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OFFENSE/DEFENSE
In any political campaign, the battle of the airwaves, which now includes the phones in our pockets as much as the TVs on the walls, requires playing both offense and defense. Offense requires sharing our candidate’s ideas and plans and attesting to his or her character. This must be primarily a positive message, which is what some of us wish politics were about more of the time. Defense requires calling out all the opposition’s lies and attempts to sow division, exposing them for the utter bullshit they are. There’s still a place for inspirational rhetoric, but this is what politics is, or seems to be, all about all too often. Especially now.
Last time around—2016—did you get out there and inform everyone you could find about Hillary Clinton’s plans on taxes, community colleges, jobs and wages? Probably not, or very infrequently. I know I failed on that score. I spent all of my time and energy retweeting coverage of the latest Trump outrage. And while all this outrage certainly did motivate many of us, we did not help the candidate reach potential supporters with her economic message. And of course the press paid close to zero attention to that part of her platform, or any of it, because that’s how the press rolls these days. The big three TV networks spent only thirty-two (thirty-two!) minutes on issue coverage in 2016. Press coverage of campaigns has become more Jerry Springer, less Walter Cronkite.
A good defensive campaign against lies and fabrications is necessary, and the discussion of how best to play defense follows, but we cannot let ourselves disappear down this toxic rabbit hole. We must take command of the conversation—play offense—by painting the contrast between the incumbent and our Democratic nominee, by emphasizing the positive case for our nominee, by motivating the individual voter to do just that—vote for something, not just against. I’d like to talk about the more pleasant task first.
In the Trump era, most voters are locked in, about sixty-five million of us—the number I cited in the introduction—are very unlikely to vote for the man. #NeverTrump. About sixty million are very unlikely to vote against him. The vast, vast majority of these Trump supporters have not wavered and never will, no matter the evidence, not even if their lives have been made demonstrably worse by his actions and policies.
Clinton famously denigrated half of these folks as “deplorables.” Some clearly are. But that was a lot of eggs to put in that basket, and it was self-evident enough without having to step on a political landmine to underline it. Did the comment have any effect? I haven’t seen any conclusive data, but it did turn into a rallying cry that likely increased GOP enthusiasm and activism.
My point is let’s not worry about people we can’t convince or who fall into the trap of thinking, “How can all these people vote against their own self-interest?” Seriously, get rid of that kind of thinking. People like to define their own self-interest, not be lectured to from an ivory tower about what it should be.
Let’s focus on those who are gettable. In the impending election, there will be plenty of Americans who are going to vote—we’ll address those who are at risk of not voting in a later chapter. And a portion of these “definitely voting” voters are not locked in, which to us has to mean that they may vote for the Democrat. They’re real, not mythical. They don’t look like unicorns. They are as ordinary as the neighbor next door, and we can win some of these good people.
In 2020, they’ll likely fall into the following categories:
FIRST-TIME VOTERS
Historically this cohort skews heavily Democratic, but we absolutely cannot take them for granted. Some will be undecided.
THIRD-PARTY VOTERS
A higher percentage of Clinton’s voters than Trump’s who were flirting with a third-party vote never came home to her, based on exit polls and other postelection research. It could have been in part because while clearly these voters did not love Clinton, they loved Trump less, but they thought she was going to win so it was OK to cast a protest vote. The votes collected by the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson and the Green Party’s Jill Stein were not an insignificant factor in her loss and may have turned the election.
That math is straightforward: Trump’s ceiling was 46 percent nationally and 47 to 48 percent in key battlegrounds. He won the critical state of Wisconsin with just 47.2 percent of the vote. The two main third parties accounted for almost 6 percent of all votes cast. It was the largest percentage for third parties since the Perot years. In 2020, Trump’s ceiling may still be in the same range as in 2016—not 50 percent. All of the possible third-party voters won’t vote Democratic, but we need to bring on board as many of them as we can to make his win number as high as possible, and therefore not attainable.
