I’m going to tell you a dirty little secret.
A meaningful fraction of the Green Party candidates you see in races around the country are creations of people like me. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough. They can break off 3 or 4 percent in the odd race here and there, particularly in swing districts. There are GOP consultants who specialize in finding the local college-age dipshit who wants to sit in his apartment, smoke weed, and play Fortnite in exchange for a check for his “campaign committee.”
You know why this happens? Because politics is a shitty business where anything that gets you to the finish line without breaking the law can and will be used.
Cynical? Yeah, have you met me?
I know, you’re shocked, shocked someone would cheat at the dignified, serious, and honorable profession of political consulting. The old joke in consulting is that when asked what one does for a living you say, “I’m a piano player in the local whorehouse.” After they stare for a moment you reply, “Well, I’m really a political consultant, but being a piano player in a whorehouse sounds more dignified.”
People cheat. It’s not even illegal. Mostly.
Once the smelling salts kick in and you’re able to rise from your fainting couch, hear me out.
Some smart Democratic-leaning billionaires need to dump some real qwan into building out some shiny third-party options for the crazies on the right. The cost is relatively low and the friction they cause is delicious. Since we’re looking at states where Donald Trump’s margins are already razor-thin, I’m going to outline a few quick real and fake third-party options in which a few million dollars would pump enough randomness into the process to make a difference.
The Party of Ayn Rand is a real party, on the ballot in fifty states. Good Lord, I know how fucking irritating they can be, but there’s a smart play here. Some smart investments in boosting the LP in key states could have a massive return on investment…without having to build a new fake conservative-party infrastructure nationally. Libertarian Party voters are almost exclusively going to draw down from Trump’s vote total.
The Libertarians mount campaigns of greater or lesser seriousness depending on the political climate of the moment. There are a little over half a million Libertarians registered across the nation, which comprises about a half a percent of all voters.
Trivial, you say? Hold still, because I need to slap some reality into you.
Donald Trump’s margin of victory in the swing states that moved the Electoral College into his column was infinitesimal. Of the 137 million votes cast in 2016’s election from hell, just 107,000 votes in three states decided the race.
The ticket of Gary (“What is Aleppo?”) Johnson and Bill Weld, which reflected skepticism about Donald Trump’s commitment to anything even in the same neighborhood of Libertarian Party commitments to free markets and individual liberty, was, by any third-party standard, a success. Johnson and Weld took in over 4.4 million votes, or 3.24 percent of the popular vote total. It was a high-water mark for Libertarian presidential candidates to date. They raised more money, got more media attention, and drew down more votes than any LP nominee had before.
Given their 2016 performance, the LP also secured ballot access for 2018 and 2020 to a degree that no third party in the past century was able to do, and that’s important for the 2020 election in big and small ways.
Best-case scenario? Justin Amash follows his heart, runs for the LP nomination, and gives libertarian conservatives and disaffected Republicans a clean conservative option in 2020. Hell, if Amash got on the debate stage à la Ross Perot in 1992, the game would become much more interesting.
You may have noticed by now that Donald Trump is a thin-skinned, whiny bitch-boy who has an ego more fragile than an Easter egg. He is also in charge of the Trump Cult, Inc., which is the rebranded name for the Grand Old Party. His command of the GOP is so complete that no one will dare to challenge him…right?
Former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, a wonderful man and a thoughtful public servant, won as a centrist Republican in a deep-blue state. He’s building out a campaign for president, and at this writing seems willing to run headlong into the threshing machine of the Trump GOP. Joe Walsh, former Tea Party firebrand and born-again woke anti-Trump warrior, promises to run a scorched-earth campaign from Trump’s right.
Weld’s climb uphill is so steep as to be perpendicular, but no incumbent, particularly one with an ego as fragile as Trump’s, wants a challenger. In Walsh, Trump faces an unfettered opponent.
Mark Sanford, former governor of South Carolina, is running a campaign based on—wait for it—traditional Republican ideas, fiscal discipline, and principled limited-government conservatism.
Will they catch fire? Honestly, probably not, but a boy can dream.
Primary challenges to incumbents are historically rare, but they can blow up the illusion of invulnerability and party unity that helps to ensure most incumbents win reelection.
Donald Trump, as ignorant and blinkered as he is, remembers that in 1992 Pat Buchanan entered the field against George H. W. Bush. Buchanan was doomed from the start, but the corrosive nature of his candidacy ate at the Bush campaign. Hadn’t Bush ended the Cold War, for goodness’ sake? Hadn’t he ushered Manuel Noriega into a Miami jail cell and dismantled his narco-state? Hadn’t we beaten Saddam’s ass and skated out of Iraq a few weeks later in a nearly bloodless and militarily perfect campaign?
None of it mattered to the dipshit paleocons around Buchanan. They were the proto–Tea Party purists, the cult kids willing to burn down the GOP for the lulz. Buchanan opened a vein, turning a reelection that could have been about a four-year term of success around the world into an existential fight. He wounded Bush badly, draining resources into having to put down the cur Buchanan instead of focusing on the general. That blood brought the sharks. Ross Perot saw how wounded Bush was and entered the race as a third-party economic populist; the rest is history.
