What About the Electorate in PA's Budget Fight?

Pennsylvania's state budget is again late, and there's no real groundswell for action to end it. The general public is simply not engaged. I wrote about the recent history of advocacy, communications, and state budgets in Pennsylvania for Real Clear Pennsylvania.

Aside from a handful of staff and elected officials, no one has a clear understanding of where we stand and what is precisely on the table. 

And most people don't care at all. 

When I was in Gov. Wolf's office, we had huge budget fights with the legislature. We fought for increased education funding and a structurally balanced budget – among other things – and held out nine months past the budget deadline. We traded barbs with legislators and harangued them about the critical importance of our priorities. It was all wrapped up in "the budget."

After we took stock and assessed what had happened, we tried to determine if anyone cared about "the budget" as a whole, and we found that they didn't very clearly.

We looked at our social media analytics. Everything about “the budget” performed terribly. Not that people were made or hate watched or engaged. They just didn't care at all. 

It matched some of the qualitative and quantitative research we saw that showed that people cared about individual components – education funding, taxes, marijuana legalization, health care funding – but their eyes glazed over when information about "the budget" process or "the budget" as a singular entity. 

In subsequent years, we changed a bit of our process and messaging – especially on social media – and made an effort to really focus on the individual components and get out of the budget muck to the extent possible.