How To Support Your Favorite Candidate With Buttons And More

We don't recommend the apathetic approach.

Alright, it's time to stalk support your favorite candidate. Are you ready for this?

Supporting your favorite politician is more than just voting, though you should probably remember to do that too. It's like doing your homework and forgetting to bring it to school. All your effort will go to waste.

So you're a designer. Well then, you should probably come up with a variety of ridiculously inappropriate slogans and whip up some button designs while you're at it. Trust me; you're going to need these items anyway.

Frankly, there's no shortage of work for you to do. After all, you are obsessed with your politician friend, right? So let's get you a restraining order noticed!

Develop Slogans

First, help the candidate come up with a few catchy slogans.

If you've been following along with the blog, you already know that rhythm and flow matters a lot when it comes to slogans (put it to the chant test; if people can chant it without having to stop and think about its rhythmic pattern, you're gold). If you can rhyme the candidate's sir name to craft a clever tagline, that's also a popular tactic.

Be forewarned. Something like Cooper the Pooper isn't too likely to have the desired effect. Do be careful with names that rhyme with swear words or bad words in general. Or not.

Design Buttons

Now that you've prepared taglines that you and the candidate are happy with, it's time to come up with some sleek button designs.

Everybody under 35 knows how to use Photoshop, right? As if we'd cover that here. We could be here all night.

So here's what you do. You come up with multiple designs, and make sure they are formatted correctly. Then you save the files to the appropriate format and send them off to the supplier. Don't go overboard with quantities. Got that? Don't worry; we've covered it in more detail elsewhere too.

Develop Other Promotional Material

Oh, you thought you were done? No way, broseph (or brosephina). We're just getting started.

Look, there's a lot of promo material you could have made up in addition to buttons (as cool as they are). You don't have to do it all, of course, but there are always other items that could prove useful in your campaigning.

You could have magnets, or even car magnets made up. You could have custom balloons, pens and pencils, plastic badges and tote bags. You could have emery boards. You could have ping pong paddles (aka paddle fans), reusable plastic cups, beverage koozies, fake tattoos, water or sports bottles, and even vinyl (records) banners.

Whew. That's a lot of stuff. And we're really just scratching the surface here. Naturally, all of these items are going to need some nice looking designs too. Use existing button designs as reference.

Canvass

It's time to become a creepy, smiley religious freak and go around knocking on every door in your neighborhood. But hey, you were planning on doing that anyway. For free. For no apparent reason.

Now you actually have a good reason to do it. To support your favorite candidate, of course! Let's not get too excited and lose sight of the purpose of all of your efforts.

Canvassing is where you shove a painting into someone's face, right? Just kidding. Basically it's where you go around asking "can we count on your vote?" Make sure to be polite and friendly, or you could make some people mad, and I can't be held accountable for what happens to you if you make people mad.

Donate

A lot of greedy bastards politicians ask for donations, regardless of how much money they have or make. That's just how campaigning is. If you see some spare change lying around, pick it up and donate it to your favorite candidate's campaigning efforts.

Supporting your preferred candidate financially is very helpful.

Advertise

Part of campaigning is having good promotional material and canvassing, but your politician friend could probably benefit from additional marketing as well.

For example, you could cover yourself in all of the promotional material we mentioned earlier and walk around town. Become a walking billboard!

Attend Rallies

If you've followed through on this list so far, you better show up at the rallies too. I know, it's boring, but otherwise people might figure that you're all-talk and no-walk that you don't really care about the campaign after all. It's like a bachelor party without strippers.

I am the master of simile inappropriate comments.

Persuade Others To Vote

Now here's a tough assignment; make it seem as though voting is the cool, hip thing to do.

For whatever reason, you thought supporting a candidate was a pretty good idea, so let your passion and enthusiasm carry you. Don't worry too much about the tomatoes flying at you from behind the grassy knoll. That's just me.

Oh, and have a few bullet points memorized. Let people know why you're in favor of the candidate you're supporting. If you convince people to vote, don't forget to tell them who to vote for.

Vote

Don't get overexcited and forget to vote. And yes, you should vote for the candidate you've been supporting thus far. Take a deep breath and calm down before making your choices.

Then, submit your ballot in the manner described. It won't count if you mess this up.

Phew. We did it. Good job, buddy.

What do you think? How would you go about supporting your favorite candidate? Leave a comment, cool?

Cover image by Curtis Cronn