They won the battle, but will they win the war?

When asked how to convince more traditional political campaigns to move past crisis messaging and adopt a more aspirational approach, Smith told Remapping Debate, “I don’t think I have the answer to how to manage the tension between messaging to win [and] messaging to change minds. Pollsters and campaign consultants will continue to identify the path to winning.”

Newman, who largely used crisis messaging for the “Yes on 30” campaign, acknowledges that the tension Smith described  between “messaging to win” and “messaging to change minds” is “a big, important question.” He said he would like to see campaigns rely more on aspirational messaging, but felt that “it would have to be [in the] relatively distant future…There’s just been so much successful anti-government rhetoric over the past couple decades. There’s a lot of work to be done to convince people that government does more good than harm.”

Fred Glass of the California Federation of Teachers agreed that it will be a challenge to fight back against what he describes as “the right wing paradigm…that no taxes anytime are good, [and] no government at any time is good if you can have the private sector instead.” He hopes, however, “that if we are able to just keep talking to people about the good that taxes are doing, that things could be different.”