OBAMA/TRUMP VOTERS
An unlikely sounding metamorphosis, I know, and when this species was discovered, I had a hard time believing the news—but these much-talked-about voters are alive and well, especially in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest. How had they preferred the young, skinny black guy with the Muslim-sounding middle name, voted for him twice, in fact, and then pulled a 180 and got down with the old racist with a gold-plated commode? I think the votes in ’08 and ’16 can be best explained as support for the most “changey” candidate, and the votes in ’12 and ’16 as support for the candidate believed to be the most authentic fighter for people like them. In ’16, they were duped, obviously, and that’s infuriating but also motivating: we can undupe at least some of them, maybe many.
PEOPLE WHO VOTED FOR TRUMP IN ’16 BUT ARE OPEN TO AN ALTERNATIVE
Some may be voters who had deep reservations about Trump but even deeper reservations about Hillary Clinton. Or they feel that everyone has so much baggage, the corruption has been going on forever, everyone does it, my vote doesn’t make any difference anyway—any number of equivocations. Still others somehow convinced themselves that Trump would drop the clown act and be more “presidential” once he got to the White House. Some might even have serious substantive problems with one or more of Trump’s key initiatives, especially the tax cuts for the rich or attacks on health care. And could some have succumbed to an unacknowledged misogyny? Not impossible. It saddens me to say this, and I could be wrong, but I think there is more resistance to a woman president then there is to any male from a minority group, or a male of any sexual orientation. Hillary put cracks in the glass ceiling, but it is stubbornly strong.
VOTERS WHO DID NOT VOTE FOR TRUMP IN ’16 BUT ARE OPEN TO HIM THIS TIME AROUND
Amazing but true. Sometimes these are referred to as Romney-Clinton voters, and yes, they do exist. Admittedly a small universe, this one, but there are no doubt Republican and Republican-leaning voters, many of them in suburban areas, with a higher than average income, who just couldn’t pull the lever for Trump based on his appalling lack of character. They could become “transactional” voters, those who still think Trump is a personal Dumpster fire but for whom one litmus-test issue may be all that’s required, and in 2020 the economy may be it for Trump. They like the tax cuts, how the economy is working for them, the rollback of many regulations. In other words, he’ll have a chance to make his case to them this time. And so will we.
Much of the Democratic nominee’s campaign will be spent obsessing over and communicating and measuring progress with these relatively small slivers of the electorate—in the core battleground states, just a few hundred thousand people; if the battleground map expands, a couple million. You and I need to be engaged in this arena as well.
Barack Obama was a man of high character and ethics. He had a good sense of humor. He won the “have a beer with” test in both his presidential elections. But the core of his success, especially when he won reelection with the highest unemployment rate of any president in history, was a strong sense within the middle class and among people striving to enter the middle class that no matter the color of the man’s skin, his weird name, or his party affiliation, he would go to the mat for them.
Hell, he’d run through the wall for them, and he proved it with his decision to save GM and the American auto industry.
At the time, that gambit polled at 10 percent. It was a bad business idea, many thought and, surely, an even worse political one. Wrong. In 2012, the unofficial reelection slogan and rallying cry was simply “Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive.” It showed up on social media, on billboards, and sides of barns in rural areas, and Vice President Joe Biden ultimately took it out on the stump. As much as everyone in the country was thrilled that the terrorist leader had been brought to ultimate justice by our Special Forces, the last part of that message was far more personal and compelling in many parts of the country, in Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, for example.
In 1992, Bill Clinton’s team had relentlessly focused on James Carville’s mantra “It’s the economy, stupid.” Years later, both Obama victories were built on messages and policies aimed at convincing working-class voters that he had better solutions than his opponents. I am writing this book not knowing who the Democratic nominee will be in 2020, but as I stated in the Introduction, for the work required to uproot Donald Trump, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the deep understanding that the nominee must win the economic argument with Donald Trump among those voters who will decide this election.
