Illustration by: Mohamed Hassan – Pixabay
Several names in Colombia are already candidates, and many others are quietly preparing to be presidential candidates for 2026. Reviewing the new way of communicating used by two previously labeled weak candidates, Milei and Trump, who ultimately won, from them are several lessons to be applied by those who hope to be elected president of Colombia. In this article, we talk about these keys and everything that surrounds their efficiency—vital lessons that do not require significant investments or effort but will, decision, and perseverance.
By: ottogutierrez@ymail.com
2025 has begun, and potential presidential candidates have started preparing to organize their support, proposals, and campaign teams. Although it may seem that 15 months before the election is too early, the truth is that it is just the right amount of time for potential candidates. That is why it will be expected to see activity from many politicians, resignations of officials, and announcements from citizens who aspire to a place on the ballot.
Citizens will begin to see many faces and hear many names. However, they will see an oversupply of proposals to win the electorate’s vote. These proposals will be based on the nature and characteristics of each candidate. All will be valid in the diverse spectrum of visions of the country that we will hear in 2025 and the 2026 campaign. The struggle to position these proposals in public opinion, especially in citizens’ minds, will be the great battle that all candidates must carry out regardless of their condition or party. As in all campaigns of all times and all democracies, the key will be in the communication of the candidates with the voters. The history of campaigns is changing due to the current communication challenges posed by traditional and new media.
It is worth looking at the most recent and high-profile presidential campaigns that prove all the theories presented in this article. They are also discussed in political and academic circles and among political advisors. The campaigns are the election of Javier Milei in Argentina and Donald Trump in the United States. The electoral policy manual proposes two candidates with the worst conditions as a path to success. These conditions in Milei’s case were: lack of knowledge on the part of voters, unfavourability, ruthless political-personal attacks, lack of empathy, and lack of a political structure to campaign (party, media, support). In Trump’s case, high unfavourability, a dark past, manifest rejection, ruthless political-judicial attacks, and lack of empathy, among others. In favor, an executed government, achievements, and a great desire to reverse the bad image. The two, like David against Goliath (Viera, 2024), fought against governments in office that were ideologically opposed, promoting their candidates for continuity and with many resources to manipulate things so that they would not change, as has been discovered in each case.
Given this scenario, the questions are: What did these candidates do to win a battle that was a priori lost? How did they manage to reverse, with speeches and proposals, the deep-rooted ideology of opposing governments and their followers who despised and stigmatized them in the public eye? Finally, what did they do to succeed if they lacked all the means to grow and only had their impetus, strength, and persistence? The answer in both cases is straightforward. They changed their communication, but they changed it radically to adapt it to the reality of their times and societies. Viera sums it up (Analítica, 2024): “The media made Trump more of a media product than he was. Trump took advantage of that “wave,” resorting to language that framed his proposals as a defense against “the others.”
Milei and Trump knew how to present their proposals; they found the best moment to make each one, and they broke the molds of traditional communication regarding their speeches, statements, and opinions in terms of form and content. They innovated, trusted, persisted, and waited. They read a country from another angle; they tried, failed, corrected on the fly, and got it right. They built their communication model, taking into account their weaknesses and strengths. Daniel McCarthy describes Trump with these words: “The challenge he poses does not lie so much in what he does as in the fact that he questions the beliefs on which authority rests.”
The two winning candidates spoke so clearly that no one could ignore their words. The statements were not politically correct, commonplaces, clichés, or apparent statements. They were their feelings, vision, promise, and commitment. They prioritized all that over the pro-candidacy political compromises or compromises that significantly limit the candidates’ sincere expression. The prestigious Democratic political consultant James Carville describes it this way: “In politics, perception is everything, and many Americans see us as absent with the economy as if we do not feel their hardships or worry too much about other things.”
Milei and Trump were authentic, regardless of their past, and, like a magnet, they attracted people, politicians, voters, journalists, and commentators. One by one, they came to share a message that, it was believed, had not been heard before, neither in form, substance, time, or tone. It was the same but different, an axiom that, although evident, plays a key and profound role in communicating the candidates in Colombia for 2026.
Once we have seen that the success of the campaigns mentioned above was based on communication and after analyzing the results, the proposals, and the way they were carried out, we go straight into the subject of communication to draw lessons to be learned from the Colombian candidates who, in the 12 months remaining until the start of the next presidential election, must apply them very well. It is firmly believed that they will not be successful if they do not change traditional or old communication and do not implement what current times demand.
