We live in a world of self-identification. You can identify yourself as any gender, “gender fluid,” or no gender at all. You can identify as another race (I’m looking at you, Rachel Dolezal.) You can even self-identify as a CAT. You’re a Directioner or a Belieber, who drinks Starbucks or Dunkin, on the way to Soulcycle or Flywheel.
We Americans are a polarizing group, able to rally around rivalries as manufactured as Right Twix vs. Left Twix.
As we fill in the blanks of our identity, there is one aspect of our lives that gets overlooked: politics. Americans are opting out of the major parties in record numbers. More people have described themselves as independents than Republicans in every year since 2003. The same is true for the Democrats since 2009, and now more people identify as independents than as Republicans or Democrats.
Politics is the one part of society where we don’t want to pull on a metaphorical jersey and cheer for one side over the other. And that’s a problem, especially for the Republican Party, which ranks about 9 points below the Democrats in terms of voter identification.
Marketing experts measure brand identity as the sum of two traits: Brand recognition, and feelings associated with the brand. The first half of the equation is easy; everyone has heard of the Republican Party. The second part, the association of positive or negative traits with the brand, is where the GOP has a huge problem. 58 percent of American adults view the Republican Party unfavorably.
The GOP brand was so directionless — and its customers, the voters, so dissatisfied — that the brand has been hijacked by an outsider.
He’s changing the Republican brand in a big way, and not necessarily a good one. A recent NBC/WSJ poll found that “sixty-one percent of all voters say Trump represents something that is harmful to the Republican Party.” The GOP is on its way to nominating a candidate who hurts their image instead of helping it. It’s not a candidate’s job to make the GOP look good, but it IS a candidate’s job to win in November — and that requires running a campaign that attracts people to it, instead of repelling them.
A candidate’s brand is particularly important to millennials. Voters between 18 and 33 are much more likely than voters in any other age group to identify as independents. A full 50 percent of us don’t identify with either major party. We’re free agents, and up for grabs. Oh, and once we’re “grabbed” by a brand, we are more likely to remain loyal to that brand than any other generation.
This used to be the Big Tent Party, but now people look at that Republican jersey and deliberately choose not to represent themselves that way. When people think that a brand doesn’t represent them, they abandon it. This is especially true of a political party whose entire purpose is to represent its constituents. The Republican Party must find its core principles, lift them up above the political mudslinging, brush them off, and show them off to voters. Conservative principles have something for everyone, and never go out of style. That’s a branding win if there ever was one.
