Why Do Voters Support Government Spending in a Recession?

Cumberland County Civic Center Bond
2011

What do you do when there are limited resources, the economy is in a free fall, and you have to ask voters to approve a $33 million bond to renovate a recreational civic center? You focus on the community, provide a vision of what the building will look like, and explain how this is a job creating initiative in tough times.

Due to lack of resources, we could only afford one television ad. We could not afford to place it on broadcast television, so we allocated all our paid media to cable television. Radio and direct mail wasn’t going to work for this campaign, because part of the story we were telling was about the modern improvements to the civic center. We needed to work in three dimensional media, not two or one.

We also took into consideration that the electorate was relatively small, so we placed a strong emphasis on garnering news in the local media. This, we believed, would stimulate a community discussion about the proposal; our strategy worked.

We won the election with 58% of the vote.