One thing about Democratic campaigns that is entirely predictable and relentlessly exploited by the GOP is their addiction to policy. They talk about what they want, rather than doing what they should. Without a superstar candidate—and let’s be honest, no one in the 2020 field possesses the natural political gifts of a JFK, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama—they need to focus on a winning strategy that avoids telling Americans what they really want to do.
“But policy!” you cry, right until the tidal wave of ads distorting your policy hits.
We’ve seen it over and over again—a top-down, rigid ideological checklist of programmatic messages that sound like a focus group at a Democratic Socialist Alliance meeting in Burlington, Vermont, shocks Democratic candidates by exploding in their faces, because the ideas are at odds with the way Americans speak, think, and live.
Many 2020 Democrats, notably Elizabeth Warren, have produced a corpus of policy papers and plans both voluminous and deeply granular. Some of it is serious, smart, and robust work. It’s also worth precisely the paper it’s printed on. A few press nerds read the papers, and then they disappear into the campaign memory hole, except when they’re being weaponized against the candidate.
Do you know how many Americans are going to pull the lever for the Democratic nominee because of this or that policy paper on court-packing, reparations, gerrymandering, or late-term abortion? I don’t care how much intern blood, sweat, and tears went into those papers, the answer is: not enough. Even seriously worked-out policies on big issues largely fail to hold public attention. This is, after all, America.
The issues that excite Democratic voters when they watch the debates aren’t top of mind for the average voter, particularly those in the target states. Over and over throughout campaigns, Gallup, Pew, other public pollsters, and every private political pollster run Most Important Problem panels. Hardly any of the boutique issues ever rise above 5 percent. The big-picture stuff—the economy, healthcare, national security—does, but even then, policy as a winning campaign strategy is an illusion.
It’s a hard 2020 truth, but none of it matters. Not one bit. No matter what consultants, pollsters, and policy geeks tell you, this race is about Trump. Policy distracts, and the Fox-Trump distortions of your policy distract absolutely.
Now, I like policy people. I like their big, sweaty brains, their good hearts, and their ability to concentrate on questions that make my eyes glaze over and to reduce those questions to cogent answers. Liberal, conservative, libertarian, they’re all such cute nerds you just want to squeeze them. In campaigns, though, they show up with the veggie platter, and I show up with oysters and a case of Champagne.
Say it with me, so we get off on the right foot: This race has absolutely nothing to do with policy. This race is about Trump and a competing candidate’s personality and presentation, not about soon-forgotten policy papers and the administrivia of running a government.
Policy is a luxury good in this election because this race is against a man, not a party, a platform, or an ideology. Democrats are fighting a cult and a cult leader, and until they realize that the referendum against Trump is about Trump, he has the winning hand.
Some Democrats think this is about picking someone who motivates their base into towering heights of political passion. They think they need the hottest, purest, wokest strain of AOCisma policies to get their voters fired up. The truth is, the Democratic base will be there with heat like a nuclear fire, no matter what. They’re passionate, motivated, and hungry for a win. To use a technical political term, they fucking hate Donald Trump.
What about healthcare? Gun control? The Electoral College? Climate change? Medicare for All? The Green New Deal? Reparations? Nope. Sorry. It’s all noise at best. Every media consultant working for Trump will merrily take those policies and twist, turn, and recast them as fodder for attack ads. You’ll never understand that once those messages are on the air, post hoc arguments are worse than useless.
There are some policy attacks that work, but they’re about Trump’s actions, and thus part of the referendum on him. Which ones? Here are a few: Show voters how Trump tried to eliminate healthcare coverage for preexisting conditions, highlighting how his corrupt government screws over working families. Educate voters on how the trade war is wrecking their economic future, and how farmers and manufacturing are both being crushed. Call out Trump’s cruelty and brutality toward immigrant children. Call him out as the unrepentant racist he has proven himself to be.
Trump has handed Democrats all the weapons they need to defeat him; they just need to use the right ones for the job. This race must be a referendum on Trump, or the Democrats will lose. You are already tired of hearing me say that, but it’s the truth and you need to internalize it.
Why give the GOP weapons in the messaging war to isolate, intimidate, manipulate, and terrify your target voters and motivate Trump’s base? Why allow them to scare the hell out of people with messages like “Democrats will take away your private health insurance,” or “They’re coming to seize all your guns,” or “They want to give free healthcare to criminal illegal aliens”?
Don’t think for a moment that Republicans won’t turn your well-meaning policy papers into operatic terror messages to be bellowed out by the Mighty Wurlitzer of the Trump Right media apparatus. They have your number on this, and they’re very, very good at ringing it. I did this to your candidates, over and over, and Trump has a dozen Rick Wilson types with an unlimited budget and zero shame.
They understand the Electoral College play, and that the fifteen or so target states are to the right of the coastal blue enclaves on issues like climate change, abortion, guns, taxes, and almost everything else. Why would Democrats give Trump and his allies the sword with which to cut off their heads?
