By Dan McLaughlin
Saturday, May 15,
2021
You know you have made it in the world of conservative activism when the Washington Post decides to run a hit piece on you — and you’ve really made it when the Post can hardly even find much to complain about except to call your efforts “a stealth persuasion machine,” quote some grumpy left-wing gadflies, and fret that your arguments might persuade people to your point of view.
That’s where John Tillman is now. A businessman by background, Tillman sold off his primary business in the mid 2000s and decided to bring his experience in the competitive world of commerce into the political space of defending free markets. He set up shop in Illinois — not easy ground for a conservative — for the most conservative reason of all: It was home. His philosophy was simple: “If the policy empowers people, I’m for it. If the policy empowers government beyond its constitutional limit, I’m generally against it.” This is not, to put it mildly, the governing philosophy of Illinois or of the city of Chicago. But every David needs a Goliath.
Tillman was centrally involved in founding and/or running a series of separate entities with different focuses across the worlds of policy, politics, law, and media: the Illinois Policy Institute (which advocates conservative policy in Illinois), the Franklin News Foundation (a national organization doing state-government journalism), the Liberty Justice Center (a legal advocacy organization that was one of the leaders in fighting to the Supreme Court against mandatory public-sector-union dues in Janus v. AFSCME), and, most recently, the American Culture Project, the target of the Post’s ire for setting up swing-state pro-liberty and pro-free-market groups with names such as Arise Ohio, Stand Up Florida, and Mighty Michigan. He recently sat down with me to discuss his approach.
When Tillman first got involved, he was “mad at Republicans who say one thing and do another.” He got to talking to small-government activists in Republican politics — Pat Toomey, the late Tom Coburn, Jeff Flake — and attempted to get at the question that bothered him (one that seems ironic, in retrospect, as to Flake): Why is it that Republican politicians get elected and move to the left, whereas Democratic politicians get elected and . . . also move to the left. Almost nobody moves further to the right in office, especially on questions of the size and limitation of government. As Tillman told me, he analyzed the behavior of legislators and policy-makers as being driven by three factors, in descending order of importance:
· Political expediency: For example, “I’ll vote for your education bill if you vote for my health-care bill.” It may be partly a measure of Tillman’s Illinois background that he sees this as the basis for nearly two-thirds of all political decision-making. The trading of government favors is, of course, a field in which advocates of limited government cannot compete.
· Political fear: Don’t vote for things if voters, donors, local business leaders, the media won’t like it — whoever it is that the political decision-maker fears.
· Political principle. As Tillman puts it: “The truth is that there are very few people who vote on principle on a daily basis. Now the interesting thing is . . . I think that has been changing over the last ten years [in] the caucus with both sides of the aisle polarized.”
One might read this as a modern version of Thucydides’s formulation of “fear, honor, and interest.” Tillman sees it as a vise, pressing down on political figures from three directions. Outside forces — media, public opinion, “influencers” (by which he means everyone from activist groups to think tanks) — apply that pressure. Whichever side applies more is apt to get what it wants. The goal is to apply more pressure than your opponents.
The second nut Tillman sought to crack was communications: “I just could never understand why the Right is so bad at messaging and marketing this amazing miracle” of the American free-enterprise system. Tillman’s philosophy of communications has been driven by his background in marketing, and he learned from doing ballot initiatives and issue-ad campaigns what works, and what doesn’t.
TILLMAN: The other side, they have great marketers ironically, selling a very much inferior product. We have the . . . best-in-class product, and we don’t sell it in the way that the target audience consumes. We tend to sell it really well to the base, but we don’t sell it well to the middle — the soft Left and soft Right and the centrist voters who really determine electoral outcomes . . .
The key . . . is that we sell in the language the target audience consumes. We did a test, up in Alaska back in 2013, on Obamacare rollout, and what we wanted to demonstrate was that red-meat messaging worked really well. But it alienated those persuadable middle voters that you need. Whereas centrist messaging — same policy, same principle, not giving any quarter — but using centrist messaging, centrist language really helped persuade that middle and bring them in, but it also worked with the base.
We really focus on messaging that works across the spectrum; we try to appeal to people through fairness, through emotion, and through truth rather than rational thought, data, and citations. And that is why we’ve been able to build the giant audience that we have in Illinois and now around the country.
Yet crafting a message, and identifying its target audience, is not just about the art of communication. It is also about measuring what works. Tillman is an apostle of the importance of having institutions on the right measure the effectiveness of their efforts.
