The Tully Message Box is a 2x2 ‘Us versus Them’ Table

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my previous post on January 3, 2024 I described Using a Message Box for planning a presentation. When I was searching for articles, I ran across another Message Box, prefixed with the name Tully. As shown above, it is a 2x2 “Us versus Them” table. An article by Joe Fuld at The Campaign Workshop on  May 7, 2020 titled Tully Message Box: Use it for your political campaign discusses it. Paul Tully was a strategist for the Democratic Party. There is an obituary for him by Robin Toner at the New York Times on September 25, 1992 titled Paul Tully Is Dead at 48; Top Democratic Strategist.

 

The earliest reference I found about the Tully Message Box is on page 54 of a 2004 book by Bradford Fitch titled Media Relations Handbook: For Agencies, Associations, Nonprofits and Congress – The Big Blue Book. It also is discussed on page 51 of a 2008 book by Jeff Blodgett and Bill Lofy titled Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way, which can be downloaded for free.

 

There is a long article by Joanna P. Kimbell and Alison Berry on pages 311 to 336 in the Fall 2018 issue of the Southern Law Journal titled The Tully Message Box as a heuristic for modeling legal argumentation and detecting covert advocacy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Retitled as the Perception Box and presented even more tersely, as shown above, it appears in yet another article by Ian Marovic at Beautiful Trouble titled Perception Box Methodology. You also can download his 2018 book The Path of Most Resistance, where it appears on page 51.

 

I also found the Tully Message Box discussed by Mike McCurry at The Washington Post on July 27, 2012 in an article titled Book review: ‘The Candidate’ by Samuel Popkin. He says:

 

“A good campaign begins, Popkin says, with the development of a message box, a big piece of paper divided into four quadrants. The upper left is for what the campaign/candidate will say about itself; to the right is what the campaign/candidate will say about its opponent. The bottom half is the reverse – what the opponent says about its own campaign/candidate and what it says about you. This box is familiar to every Democratic campaign operative, although we traditionally associate it with the late and legendary Paul Tully, who taught the technique to most of us.

 

Political director for the Democratic National Committee during the 1992 campaign cycle, Popkin is a veteran of most Democratic presidential campaigns going back to Robert Kennedy’s in 1968. Curiously, he does not credit Tully with making the box a standard feature of campaign strategy, but I suspect there is a longer story there. It could be that Popkin introduced the box to Tully, although the author makes no such immodest claim. That is worth some follow-up, given how ubiquitous the message box is in current campaign strategy, at least on the Democratic side. (I have heard that Republican campaigns have their own version of this, too).”  

 

The Republican version was discussed by Patrick “PC” Sweeney at LinkedIn Pulse on January 12, 2017 in still another article titled What can libraries learn from using a Message Box like Kellyanne Conway?