Some Democrats will object that I’m recommending shallow, content-free campaigning.
You got me. You’re right.
So what?
It’s smart and cynical, and if you need to beat a man who practices pure, unadulterated opportunistic politics, you’d better be ready to practice pure, unadulterated opportunistic politics.
Don’t believe me? Have you been living in a cave? Have you taken a Marie Kondoesque vow of digital celibacy because too much news fails to spark joy?
May I remind you of death panels, migrant caravans, the war on Christmas, creeping sharia, Hillary’s emails, Seth Rich, the Clinton Body Count, babies being killed after birth, Antifa, and a thousand other weaponized issues and stories Democrats laughed at, saying “How absurd, darling. Is this organic kale slushie gluten-free?” while Republicans ate their political lunch?
There’s an organized system for creating these weaponized outrages. I know; I helped build it. Republican candidates and consultants exploited it in races across the country. No policy from the Democrats will ever be seen with even an iota of good faith, and everything they commit to a policy paper is like show notes for the latest Muslim Illegal Immigrant Soros Deep State Antifa Hour on Fox.
Democrats don’t have to play by the GOP and Fox (but I repeat myself) rules.
Democratic voters have already demonstrated the aforementioned sweeping, powerful, almost unprecedented hatred of Donald Trump. It drove a host of new candidates into office in 2018, not only in Congress but in hundreds of down-ballot races. Democrats don’t need policy to make their voters turn out against Trump. Those people will crawl over broken glass to vote against him, as they did against his minions in 2018.
Until Democrats grapple with the fact that they must make the case against Trump to the few voters who can still be swayed—in other words, not his base or theirs—they’re playing on Trump’s battlefield, and by his rules.
More bad news: There’s an equal, if thankfully smaller, fire on the other side of the political divide. The Trump base may be smaller, but as two and a half years of painful experience demonstrates, Republican unity behind Trump is virtually unshakable. He is the parasite that ate the GOP from the inside out as an ideological force. In 2020, they’ll be utterly united, motivated, and angrier than ever; we’re moving away from red-hat, spittle-flecked, rally crazy and approaching bomb-vest crazy. I wish I was kidding. They are dead-enders, the last guys in the bunker.
Fox News, talk radio, the debased clickwhores of the Trumpist conservative commentariat, social media, and those ever-helpful Russians will continue to be all-in with Trump, pouring a constant drip of fear poison into the minds of his base. You’re not going to change many of their minds.
For Democrats, the voters they need are right in front of their eyes: the large and growing cohort of Republican women who broke away from the GOP, and the white, Democratic men who broke for Trump in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. Democrats who recoil at actually messaging to these old white dudes, writing them off as a lost cause or viewing them as an intractable enemy, are miscategorizing these voters.
For many, their choice to go with Trump was diffuse; they voted out of anger and bitterness at a system that shanked them. It was the end-product of a successful thirty-year War on Hillary.
After a string of broken promises—Thousands of coal mines! New car plants! So much winning on trade!—many of these voters are in the wind. Democrats need a candidate who makes a moral and personal case against Trump using language and messages that don’t sound like something spewed up by a mushy focus group or overheard in the living rooms of Cambridge, Potrero Hill, or the Upper West Side. As Bill Clinton speechwriter David Kusnet once said, “Speak American.”
Donald Trump’s 2016 “policy” fit on a trucker hat. As expressed at a hundred rube rallies, it was raging xenophobia, revenge against brown people, a Wall, and what was essentially a long, cheap riff on his wealth, power, intellect, and sexual prowess. Smart people in the GOP laughed it off.
The Democrats howled. How could this simpleton hope to win the election? We have so many people from the Center for American Progress and Brookings on our staff! We have a Lake Michigan Grass Carp Mitigation plan on our website! We published a slide deck on our campaign’s gender-pronoun policy!
Over and over again in elections up and down the political scale, simple, robust messages on heavy rotation triumph over complex policy. Some voters pretend to be interested in policy and to base their decisions on it, but in the end, they’re mostly faking it.
Once in a while, pollsters will sneak a policy test question into surveys to subtly call out the bullshit of people who say policy matters in elections. The questions go something like this: “Have you heard of the Wilson-Santiago Bill?” Of course, there’s never a Wilson-Santiago bill, but guess what? Somewhere around two-thirds of voters will tell you they have.
The next question sets the trap: “Do you favor or oppose the Wilson-Santiago Bill?” Sure enough, they’ll answer, generally along the usual statistical distribution curve.
Given that the issues you discuss on the 2020 campaign trail need to be laser-focused on Trump and a contrast to his actions and policies, I want to close with a simple principle I’ve applied for a couple of decades in professional politics: In a Walmart Nation, don’t run on boutique issues.
Or, as a campaign mentor once said to me, “Never underestimate the power of dumb.”
Language matters. Presentation matters. Charisma matters.
Policy? Not so much.