TILLMAN: In business, you have to measure everything. I came out of the marketing space, I was a retailer, I was in the direct marketing space. We measured everything. . . . Measurement leads to accountability. I find that there are some lingering dinosaurs on the right who don’t like to measure it because they fear the accountability of their own impact. My point is that we all have to embrace measurement, because we all should want to be held accountable to know whether the work we’re doing is actually having a positive impact on the country.
So, we measure everything we do. We test everything we do. We do A/B testing on all of our messages before we seal a message and put much money behind it. We measure open rates on emails; these are very fundamental things, but we actually get into fairly complex measurement; we measure conversion rates, we measure cost of acquisition to get a new person to opt into our active user database and earned audiences. . . . We think [opt-in rate is] a core deliverable, as well as to ourselves and know what we’re doing.
I think a lot of people in the public-policy space kind of like not being held accountable, so they don’t measure. I would say we all should be measuring everything. . . . You want to measure that to know if you’re making a difference.
He also emphasizes that measuring impact is particularly urgent for the Right because it faces an uphill battle against the better-funded activists and institutions of the Left:
TILLMAN: I think the most important thing for all of us on the right is to understand that one of the reasons we need to measure — one of the reasons we need to hold ourselves accountable — is because we are not going to get the resources required to compete effectively, and once our donors and investors believe we have a good strategy, and that we’re really focused on results that move the ball, [they will contribute], and all of us should have a little humility about that.
Of course, while open rates on emails and positive responses in poll tests are useful intermediate steps, they are not the end goal. But Tillman can count those, as well. Janus is one. Others have come at the ballot box. In 2020, the big battle was an amendment to the Illinois constitution to allow a progressive state income tax, repealing the state’s requirement of a flat tax. Governor J. B. Pritzker and his allies poured $50 million into the effort, but Tillman was a key part of the pushback, which ended with the initiative going down 53.3 percent to 46.7 percent. Over 3 million voters opposed the amendment, including more than 600,000 people who did not vote for Donald Trump. That’s a mark of the success of the initiative’s opponents in reaching beyond the Republican base in deep-blue Illinois.
Another satisfying moment came in February, with the long-overdue fall of Mike Madigan, the cartoonishly corrupt former Democratic speaker of the Illinois house and the dominant figure in Illinois politics for the past four decades. Having held the speaker’s chair since 1983, Madigan was the longest-serving statehouse speaker in American history and a master of the sinister arts of political expediency and political fear. Tillman’s Illinois Policy Institute worked long and hard to raise the profile of the camera-shy Madigan’s role as the embodiment of Illinois’s corrupt and dysfunctional system, including a 2016 documentary that got under Madigan’s skin.
Tillman notes that the film was instrumental in raising Madigan’s name ID in the state from 50 percent to 95 percent, and dropping his favorables from almost even to negative 30. In the end, Madigan’s fall was the result of his own hubris and corruption, but rattling his cage for years helped set the stage. Madigan was increasingly hostile when questioned over the years by reporters from the Illinois News Network (originally a media project of the Illinois Policy Institute, but run by the Franklin News Foundation since 2017), asking one after Pritzker’s 2018 election victory, “When are you guys gonna fold your tent?”
In the end, it was Madigan’s tent that folded.
The Illinois Policy Institute had more mixed success when Republicans finally captured the statehouse in 2014 behind Bruce Rauner. Rauner initially welcomed ideas and personnel from IPI, but by the end of his tenure, he had managed to alienate Illinois conservatives, leading to a primary challenge and a humiliating 15-point loss to Pritzker in 2018. Selling ideas directly to voters is one thing; selling them through fallible politicians is another.
Illinois still needs a lot of change to turn itself around. It loses a continuous stream of emigrants to every surrounding state. The Illinois Policy Institute has made the state’s shrinking population another of its main issue areas. Tillman remains undiscouraged, but he takes his victories where he can get them.
Finally, while Tillman’s background has been in free-market issues, he recognizes the need to defend the culture, as well. A fundraising solicitation by the American Culture Project, obtained by the Post, promises prospective donors that its purpose is “to address the right’s gap of cultural influence.” Tillman notes how the landscape has changed since the Bush years, when he got into this space.
TILLMAN: There was on the right, back in those days, there were many people who . . . felt a little icky about what I’ll call full-spectrum social conservatives. I think we’re way past that now . . . because the rest of the conservative agenda . . . free markets and the Founding principles, are now on the table and central in that cultural war. . . . The culture war today is about the very essence of what America is, and the purpose of its Founding and the morality of the Founding. . . . People on the right are waking up to that, and that’s why I actually think there’s going to be a growing movement and backlash against the overreach by the Left — woke capitalism [and] critical race theory.
Battle is joined now on all fronts. Activists like Tillman can point the way to winning it.
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