I learned all about this in the 2012 reelection campaign against the plutocrat Mitt Romney. Countless conversations throughout the country, especially in the midwestern battleground states, went something like this: “I don’t agree with everything Obama has done. I wish the economy were recovering faster. But he stuck his neck out to save the auto industry. Romney would have let it die. Obama wants to cut our taxes and raise taxes on the superwealthy. Romney wants to cut taxes for people like him. And who is going to understand and fight for people like us—a corporate raider like Romney or the son of a single mom who was recently still paying off his college loans like Obama?”
That’s not to say that other issues won’t be important with many voters. Think health care, education, immigration, national security, lack of American prestige in the world, and climate change. They will be critically important, and the Democratic nominee needs to speak to them persuasively, but the economy will be the central front in this war. No matter what else is said and what else happens, target voters will need to see clearly that the Democratic candidate will wake up every day, take the elevator down from the White House residence, walk across the Colonnade to the West Wing, enter the Oval Office, and make decision after decision aimed at bettering their lives and the lives of their families. Unless voters feel this connection and trust in their guts, the odds that Donald Trump wins reelection will soar. If November comes and persuadable voters testify that “he drives me crazy with the tweets and I think he’s a terrible person, but I think he’s been OK on the economy and the Democrat wants to turn us into a socialist country,” we will likely lose.
Your candidate’s baggage is bigger than my candidate’s baggage? For sure that’s the case in this next election, but this kind of calculation will win . . . second place. Which is last place in a presidential race. Voters want to know, that is, feel, what the candidate stands for, not just against. The GM decision proved that President Obama, at great political risk (10 percent approval!), was willing to take on heavy political barnacles to fight for the American worker.
In 2016, Donald Trump’s campaign worked relentlessly to undermine Clinton on the grounds of her assorted baggage—the emails, Benghazi, her husband, and the rest of it—but all this could only help support the orange-haired candidate’s peculiar but nonetheless effective economic messaging.
The message was often dishonest and hypocritical to the point of shamelessness, but it worked. With many voters it’s still working. Learn from history: Hillary Clinton and her campaign undoubtedly could have done a better job of getting across her economic arguments, and for sure they could have drawn a more effective contrast with the Republican, but the success with which Trump played the role of fearless fighter for the forgotten middle class was one of the most remarkable feats of utter bullshit in modern American political history. If he gets away with this again . . .
“He’s got my back. He has never lied to me.” How many times have I read or heard this explanation from a Trump supporter? I, like you, want to yell, “He does not have your back! He has lied to you every single day. He will say anything! You know this! He has sold you down the river!” But of course, yelling out of frustration isn’t the answer. We have to calmly prove that this emperor has no hair, orange or otherwise, and we have to help the Democratic candidate make that gut connection on kitchen-table issues.
The identity and character of the Democratic candidate will be the most important factor in closing the sale on the economy in 2020. If target voters like and trust this man or woman and have faith in their commitment to help improve their own lives, our job will surely be easier. But if we rely solely on the nominee’s charisma and perfectly run campaign to get people to pull the right lever, we will, once again, come up painfully short.
We don’t know what the state of the economy will be as we head into Election Day, but we do know two things. One, despite the low unemployment rate, many Americans feel no better today than they did three years ago, much less ten years ago. Trump promised that he and he alone would change this vulnerability among “the uneducated,” as he so ungraciously labeled them, but people are having to work harder than ever, stringing together multiple jobs, many part-time and without benefits, to get by, no matter how high the Dow soars. Remember, only about half of the country is in the stock market at all. And two, just about everything Trump has done—the tax cuts for billionaires, the trade and tariff wars that hurt rural communities and farmers, undermining health care enrollment and removing labor protections—all of these measures have taken dead aim at the people he claims to be fighting for.
All the time I hear good Democrats complaining, “But everyone knows the tax cuts were wrong and skewed to the wealthy!” A lot of voters do, yes, but many do not, and few understand the scale of the betrayal. Don’t assume everyone reads the New York Times or Vox. If anything, assume that they don’t, by far the safer bet.