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On the contrary, success will come if the candidate knows how to implement and adapt to the three variables of campaign communication that experience says had a winning effect and will have such a result in Colombia only if they are applied to the reality in which the campaign will be carried out. These axes are the following:
- Campaign topics are different from government topics. It means that a candidate who wants to connect with and convince voters cannot come and present topics in campaign appearances as if he were talking about his well-crafted government program. No. The campaign presents topics without the technical, complex, politically correct, ceremonial, prosopopoeic language of past elections. Today, more than ever, it must be decoded, simple, straightforward, understandable by all, complete, short, and above all, impress the listener and not leave them wondering what he said or stating that the candidate did not say anything simply because the listener did not understand. Some very conservative examples of this type of message could be that social protest is how a minority violates the rights of the majority. Subsidies make people poorer; getting educated is making a profit. Criminals are the ones who should be afraid, not honest people. Three suggestions will be put forward in the campaign journal, which will then be asked to be explained, and positions will be set on issues such as social protest, subsidies and education, security, corruption, and justice. In the Milei case, which also applies to Trump, analyst Ana Iparraguirre, from the GBAO Strategies analysis center (2023), spoke of a new style, saying: “It was a fight between the old form of communication in traditional media and billboards, with state funds, versus a more organic way of communicating through new media.”
- Communication must be structured to be disseminated on social networks and the media. Giving one or the other the value to be predominant will depend on handling the issues in point one. The expression cannot be the same. The message cannot be the same in form, content, and timing because social networks exist. It is reason enough to change. If the messages are emotional, short, complete, simple, and easy to understand, they will be successful on the networks. They will reach more people interested in achieving them, and the reactions can be measured. Thus, many more benefits can be attributed to this means of communication that gives what traditional media do not offer. As the media continue to exist and will also be in the campaign, they must be supplied with the same issues but differently. The media proposals described before, such as social protest, subsidies, education, security, corruption, and justice, will be repeated, explained, and expanded. It must be understood that the media have their dynamics but, above all, their specific audiences. The media are not social networks. The media is used to find another scenario from which more emphasis is placed on the campaign approaches made on social networks day after day. It is about taking advantage of the communication circle to turn it in favor of the candidate and his cause. The same analyst, Ana Iparraguirre (2023), summarized it: “Milei became known as a television panelist, and clips of her interventions went to social networks, where they went viral and reached young people. Thus, she carried out her campaign on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok and moved away from traditional formats, which also shook the way of campaigning in the country.”
- The candidate will have an audience of supporters and detractors (more of these). It is vital to understand its effective management. The campaign must communicate efficiently by speaking to them in the same way but differently. As the audience that listens to the candidate is mixed between those who support him and those who do not, the secret will be to generate messages that, when heard or read by both groups, cause an effect. The ideal would be for it to have the same effect, but since it is impossible, achieving the maximum in one and the least resistance in the other will already be a good achievement. Gabriel Vommaro (2023) described Milei’s work with these words: “his intense media exposure since then allowed him to establish a relationship of relative closeness with depoliticized audiences. Convinced of the power of that direct contact, the power of a “celebrity,” he chose not to invest in the construction of a political organization. Instead, he maintained control of his public image, speech, and proselytizing action.” Javier Balsa (2024), in the book Why did Milei win? He defined it thus: “A much harsher discourse predominates, which perhaps began with memes but became increasingly established, with communicators who were previously peripheral and now move towards the center of the concentrated media. Thus, this discourse became legitimized; some people adhere to it, replicate it, and choose it.” The old and famous James Carville credited Trump with a more direct expression: “Trump, for the first time in his political career, won decisively by taking over a section of middle-class voters.”
Once the three key axes of how campaign communication should be in 2026 have been raised, it is necessary to make a warning. Populists, opportunists, or candidates who distract the vote can easily make use of these resources for their purposes. It will be easy to distrust them because they will only remain in sonorous and pleasant announcements for the masses. It will be seen that they are empty proposals without the requested explanation or depth, context, and support. The 2022 presidential election already gave us a demonstration of these errors. The two finalist candidates were characterized by decisively falling into these errors. One promised dozens of unrealizable things and disappointed his voters. The other, incipiently applying the ideas raised here, gained favorability, but behind his proposals, it was seen that there was nothing. In the end, it deflated resoundingly. That election also showed that the candidates who did not make it to the final vote could have had more sensible, documented approaches and proposals focused on solving citizens’ problems. However, they failed to connect them because their communication was not aligned with what was proposed here, which will be vital in the future.
Illustration by: Mohamed Hassan – Pixabay
To put everything said into context, we only need to review Colombia’s reality regarding the technological, behavioral, and demographic environments that will make the communication proposed here possible.
