Dante Pittman 2024 CAMPAIGN: Winning Underneath a Trump Victory

Dante Pittman was a young man of color who served in the North Carolina National Guard. His career in public service through local and state government provided an opportunity to frame Dante as a career politician, but his youth, energy, and military service provided a great counter to this narrative. Our vision for the campaign was to highlight his local roots and play up his values that rooted him in the community his whole life. 

After redistricting, this seat was a classic example of a district that appeared on paper to be Democratic-leaning, but strongly underperformed. Democrats held a registration advantage of almost 18% over the GOP, but struggled to secure more than 47% of the vote in 2022 with any candidate on the ballot. Therefore, activation and engagement of core democratic demographics would be key to Dante's success. 

Polling showed this district to be ripe to flip. But the message couldn’t just focus on traditional “persuasion” voters. This leaned into CXC strategic specialty. No matter who we talked to, “persuasion” or activation voters, we needed to lean into Dante being a homegrown young political outsider with a fresh perspective. We needed to validate his Democratic bona fides with base targets, but had to keep the pressure on them to activate. We also needed to watch any defections to our opponent, so we tied the opposition as close as we could to the GOP's toxic Gubernatorial candidate.

Dante’s 17-piece mail plan coordinated communications to three target universes starting around labor day and continuing through Election Day. The messaging integrated with linear and non-linear communication programs. From 50,000 feet, Dante’s mail plan looked like balance between positive and negative communications, but when one drilled down to individual voters, one would see the customization used to ensure key targets received tailored tone based on their responses to our survey.

This is where Dante’s program shined. When one looks at the voter activation strategies, they will see that base voters received an overwhelming share of positive messaging about Dante, reinforcing what they wanted to see and hear from him. Meanwhile, persuasion and lean GOP targets received a disproportionate amount of the negative communications tying our opposition to the toxic Gubernatorial candidate. This way, each recipient of direct mail was getting fed what they wanted to hear without cross-pressure from other communications. 

Dante’s win in 2024, was one of the few highlights on Election Day in North Carolina. His victory underneath a Trump win in his district shows that when communications help downballot candidates break away from the top of the ticket, victories can be had. His seat broke the GOP supermajority and set Democrats up to help protect the new Democratic Governor’s veto power on dangerous legislation.