Shame on us if we can’t convince enough voters that they are cutting their own throats if they give Trump four more years to further feather the nests of the billionaires and large corporations. It’s not that difficult: “Trump pushed through the biggest tax cuts for billionaires and corporations in history. He’s cut funding for health care and education and job training. Rolled back regulations on the big banks that caused the recession and is doing the bidding of the sleazy payday loan and for-profit college rackets. The Democrat will raise taxes on the wealthy, cut your taxes, and invest in proven ideas in education and job training that creates good jobs.”
One final important point, one that may seem to be gaining traction: the idea that at this moment in history, with populism on the march in countries all over the world, it’s not about the economy. In 2020, it’s about identity, culture, political correctness, provincial versus cosmopolitan, open versus closed, white nationalism, and so on and so on and so on. This theory proposes that what’s going on now is simply that the partially buried id of the Republican Party—McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon, Agnew, Palin, many others—has broken through to the surface big-time.
My answer: No doubt there is some truth there but only if you’re talking about the base within the base, voters who do hear a different, scarier drummer with a beat that drives “Lock her up!” and “Send them back!” while their hero stands there, chin lifted to accept the reflexive idolatry, soaking it all in.
The subjects for us here and now are the undecided and persuadable and might-vote citizens—the ones who are motivated by wages, not the wackiness; by health care, not hate. They exist and they’re more numerous than some of us might believe. These are the voters who will determine the outcome. This election is much more than just a battle of the bases, as critical as that will be.
We can’t just throw up our hands and say racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, and misogyny are forces that are too powerful. That’s Teflon for Trump for too many voters. There’s no doubt it is a protective shield for him with his core base, but let’s not paint with too broad a brush.
Playing offense, we can win because we have the goods. We just need to be smart, deploy them with discipline, and work hard. (I’ll get into point-by-point details about how we can do this in the next chapter.) Playing defense against all the deception and lies perpetrated by the other side is trickier. Times have changed. Our campaigns have always been nasty affairs, our politics never for the faint of heart, but in the old days the main weaponry included whispered rumors and broadsheets and a few books passed around hand to hand. Then came radio and TV. Then came unrestricted chemical and biological warfare, in effect, insidious molecular attacks, minute by minute, second by second, on our computers, tablets, phones.
It’s fair to say that 2016 presented us with a radical escalation in this arms race. We’d never had a major party nominee whose first instinct was to lie about himself, then to attack (and lie about) his opponents, and then to prime the pump of the right-wing echo chamber to further the first two lying instincts. The unfairness and hypocrisy are mind-boggling. Just imagine that Barack Obama had violated campaign laws and matrimonial vows by illegally paying off his porn-star mistress with six-figure hush money in the days before the 2012 election. If reelected nevertheless, I guarantee you he would have been impeached by the Republican-controlled House on the morning of the first day of the next session, because that’s how they roll. No question at all, and not much question that just about every Republican would have supported the cause in the Senate, while falling short of the two thirds required for conviction.
Now, four years later, we encounter yet another escalation. You were hoping that the nation’s president would run a more elevated race than he did as a candidate? Dream on. Didn’t you check your Twitter feed an hour ago and watch the news last night?! We Americans have elected some losers as president, but no sitting president has ever adopted such deceitful tactics as his default, go-to mode. In addition, this president has had at his beck and call the most powerful faux news/entertainment media empire in history, and it’s growing larger all the time. Foreign leaders and governments launch missiles armed not with nuclear warheads but with misinformation designed to weaken American democracy. It is in their interest to have a buffoon leading America.
The bombardment has been effective. We have finally reached that nirvana of grifters and frauds worldwide: an almost fact-free environment, or as Kellyanne Conway prefers, “alternative facts.” It should be no surprise that we are increasingly sorting ourselves into like-minded tribes speaking separate languages within echo chambers.