Technological Environment: The technological habits of Colombians in 2023 (Digital Colombia Datareportal) show 39.3 million Internet users in Colombia, which means a penetration of 75.7%. There are 38.4 million social media users, representing 75% of the population. A total of 73.6 million active cell phone connections were made, which is equivalent to 141.8% of the population. Colombia has 36.2 million adults who use social media, meaning 93.9% of the adult population. 97.7% of Internet users use at least one social network regardless of age. By networks, the most used in Colombia are Facebook 33.5 Million, YouTube 30.7 Million, Instagram 17.7 Million, TikTok 20.1 Million, FB Messenger 20.4 Million, LinkedIn 12 Million, Snapchat 6.1 Million, X 5.1 Million.
Behavioral Environment: 97.5% of Colombians own smartphones (We Are Social/Hootsuite/Branch 2021). The time spent using the Internet is 10 hours and 7 minutes. 78% use the Internet for entertainment. 79% used it in the last month to access social networks. 80% use it daily to access Facebook. 88% say that Facebook is the most used network. People between 16 and 56 consider the Internet important (TIC, 2018).
Demographic Environment: The demographic changes in the current Colombian population and their habits regarding the use of the Internet and social networks determine audiences’ nature and how they relate to them. Today, 33.59% of the population in Colombia corresponds to digital natives, people between 15 and 35 years old. 19.48% are digitally savvy people between 35 and 49 years old. Of these two groups that favor digital information and relationships, 53.07 represent more than half of the population. Additionally, 15.17% of the so-called digital users are between 50 and 64. Finally, 5.43% are part of the basic digital users group, aged between 65 and 74. The estimated percentage of the digitally active population is 73.67%, equivalent to 35.54 million. Of these, 50.7% are women and 49.3% are men—82.2% live in urban areas and 17.8% in rural areas. The average age of the Colombian population is 31.5 years, and a fully digital native is.
A communication operation like the one proposed in this article requires a communications team familiar with the processes outlined here. The necessary digital strategies, such as one-to-one segmentation, micro-segmentation, Viralization, deepening of content, and KPI management, will make digital communication efficient. All this with a critical warning. What is proposed is within the ethical and legal framework of digital communication. Anything done outside of this framework only demonstrates the inability of the performers to obtain results by complying with the rules of the game. If somebody knows how to play the game, that person can win without cheating or unfair dealings.
Finally, it is undeniable that political communication must be different in light of the new communication realities implemented in the first quarter of this century. Today’s audiences are diverse, with various information searches and consumption habits. They give credibility to their digital sources. Some say that not so much to traditional media, which is losing ground to social media. The costs of dissemination on social media with optimization and segmentation are lower than those of the press, radio, and television. According to the Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2023-2027, “by 2023, it was observed that digital advertising investment was 4,087 million dollars globally. This level is higher than that of television, radio, or paper combined. In recent years, advertising has taken the digital direction with greater force, even above channels such as print media or television.” Experience shows that the high volume of resources invested in digital media and the low effectiveness of that communication in some organizations confirms that it can be well-targeted but poorly executed, which must be corrected for the communication proposal for the 2026 campaigns. Finally, the best conclusion is made by the experienced James Carville, a Democratic advisor to dozens of presidential campaigns and who appeared in the media several times saying that he was looking for the reason for Kamala Harris’ defeat. He finally found a reason and published it in an article in the New York Times in 2024, transcribed here: “It is a new media paradigm that we live in now. I am an 80-year-old man, and we are heading towards a non-traditional and decentralized media environment. Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. Moreover, influencers are the digital managers of that conscience. Our economic message must be sharp, sharp, and clear; we must take it directly to the people. For Democratic presidential hopefuls, their 2028 auditions should be based on two things: 1) how authentic they are on economic issues and 2) how well they explain it on a podcast. Carville’s statement is completely in line with our analysis and our point. As things stand today, it will not be possible to have a successful campaign without considering campaign messages and government messages as different but complementary things. Knowing that should speak to social and traditional media as two parallel channels that converge on the candidate. Supporters and detractors demand similar but different messages that must be effective in both audiences. We can end with the phrase from Kelly & Littman (2010) in their book The Ten Faces of Innovation, which applies perfectly to a presidential election year. “There is no guarantee that what worked yesterday will work tomorrow.” For a candidate to be able to communicate efficiently, they must create their own communications environment. Here are the strategic axes. When those interested are thinking about organizing their campaigns while defining proposals and teams, they must manage the communication that, as demonstrated, will make the connection and majority vote of the electorate possible.
Otto Gutierrez 