Candidate

Are you a candidate for public office? Do you hold an elected government position?

Effective campaigning involves connecting with the people who turn out on Election Day. Effective governing involves supporting the policies your constituents endorse. If you want the support and confidence of voters, you need to know their passions and interests. Here are a few of the ways Matt Berent Consulting can help you learn what voters and constituents care about, and what type of messaging resonates with them:

Issue

polling

If you don't know how voters and constituents feel about political issues, you'll have a difficult time connecting with them. Some political polling companies ask people what they think about a few political issues that the company thinks people should care about. Others ask generic "open-ended" questions, but don't use rigorous methods to extract meaning from what people say. We overcome these problems through a multi-stage process that identifies the issues that people care about and what most people want elected officials to do about them.

The number of people who call themselves politically "independent" is steadily increasing. This means that candidate labels like "Democrat" and "Republican" have less influence on vote decisions than they used to. We can help identify what will influence voters' decisions about the levers they pull on Election Day by analyzing issue polling data, voter demographics, and historical trends.

Supporting a policy that most voters or constituents endorse is good, but it's better if you can communicate that in a way that touches people's hearts. Small, unreliable focus groups won't tell you how your messages will be received in the population. Fancy "dial-turning" gimmicks make for entertaining news coverage, but it doesn't help you get your message out to the people who matter. We can field test different messages for you to help you craft your message in a way that has the greatest impact on the people you want to reach.

Elected officials are problem solvers. If you want to solve a problem through legislation, you'll want to know if the legislation is, or is likely to be, effective. We can help evaluate the likely effectiveness of legislation through critical reviews of scientific research. We can also evaluate the effectiveness of existing legislation through trend analyses of key outcome measures.