Lord knows it’s tempting for #NeverTrumpers to do nothing but attack the man and his manner, which seem to have no bottom, but I’m not sure anyone can or should try to play his game. Trump is an idiot, but he has mastered politics as World Wrestling Federation art. Our nominee will have an overwhelming advantage in positive values—inspiration, ideas, facts and plans, and character—and they will be critical for energizing tough-to-register-and-turn-out citizens and even persuading the elusive swing voters. But we do have to be smarter on defense.
How? Let me begin the discussion with a stroll down memory lane, of better times—you know, way back, 2008 or 2007, when the preferred means of spreading lies in campaigns was the email chain. How quaint that must sound today, and at first those in the Obama campaign HQ in Chicago didn’t pay too much attention to them. The first ones sounded ludicrous. Educated in a madrassa in Indonesia; Muslim, not Christian; real father was not a Kenyan with a master’s in economics from Harvard but a homegrown American radical; he’ll impose Sharia law; he refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; there’s a grainy tape somewhere with Michelle Obama talking about “whitey.” The list goes on and on—and all of it before Donald Trump’s birther crusade. Those of us in the campaign knew all about the infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in John Kerry’s ill-fated run against George W. Bush just four years earlier, but those were heavily funded TV ads—legacy campaigning, out there for everyone to see and judge. But this stealth stuff on the internet? Who could take it seriously?
People on the internet, that’s who. Our field organizers on the ground in the states started fielding questions about these crazy stories from our own supporters who were being recruited as volunteers. They said that they, of course, knew it was all nonsense, but they feared it would hurt us in the primary and even convince potential supporters that Obama would not be electable in the general election. Our press staffers were asked by reporters to comment. Eventually the candidate himself would get asked about some of these lies and smears when out on the trail. He and the rest of us tried our best to either ignore, laugh off, or fight these haphazardly through the primary.
Our defense left a lot to be desired. We should have taken this poisonous nonsense more seriously and armed our volunteers more effectively. We survived anyway, but once it was clear that Obama was going to be the nominee, we realized that the threat was real and could endanger the entire enterprise in November.
In June 2008, gearing up to face off against John McCain, we launched the website Fight the Smears. Doing this infuriated us, of course—the investment of time and money and having to acknowledge the sludge could hurt us. It was viewed as a big risk—or just plain stupid—by many in the political chattering class. They were still stuck in the era when the mantra was “Don’t worry about it unless it shows up on the front page of the New York Times or on the evening news.” Everything else, either ignore or deflect without elevating it. Acknowledging and itemizing the nonsense would only help spread it among computers throughout the country. Whatever you do, don’t legitimize the purveyors of fraud by treating them the same way you would an attack on your tax or health care plans!
Good points, and we certainly had a vigorous internal debate about them. Conclusion: the quaint standards from the era of the legacy media are gone, along with the gatekeepers of ethical, fact-checked media. The new standard—not that there even is one—is much more difficult to police. What matters in the twenty-first century is that any one piece of content or rumor that is shared by even a few people can end up infecting millions of voters’ devices in an instant, a political virus that no security software can catch or stop. The multiplier effect can be exponential. There is an old quip attributed to Winston Churchill and Mark Twain, among others, that a lie is halfway ’round the world before the truth can put its boots on. We can only wish this were still the case.
If the Obama effort had been a hierarchical campaign, not one fueled by millions of passionate supporters who were living part of their lives every day through and on behalf of Barack Obama, we might have decided against direct action. But we thought we had our own decentralized rapid-response army in the making, many of whom had digital savvy, so why not try to arm them with everything they needed to fight back against the sleaze machine and set them loose?
On the new website we listed every attack and smear, and then provided rebuttal information: news articles, fact-checking pieces, statements from Republicans condemning these smears, videos, our own talking points, and whatever else we had. Our troops could grab an appropriate link and attach it in a reply to a smear-laden email, share it with a questioning voter, and print out fliers if that’s what it took.
