The Leesburg Diagram is a strategy taught in the Activism 101 classes available through the Leadership Institute.  It is a method used to visualize and identify the contrasting positions you have versus a specific opponent.  We felt it was such a powerful concept that we created our own version of this tool and added it to our donation and campaign management engine known as Patriot (www.yourpatriot.com).

To understand how this could benefit your campaign, we have created a simple example below.

Leesburg Diagram for the 2004 Presidential election.

For this example, we will look back to the 2004 presidential election.  Of course, viewing an election like this in hindsight seems a bit obvious, but it sure didn't when it was in the process of being determined.

What Bush wants people to think about Bush Honorable military service history Intelligent & graduate honors Wants to keep taxes low Man of God	What Bush wants people to think about Kerry Kerry is stiff Kerry is ultra-wealthy His wife is rude Lied about his war service
What Kerry wants people to think about Bush AWOL from his service Bush is an idiot Bush is ultra religious Bush can't tackle tough issues	What Kerry wants people to think about Kerry Decorated war hero Decorated war hero!!  Married to a powerful woman Wants low taxes for the poor

We can clearly see there are many things that each side will try and use as a point of strength, such as a war record or growth in the economy.

For example, "finding" documents about Bush going AWOL from his military duty and getting them broadcast would close issue #1 and eliminate it from bing used as a point of strength.  This is very similar to what occurred with the Swift Boat Veterans, in that an outside organization eliminated a point of strength without the candidate having to do it himself.

The goal here is to cover, or "close" each item and then see what items are still open to attack about the opponents.   You can easily forecast these potential salvos if you visualize them in this manner.  If we know Bush might look to the economy for strength, so we can proactive collect selective economic data that shows the economy isn't doing well because of the Bush tax-cuts for the rich.  This might eliminate a possible pillar of strength before the candidate might have even tough of it!

Your election will have points that your opponent plans to make, and you need to be aware of the strategy in his/her statements.  Does it hurt any of your good points?  Did he create a new position of strength you have not yet covered?  Leaving issues open allows them the possibility to create a positive with undecided voters, so it is a solid plan to get them all covered as soon as possible.

To summarize, each ''square'' shows which items are your strengths and you can easily contrast items that you can expect to be ''accused'' of. These strengths are likely to become key parts of your message.  Since Patriot allows you to create a Leesburg Grid diagram for each opponent, you can easily set a strategy for your message and keep it updated.