OP-ED: Joe Salerno Responds to FRNJ Opinion Piece on Tim Alexander-Lee Atwater Campaign Comparison
Photo courtesy of Joe Salerno's Front Porch Facebook
EDITOR’S NOTE: On March 16, Front Runner New Jersey.com’s Editor Clyde Hughes posted the opinion piece “Joe Salerno’s Comparison of Tim Alexander’s Campaign to Lee Atwater Misses by Grand Canyon Lengths.” FRNJ invited Salerno to respond in kind. He emailed us the same day. Here is his response.
OP-ED
BY JOE SALERNO
I appreciate the chance to respond, not just about one video, but to explain the larger project it’s part of. I started Joe Salerno’s Front Porch to examine how political campaigns shape what voters feel about candidates, often before voters ever make a thoughtful assessment.
I began by looking at the Democratic primary in CD-02. In an earlier video, I focused on positive campaign messaging, beginning with a quote from Democratic strategist David Axelrod: “Voters ultimately make decisions based on how they feel about a candidate.” Campaigns understand that we all rely on quick, intuitive judgments, especially when we don’t have the time or inclination to fully analyze our choices.
Campaign messaging is designed with that in mind. To generate positive feelings, campaigns often associate their candidate with images and themes voters like intuitively, such as empathy, service, and authenticity.
In fact, the Tim Alexander campaign found my analysis in that video accurate enough to use a clip of it in their advertising (see that here).
In the next video, I examined the other side of that same dynamic. As Lee Atwater put it: “You have to make the other guy the issue… you have to make him unacceptable.”
Campaigns do not just build up their own candidate. They can also shape how voters feel about their opponents. They often do that indirectly, by associating an opponent with something voters already distrust or dislike.
In this primary, that pattern is most clearly and consistently visible in the Tim Alexander campaign’s messaging, and it is being done quite openly. Per the campaign, “the gloves are off.”
One of his opponents is associated with those controlled by machine politics and open to corruption. Another opponent is tied to “North Jersey elites,” outsiders trying to “buy” an election.
The 2024 race is also repeatedly invoked in that same frame, referencing an “outsider,” an “unknown,” or someone trying to “buy” the election. That is why I briefly referenced my own race. Not as a grievance, but because it is being used as part of that same pattern of association.
These negative messages do not directly attack an opponent’s character. They are cues designed to trigger quick, intuitive reactions based on associations voters already have about certain groups or ideas, often before we stop to think them through.
That is what the Atwater reference was about. It was not about race or identity, but about a broader, well-established campaign approach: defining your opponent in a way that makes them unacceptable before voters have a chance to evaluate them on the merits.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether that approach is effective or appropriate. But it is real, and it is worth understanding.
Let me pose a question back.
When analysis highlights the messaging that makes a candidate feel like “one of us,” it is embraced and raised, even incorporated into that campaign’s own advertising.
But when that same analysis examines the messaging that makes opponents feel like “one of them,” it is recast as personal or as something even more troubling.
Are these opposite reactions based on differences in the analysis, or simply on whether the observations are welcome?
Note from AC JosepH Media: If you like this story and others posted on Front Runner New Jersey.com, lend us a hand so we can keep producing articles like these for New Jersey and the world to see. Click on SUPPORT FRNJ and make a contribution that will go directly in making more stories like this available. You can reach Editor Clyde Hughes at chughes@acjosephmedia.com. Thank you for reading!
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