I don’t know how important that effort was ultimately to our victory in November, which ended up being by a much larger margin than we had thought possible in June, when we were given no better than an even-money chance to win. But I do know that if it had been just our campaign apparatus trying to fight back, it would have been an epically large game of Whack-a-mole, impossible to win. The website gave our millions of volunteers and supporters confidence to jump into the digital muck with their hazmat gear and suffocate the slimy lies bubbling up from the ooze.
I’m sure there were some voters on the fence who, sadly enough, needed to be reassured that Barack Obama was not a sleeper agent sent by Al Qaeda to do the terrorists’ bidding from their new command post in the White House; and it certainly reassured the candidate and his family we were not going to take these lies and smears lying down.
And that was before Facebook and Twitter had made any serious penetration into the electorate. Just eight years later, look what they did to Hillary Clinton online: Pizzagate, child-sex rings, fatal health problems. Just about anything you could make up was said by someone, somewhere about her, and then sent out into world.
In 2020, the contours of what we will be dealing with are already clear. Whether the nominee is Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, or one of the other contenders, Donald Trump, the Russians, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the whole crazy but deadly network of smear peddlers and hate-mongers on the airwaves and the internet will claim that if the Democrat is elected, our borders will be opened to all comers, murder and rape will be daily horrors visited on our neighborhoods, our vets will be forgotten, criminals will be furloughed or paroled, the most ethical and honest administration in the history of the planet will be turned back into the swamp from whence it came, your taxes will go up 100 percent, you’ll have to wait six months to see a doctor and grandma will have to wait six months for the death panel to convene, the economy will tank, and we’ll have a new depression, which would be great for them because what they really want is a socialist America.
Oh, and for good measure, the Democrats support infanticide.
There will be nothing fancy about these pitches, no secret spin, no knucklers, curveballs, sinkers, brushback offerings. Just four-seam fastballs aimed directly at the candidate’s head—and their aim is good. But wait a minute! What? Infanticide? Really? Will anyone other than wing nuts be tipped to believe the Democrats want to kill newborns? Anyone who truly is undecided on this race? Yes, there may be some voters who are very lukewarm on Trump, but the infanticide charge they read about in some dark corner of the internet, or maybe not so dark—think Fox & Friends—convinces them the Democratic nominee is too far gone to even consider, around the bend, gone off the deep end.
This kind of crap may also be the fuel to get more conservatives to donate money, give time, and get more involved in the Trump effort. Stopping infanticide can be quite the motivational rallying cry for those who believe that nonsense charge. It’s a mistake for any of us to assume that a crazy lie bouncing around Facebook will not be believed. Everyday experience amply demonstrates that someone, somewhere, can believe just about anything. A content factory in Moscow can create an “article” stating that our Democratic nominee has been tied to an ongoing investigation into a pedophilia ring operating out of a pizza joint in Washington. And in twenty-four hours more people could see that smear then watch any of the major cable news shows that night.
It’s tragic. Our presidential campaigns should not have to be fought this way; the stakes are too high and the issues too serious. But the truth is that we can’t fight only the war we want to fight. We also have to play defense in the war that will be fought on Trump’s behalf, and we have to win it. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean the Democratic National Committee. Or the nominee’s campaign infrastructure. Or outside progressive groups. Or the media. Lord knows we need all those entities to get smarter and more effective at handling the Mad Max: Fury Road approach of the Trump campaign and the constellation of weaponry surrounding his approach. But the “we” I mean is us. As in you. As in me. We will become a decentralized, organic rapid-response machine, complementing smart efforts at the top, I hope, but definitely not waiting for them. We have to don those hazmat suits and do everything possible to keep people from drowning in the muck.
Much of this work will be frustrating, depressing, infuriating, tiring, and headache inducing, but I actually think it can also be fun. I believe there’s a general sense, sadly, that progressives are weak or easily bullied, so when we fight back with gusto and confidence, the smear machine will be surprised and infuriated. I have no doubt that your down-to-earth conversation with a conflicted voter about how our nominee will cut her taxes and actually make our southern border safer with smart policies will outweigh the Siberian bot claiming the opposite. Surround your people with the truth.