Shock Treatment

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At 27, Rep. Aaron Schock, R-Ill., is currently the youngest member of Congress. Being a Republican in a predominantly Democratic state, he found that communication to all groups is the key to success. While campaigning for office as a state representative, he was told to ignore certain demographics since they never vote Republican. When he would visit these groups, he would be met with people who had never before been approached by a Republican. He says, “When you write off a demographic, you’re most…certainly set for defeat—and I don’t care what demographic it is.”

Schock tells a story of how communicating with his constituents helped him when he voted on not-so-popular stances: “I had to vote against [the] minimum wage twice. Well, if there were anyone in the state…who could have defended a vote for minimum wage, it would have been me… I had the poorest district—all these people…actually working on minimum wage that were in my district, and yet I voted against minimum wage[. I]…went to three different black churches, went on two radio stations, and got out front and said, ‘Look, this is why it’s a bad idea. We’re one of 48 states; we’re not an island. When we raise [the] cost of doing business, [the]cost of work, and [the] cost of labor, the companies go elsewhere. And one thing’s for certain—having a job is a lot better than not having one, and basic economics says that if we do this we’re going to have fewer jobs.’ And that was something that resonated with the black voters in my district. Now, many of them said, ‘Well, we don’t agree with you,’ but every one of them respected me for at least coming and being upfront and communicating with them. And so when I ran for reelection, and the state Democratic party came in and said, ‘…Aaron Schock doesn’t care about the working man,” and they spent a couple hundred thousand dollars alone on one ad on minimum wage, it did not affect my numbers at all…we won that reelection with 59% of the vote…there is no one that needs to convince me [of] the power of communication.”

Schock argues that Republicans lost their majority in Congress because they were not getting their message out to different groups: “We have to…begin communicating as effectively as the opposition [is]…and to reach each one of these demographics requires a different medium. In my community, if I wanted to reach African-American voters, I couldn’t get on a blog. Now, there’s nothing stereotypical about that; it’s reality… I could run all these ads, I could have the news conferences, I could get all the write-ups, but they weren’t going to hear my message. And unless I took the time and got out of my comfort zone, and went to where I needed to go to communicate to them, I wasn’t going to get 39%—I wasn’t going to get 4%! …they hadn’t ever heard my message—they hadn’t ever heard my party’s message, and many of them were fifty and sixty years old. And the frustration for me is, now…I go to conference, and my colleagues come up to me and they say, ‘Well…Schock, you’re twenty-seven. How do I talk to young people?’…it’s like saying, ‘How do you talk to women?’ You…don’t dress up in a dress and pretend to be a woman…you go to them, you’re honest, you’re compelling…you talk about why your positions and your issues make sense, how it will improve their lives, why it makes sense for them, and you relate it to them. Now, it requires getting out of your comfort zone, it requires maybe using new technology…my response always to…[my colleagues] is, ‘Do you have a Facebook page?’ ‘Uh, no, I don’t…that’s for young people.’ Exactly!”

Heather Latham is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.