Which may help consolidate support from already committed Dem supporters and thus be of very marginal benefit at best.

What you need to appeal to uncommitted voters is a presence on apparently unaligned or "non-political" sites singing your praises - facebook pages etc. Local community sites, a personal campaign site emphasising your personal qualities and community ties rather than your political identification.

Committed Dems will vote for you because your a Dem. Everyone else will vote for or against you because of how you present yourself to them as a person  - and a strong party identification may even be a negative for them.

You are a multi-dimensional person, not a party apparatchik. You have to appeal to a multitude of different people on a variety of different levels. Only a small minority of people will vote for you on purely ideological grounds, and only a few more on perceived competence.

The swing vote is typically composed of low information voters who are looking for some hook or symbol by which they can differentiate between two candidates they know little or nothing about  - and who will then promptly forget about their choice and get on with their daily lives far removed from any consideration of politics

You have to give them some reason to vote for you in that one glimmer of consciousness when they are actually deciding how to cast their vote.  So they have to have some positive association with you:

1. Name recognition
   
2. Local/community identification
   
3. Professional respect for what you have accomplished
   
4. Some belief in the more positive future you are depicting/promising
   
5. positive, warm, sunny emotional feeling/vibes about you (are you someone they would like as a colleague, neighbour, grandfather, community representative)
   
6. Association with other things they feel positively about
   
7. Party political/issues identification - comes about last in the list for swing voters.
   

Index of Frank's Diaries