If Geneva’s new police station referendum goes down in flames — and it will — the post-mortem won’t require a panel of experts. Just one look at the campaign mailer hitting mailboxes this week is all it’ll take. For anyone who studies persuasion, political messaging, or basic human attention spans, the piece reads less like a referendum promotion and more like a step-by-step instructional guide on how not to pass one.
With that in mind, let’s begin class.
Step One: Create a mailer no one will read
The front of the piece is a wall of text with long paragraphs explaining infrastructure problems, operational challenges, and flooding issues. It may be accurate, but accuracy doesn’t equal persuasion.
A political mailer is not a grant proposal. Voters glance at it for maybe three seconds before deciding whether it goes on the kitchen counter or straight into the recycling bin. Considering the average American adult’s attention span sits at a strikingly short 8.25 seconds, if the goal was to see that no one reads their argument, then it’s mission accomplished.
Step Two: Use the wrong kind of messaging
Right next to the dense text sits a set of words that would look great on a police recruitment poster:
Leadership. Honor. Teamwork. Integrity.
Those may be fine sentiments, but they’re utterly irrelevant to the question being asked. No one is electing anyone here. No one is judging the moral fiber of the department. The ballot question is painfully simple. Do we need a new police station or not?
This mailer answers a question that no one asked.
Step Three: Introduce humor at the worst possible moment
The piece pivots to a photo of the department’s comfort dog with a “the police station is ruff” reference. Look, comfort dogs are great. They serve an important role and everyone loves them. But humor works only when it reinforces the core message. It mercilessly undercuts it here.
You just spent a paragraph explaining flooding, sewer backups, emergency access problems, and space shortages. That’s supposed to convey urgency. But then to suddenly switch tones and crack a joke with a golden retriever.
The result isn’t charming, it’s confusing and off-putting.
Step Four: Tell voters what the new building will offer
The back of the mailer explains the grand features of the proposed new station. Modern facilities. Improved efficiency. Flexible space.
Here’s the problem with that approach. Voters don’t care about the new building until they understand why the current building doesn’t work. If you want to pass a referendum, show the problem and not the solution. Show the flooding. Show the electrical issues. Show the cramped workspace. Show the operational problems that make the building obsolete.
Since you clearly can’t bring the physical building to them, provide the kind of evidence that makes voters say, “Wow! That’s really bad. I wouldn’t want to work in an office like that.”
Step Five: Lead with a tax increase
But the most astonishing strategic choice in the mailer is highlighting the specific tax impact, which in the current political and economic climate borders on malpractice.
We’re living in what can only be described as the ICE age where immigration politics have put law enforcement in the crosshairs. We all know the average voter doesn’t differentiate in this regard. Add economic anxiety and a growing distrust of institutions and you end up with a voter base that’s already skeptical.
So, do you really want to let the voters know exactly how much their taxes will go up – in overtaxed Illinois of all places? I’ll give ‘em credit for transparency, but it’s a wonderful way of triggering the singular response referendum campaigns so desperately try to avoid: “No thanks.”
And if you’ve managed to create a visceral reaction with dire photographs of a substandard police station, why would you want to undo it with an equal and opposite reaction?
Step Six: Deliver the message after early voting starts
Timing matters. Call me crazy, but if your point is to persuade voters, then you probably want the message to arrive before they’ve already cast their ballots. This mailer showed up almost a month after early voting began.
Which brings us to our final step.
Step Seven: Assume voters will fill in the gaps
Campaigns often believe that because something seems obvious to them it will be equally as obvious to everyone else. But that’s rarely the case.
If the goal was to persuade skeptical voters that Geneva’s current police station is failing, then the campaign needs to make that case visually and relentlessly. Show the problems. Show the constraints. Show why continuing with the current facility is unsustainable.
Instead we got a verbose mailer, a tone shift involving a dog joke, and a tax hike indelibly etched into the voters’ brains. If the referendum fails, it won’t be hard to understand why. No panel of experts necessary.
That brings us to our ultimately ironic ending. Geneva needs a new police station. Yes! Despite my abject lack of respect for that department and no love lost between them and yours truly, I’ve written that sentence twice in two columns.
And I came to that conclusion after a brief conversation with a very sharp employee at the current station who expertly explained the operational problems in five short minutes. She should’ve designed the mailer. The building is old, cramped, defective, and increasingly impractical for modern policing. And that comes in well under our 8.25 second limit.
My previous column suggestion was for the City to embrace and frequently repeat, “Even Jeff Ward thinks we need a new station.” But who listens to the guy who got our Sheriff, Coroner, and State’s Attorney elected en route to better than a 75-percent campaign success rate?
When this referendum crashes and burns it won’t be because the project was flawed, but the effort to “explain” it certainly was.
