There's just a few days left to snag some Marketplace swag at a discount when you... Donate Today! 🎁

Candidates grow their operations, and fast

Tracey Samuelson Feb 29, 2016
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Candidates grow their operations, and fast

Tracey Samuelson Feb 29, 2016
HTML EMBED:
COPY

Super Tuesday marks one of the busiest days on the presidential campaign. Gone are the days of individual contests like Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign is now fully in multi-state mode with lots of delegates in play. In fact, Tuesday is the biggest single-day haul of the nomination period, which means campaigns have scaled up and spread out.

The process is similar to trying to suddenly scale a business.

“At the early days, when it’s a small group, everyone knows everyone, lines of communication are clear,” said Stewart Thornhill, a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. “As it scales and goes from 10 to 50 to 100 to 1,000 people, it becomes like that broken telephone game and managing the complexity of that is just as difficult for a retailer or service provider as it is for a political operator.”

“You really have to think, ‘Where is our opportunity, what’s going to be cost efficient, where can we get voters?’” said Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University who spent three decades as a political media consultant.

As campaigns expand, they also have to watch and react to their competitors.

“Sometimes, campaigns aren’t both going after the exact same territory,” said Berkovitz.

Even as they’re scaling up, candidates may need to scale back to better use resources elsewhere. 

There’s a lot happening in the world.  Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 

You rely on Marketplace to break down the world’s events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. 

Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you.