Stick to the issues, don't run a  personal campaign

Oh I think that's correct if you're running for congressional, other than president or perhaps governor.

When you run for president, on the other hand, every Tom Dick and Harry comes out to vote for their favorite personality after the long kayfabe horse race performance. If you don't have an opinion to share on what you like or don't like about the main actors, you're a social loser. So they must run on their personality and how well they fight and pander without too much wonk detail.

Otherwise, especially for mid-terms and special replacement elections, only the voters serious about government, party dominance and/or individual issues show up to vote. Sometimes extremely passionate about issues, say like: abortion. They don't care about personality.

In presidential years, there's a lot more voters voting for the congressional races, but there too personality isn't that important, they vote "down ticket" party line or just guess.

This is the problem of our long expensive horse race for president.  Everyone gets to know the candidates more intimately and gets interested and votes on that basis.

Happens to be why I was upset when Josh Marshall clearly decided to go after horse race coverage over policy coverage at TPM in 2008 (partly to up his numbers and partly because he likes both kinds of news)  and invited a huge flood of Obama fans to flood TPM Cafe in 2008, fans of his skin color and his personality and his biography, clearly weren't reading his white papers.