed time period? It was now or never from the time she announced. But the biggest lesson of this campaign was not fundraising, it’s the use of the media.

If you go back to Obama, he invented digital campaigning and fundraising, and use of digital media. After he won, every client and company wanted to tap into the magic of what Obama did and wanted it for their brand, organisation or cause. Fast forward to today, the Harris campaign has again reinvented the use of the media. She knows that the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are not places that swing voters are. The vast majority of people reading those already know who they are voting for, so she’s spent very little time on mainstream media. Instead, she’s used TikTok and creators – there was a whole creator and influencer portion of the Democratic congress. She went viral because of all the young people supporting Kamala, and the amount of people who took to TikTok on their own. She understood it was about local print, local TV, TikTok, Instagram and podcasts, so she has spent the vast majority of her time all but ignoring the big ‘king of the hill’ media; she went to what people actually read and see, and what influences them.

MPS: Can you apply this approach to the advice you’re giving your clients?

MK: This is a conversation we have with clients all the time. We ask them what media they think their audiences actually read, but often no-one reads the publications clients want to be in. We spend a lot of time talking about the ‘new top tier media’, and if Harris wins I believe you’ll see an acceleration of adoption of that approach. I don’t want to imply that legacy publications aren’t important, but it goes back to who you want to reach. Trump began to do the same, looking at this by audience. In some cases it’s very niche digital publications or particular Instagrammers, but the understanding of taking an audience-first media strategy will be, for a marketer, the greatest lesson of this campaign.

MPS: And yet the flipside of the digital era we live in is that we also have to contend with the rise of – often AI-led – misinformation and disinformation. How is it possible to tackle this in campaign communications?

MK: It’s very difficult. This is not about college kids causing mischief, this is the Chinese, Russians, North Koreans, Iranians – you have state actors involved. At the same time Elon Musk is running ads in Jewish neighbourhoods saying Kamala is pro-Arab, and in Arab neighbourhoods he’s running ads saying she’s pro-Israel. The richest man in the world, who owns an important media outlet, is intentionally using his own money to create purposeful disinformation campaigns. It’s whack-a mole – we try to work with the platforms themselves and most at least try to be responsible in part, but they do like selling ads. With the level of disinformation, even on platforms that are fully committed, it would be impossible to stop all of it. You can only monitor, try and stop it when you see it, fight back against it, and use creators, influencers and credible third party spokespeople to tell your story for you. But it’s difficult and getting worse; I don’t see how we put the genie back in the bottle.

MPS: What about business leaders, has this campaign changed whether they will or won’t speak out on issues?

MK: That’s another interesting question – are the business leaders of the United States prepared to stand up for democracy? I am going to predict the answer is mostly no. Trump is quite adept at making people afraid, and many business leaders fear he will come after them, whether cancelling government contracts, taking punitive measures, or even arresting them if he wins. Even people who have taken a stance in the past, I don’t believe will do so this time. The reality is everyone from media businesses to Fortune 500 leaders are in a difficult position. If Trump loses, we’re still in an era where even benign, patriotic, non-political campaigns like ‘Get Out To Vote’ are seen as partisan, and we have this massive cancel culture. There’s a real question around how companies will be able to participate in important issues. How they are prepared to participate in the democratic process will be interesting to watch, and I predict it will be difficult to watch.

The consequences of making the wrong decision and being on the wrong side of an issue are so high, you can’t blame them, but we’re talking about existential issues here. We could be talking about the end of a functioning democracy in the US. If you can get past how frightening this all is, there are important lessons for marketers, which have nothing to do with politics or the conclusion. The Harris campaign has rewritten the rule book on what a modern media campaign looks like.

MPS: So what have been the biggest communication challenges Kamala’s campaign has faced, in this climate?

MK: As well as the unprecedented amount of disinformation – which has an impact even on very smart people – the biggest challenge is the double standard that the media uses for Kamala versus Trump. He’s clearly lost a step, he has rambling speeches, he says crazy things, and the media ‘sane-washes’ him. If Kamala even giggles wrong it’s on the front page of the newspaper; if Trump praises Hitler it wouldn’t even make the news. The media did not learn from 2016. They don’t put the ‘old and feeble’ standard they applied to Biden on Trump. The lens by which they judge and view Kamala versus Trump is a huge issue.

MPS: The line between PR and propaganda can get very blurred in politics. How do you maintain ethical standards while working in such a high-stakes and divisive environment?

MK: The Democrats have a history of bringing a knife to a gun fight, and so one of the issues they have is that the Trump campaign is not encumbered by the facts. When you can say anything, any time you want, and have no issues with lying, it’s very difficult. All politicians sometimes talk optimistically, but there’s a difference between puffery and lying. Trump has still not released his taxes or health records and he can’t be embarrassed into doing it by the press, because he doesn’t care. While the Democrats are trying to organise the facts in the most positive fashion, taking the take the truth and making it sound better, versus simply making things up.

Punching the bully in the nose doesn’t work with Trump, but ridiculing him and making fun of him drives him nuts – Kamala has used a lot of sarcasm and humour to go after him. Making him look foolish and out of touch is an interesting strategy. Joy is indeed a strategy – this country has been dominated by Trump for almost 10 years and people don’t want to be unhappy all the time. Now we’ll see if it works. She will win the popular vote by a historic number, which means her strategy of how to motivate people has been successful, but she could still lose the election because of our system. People will analyse winning and losing, but she’s going to win the hearts and minds of a significant majority. She’s run a brilliant campaign that will be studied for a long time. We’ll see if it’s enough.

MPS: Finally, what has been the biggest benefit of being involved with campaign fundraising, for you as a communicator?

MK: The most important thing has been proximity to power. Political campaigns often set the tone in how to use the media, as well as having an understanding the impact of election results on business and consumers. I can see early the success or failure of all these experiments in using modern media, so I can give clients advice in advance of any possible conclusions. 

But I want to make it clear that the firm is non-partisan, these are my personal views and not the views of the firm. In fact, the firm purposely doesn’t represent candidates or any political party. I use my proximity to power to help clients get early looks at how campaigns are reinventing the use of modern media and technology, provide them with early and deep understanding of how government policy may impact their people and business and how to take advantage of the changes before others, and advice on the difficulty in working within the highly polarized political and social environment of the US and abroad. When all decisions seem to be political or controversial, it’s critical they have someone who understands the intersection of business, government and political when making critical marketing decisions. While my personal opinions are well known and I am fairly loud and proud with them, our advice is non-partisan and only in the best interest of our clients, no matter the political environment. Plus, the firm has many Republicans including our most recent hire, Maury Donahue, who worked in the Bush White House and for Fox News.

Whatever happens, it’s a front row seat to dynamic changes, and what the next few years of communications is going to look like.