The 2020 GOP field’s task is much harder. In 1992 there was no Fox News agitprop channel to keep the masses in line, and for all of Buchanan’s raw politics, he had a certain rhetorical flair that spoke to the conservative wing of the conservative party. They almost certainly can’t beat Donald Trump, but a lesson from the Cold War springs to mind. Charles de Gaulle once said of France’s nuclear deterrent that, though it could never be large enough to defeat the Soviets, with it he could at least “tear off an arm.”10
The Democratic candidates should start framing every discussion of the general election with a phrase guaranteed to send Trump into a hissy fit: “Whether my opponent is Donald Trump or Bill Weld or Mark Sanford or Joe Walsh…” Like all bullies, Trump can’t tolerate competition or challenge, and getting him to focus on his primary opponents will heighten the dissension in the GOP. Democrats need his Twitter attention focused on his own challengers for even a little while. Watching him act out his petty resentments over his primary competition is good media and good politics.
The entire legal mechanism of the GOP and the state Republican parties will dedicate millions of dollars and man-hours to keeping challengers off the ballot. A few million dollars to ensure Trump isn’t able to legally hack his way to a ballot with no Republican challengers on it would also be a smart investment.
If I was king—a shortcoming I regret on the daily—I’d spin up a few state-specific parties with a focus on immigration.
And before I forget, if some billionaire prankster really wants to have some fun, the creation of the MAGA Trump QAnon Build the Wall Now Party in a handful of states wouldn’t take much effort or cash. It would be one more way to drag a few of the loons off the GOP line in the fall.
As Democrats, you’re thinking narrowly about how to get your candidate to the finish line. You’re looking at the apocalyptic political Thunderdome in which you will battle Trump in the news and social-media space every day between now and Election Day 2020. You’re going to try to draw a stark ideological and personal contrast with Trump, because of course you are. But why not muddy the waters? Don’t underestimate the political value, and the sheer fun, of fucking with Donald Trump from the right.
Making Trump work harder by posting conservative spoiler candidates in the primary—and conservative party spoilers in the general election—is good politics, but Democrats must fear and manage their own spoilers in the 2020 election.
First, the progressive wing of the progressive party is rich with spoilers on the farthest fringes of the far left who can and will try to burn it all down. They’re willing to ensure a second term for Trump if they’re denied even the smallest items on their road map to ideological nirvana. Some are even convinced that reelecting Trump will hasten the revolution.
Some, like Tulsi Gabbard, look like creations from the 4chan/Putin Center for Candidates Who Just Want to Wreck Shit and Destroy the Republic. If the Democratic Party has any leadership at all, they should dedicate themselves to narrowing the field, fast, and pushing the lower-tier also-rans into Senate, governorship, and house races as quickly as possible. The field remained so large in late 2019 it became a running joke.
The spoilers in the middle lane are the billionaire-class candidates potentially flirting with runs as independents on the left. Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg have declined to run, but don’t write off some center-left spoiler with too many zeroes in their bank account; they’ll doom the Democrats by targeting the same set of voters the Democratic nominee needs to win. Democrats need to work very quickly to neutralize and marginalize these center-lane spoilers. Don’t put it past Tom Steyer to leave the Democratic field in the spring of 2020 and run as an independent.
Other spoilers aren’t candidates but interest groups. In politics, no one works harder to make you do dumb things than your own political allies. The nominee will need to tamp down hard, and fast, the constellation of Democratic interest groups, activists, and policy goons who will do what they always do—put the cart before the horse and start declaring victory and making demands. From environmentalists to gun-control types to LGBTQ activists, these groups will put pressure on the nominee to announce he or she is all-in on every detail of their agenda. The unspoken and spoken threat is, sign on to our wish list or we’ll stay home on Election Day.
Believe me, the GOP has faced this kind of blunt-force blackmail from the evangelicals and other groups for decades. Like all extortion attempts, it deserves a two-word response: Fuck you.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that subsuming your own public goals until after the win isn’t an ally, they’re idiots. It’s the dumbest politics, and the nominee and the campaign need to be utterly merciless at telling them to shut the hell up or they get nothing. In the words of Van Jones, “Drop the radical pose to achieve the radical ends.”
Sound cynical? I can’t tell you the number of times my far-right candidates have wanted to announce some public change of their policy because Group X threatened to stay home. Ask Barack Obama about dealing with Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton in 2008. If they’re going to stay home, you don’t have them anyway. As one of my wisest friends in politics says, “Fuck ’em and feed ’em oatmeal.”
The biggest possible spoiler of all, of course, is Bernie Sanders, who is a seemingly impossible problem for the mainstream of the Democratic Party. We’ve covered him elsewhere, but if the nominee doesn’t get a handle on Bernie, fast, expect him to bitch and moan loudly, sniping at the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer all the way to Election Day.