In 2018, Victorian Labor ignored a crime scare campaign and won a landslide. Now it is campaigning on crime itself, giving the Liberals the issue voters already associate with them.

Don’t think of an elephant. You just did. George Lakoff built a book around that trick in 2004, and it should be the bible for anyone interested in running political campaigns. For two decades, it was my bible.

My first campaign was Bendigo in 1998. Steve Gibbons took the seat from the Liberals that year and held it for the next 15 years. Then came Tullamarine in 1999, where Liz Beattie won a seat the Liberals had held through the Kennett years. From 2005 to 2019 I worked as a campaign official for Victorian Labor, finishing as deputy campaign director. The instinct, but critical for my professional development, the instructions from those above me, was there in Bendigo: focus on why they vote for the Left and not the Right. To use a marketing analogy, if you are selling Red Bull, don’t try to compete with wellness products but instead, sell it as a stimulant, a magic potion. The drink tastes like medicine for a reason.

Lakoff gave it a name. Detailed in his 2004 book, Don’t think of the elephant. From the moment it hit the bookstores, I snapped up a copy, and it went everywhere with me: the car, the campaign office, the desk during the long nights before polling day. Not literally but floating in the background, influencing most of my professional decisions.

Lakoff is a cognitive linguist who taught at Berkeley for over 40 years. His argument is simple and, once you have seen it in the field, impossible to un-see. Politics is fought over frames, a mental model, not facts. A frame is the mental structure that gives a word its meaning. Say “tax relief” and the listener pictures a burden and a politician who lifts it. Argue against tax relief, and you have already accepted the burden. The title of the book is the experiment. Tell someone not to think of an elephant, and they will think of one. Negating a frame activates it. Nixon told the nation he was not a crook and the nation thought about crooks.

The lesson for modern political campaigns is simple but critical. When you argue or campaign on your opponent’s terms, in their language and on their issue, you strengthen their frame even as you attack it. You put their elephant in every voter’s head. The discipline Lakoff demanded was to speak only from your own values, in your own language, on your own ground.

Lakoff was writing for American progressives after the Clinton years, but the political science underneath his argument is older, broader and embedded in our DNA. In 1983 Ian Budge and Dennis Farlie studied post-war elections across 23 democracies and found that parties rarely compete by taking opposite positions on the same question. They compete by trying to make the election about different questions, with answers that neatly align with their brand equity. Each party has issues on which it is trusted, and each spends the campaign trying to make those issues the ones that........

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