The advertisement starts with a video of Hillary Clinton on stage. “If you look at the map of the United States, there’s all that red in the middle where Trump won,” she says. The video is intercut with images of Missouri’s Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill proudly endorsing Clinton, as Clinton goes on to describe Trump supporters as racist and sexist. The kicker flashes in block red letters on screen: “This is what Claire McCaskill and her ‘President’ think of you.” It ends with the logo for Josh Hawley, McCaskill’s Republican opponent in the 2018 midterms.
“Who thought that was a very powerful ad?” asks former Democratic congressman Timothy “Tim” Bishop ’72, standing in front of a Smith Labs lecture hall of more than 20 Holy Cross students. Nearly every hand goes up. He agrees: “I thought that was a very powerful ad.”
“A lot of this stuff is poll-driven,” explains Peter Flaherty ’87. “The strategists sitting in the room got a poll back that tested Hillary Clinton’s favorability in the state of Missouri, and that’s the reason an ad like this got put on the air.” He should know — as a longtime political consultant, he’s run campaigns for Mitt Romney, Scott Brown and other Republican candidates, often being the one to make decisions about what ads to air and where to spend resources.
Students in the Academic Internship Program course Campaign 2018: A Hands-On Approach spent the fall semester combining hands-on learning as interns in area local, state and national political campaigns with a weekly seminar co-taught by Bishop and Flaherty. In addition to getting real-world experience in races culminating in the November midterms, the students had the ear and expertise of two veterans of the national political scene.