The midterm risk map for communicators

The big picture: Public affairs advisers agreed: Don't wait for election results to tell you where you're exposed.

• "It's really important to have the right antennae to think as broadly as possible about risk, because the next flash point may come from somewhere quite unexpected," FGS Global's Graeme Trayner told Axios.

Here are five things communicators should be doing now:

Find your exposure. Start with affordability, then assess how products, policies and business decisions stack up against voters' anxieties about jobs, technology and corporate power.

• The challenge for communicators, said Trayner, is that these issues can be "hard to understand, but very easy to caricature."

• Kyle Plotkin from OnMessage Public Strategies says that includes AI adoption far beyond the frontier labs — from customer-service chatbots to other ways companies are changing human interactions. Those companies "all have the potential to be punching bags," he says.
• "The earlier you can define why this is more effective for American families or workers, the better," he says.

Listen beyond Washington. Don't wait for election results or a congressional inquiry to learn how an issue is landing in communities.

• Plotkin says companies focused only on agencies or committees risk missing "the people that actually compel policymakers to move" — voters.
• Issues that once had a narrow audience can move quickly online, so companies need to be "thinking about an inside game and an outside game," he says.
• Bully Pulpit International's Andrew Bleeker put it more simply: "We have to be local wherever we are."

Prepare the internal response. Not every post-election development warrants a public statement, but employees may still expect information, guidance or acknowledgment.

• "There may not be things to comment on publicly, but there may be things you need to address with internal audiences," APCO's Linda Barnhart said during a briefing Axios attended Wednesday.
• APCO recommends scenario-planning for potential protests, operational disruptions or contested results now, aligning leadership and preparing language in advance.
• Employees may be looking for "even just the baseline acknowledgment," Barnhart said, and "not communicating in these moments could result in a loss of trust."

Resist the post-election whiplash. Election results can change who's in power, but they don't change a company's stakeholders overnight.

• Bleeker says many brands felt they "overcorrected a little far" during the Biden administration and then "overcorrected far too quickly" after President Trump returned to office.
• Trayner's test: "It's got to be authentic to who you are as a business, core to your values, core to your principles, but also thinking about your stakeholders."

Prepare for the clip, not just the hearing. If congressional scrutiny increases, legal preparation alone may no longer be enough.

• "The traditional playbook of, 'Oh, you come into town, you do an op-ed, you try not to screw up your hearing,' is totally gone," Bleeker says. Lawmakers are trying to get "their clip" confronting an executive or industry.
• That means establishing what the company stands for before the hearing and preparing for the social audience that may see only seconds of the exchange.

Between the lines: Political exposure rarely fits neatly into a single corporate function.

• A pricing decision can become a reputation issue, local backlash can become a policy fight and an employee concern can become an external story.
• That's why communications, government affairs, risk and business leaders need to work closely together.

The bottom line: "Look around corners, work with your business side, build a political risk map and take inventory of your exposure," says Plotkin. "Sitting back and waiting and hoping everyone ignores you is not a plan."