2
CREATE
For most of the primary season leading up to the first voting in 2008, Barack Obama trailed Hillary Clinton by large margins in New Hampshire. We began closing the gap in December, and then on January 3 we convincingly won the Iowa caucuses, which was considered a pure three-way toss-up (remember John Edwards, anyone?). The momentum slingshot did the rest.
We had the big mo, big-time. Our final internal poll prior to the voting on January 8 had us winning New Hampshire by 8 points. The average of the public polls showed an even bigger lead. Everything was pointing up and to the right for the Obama team. The Granite State would wrap up the primary campaign, and Obama would be anointed the nominee by a landslide.
The punditocracy asked, “How large would Obama’s win be? Will it be more than 10 points? More than 15 points? Will Clinton drop out if she loses that badly?”
Frankly, these were our only questions too. On Election Day, when the first exit polls showed us up by 5 points, our reaction was “Well, those numbers are clearly screwy; the final margin will be much bigger.”
Actually, no. We lost by 3½ points.
Gut punch. Given the prior expectations, the loss in New Hampshire could have been a serious wound to Barack Obama’s candidacy, potentially fatal. I could spend the rest of my life recounting what we—and I—did wrong leading up to the primary and probably not capture the extent of it all. And give Hillary Clinton and her campaign credit—they did a bunch of things right.
In any event, we were caught completely unprepared to lose in New Hampshire. The victory speech we were certain our candidate would give was pitch perfect, but we hadn’t given a thought to a concession speech. It was our bad, and in the vacuum that swallowed us whole, Obama decided to give the victory speech, just adding a line of congratulations to Hillary Clinton. Was this an inspiring choice, or was he simply stunned by the loss and no one had any better ideas? Probably some of both.
The speech was based on the refrain “Yes We Can!,” a translation of the call to arms employed by Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement during their long struggle for fair pay and better conditions. Obama had used that tagline in his 2004 Senate race in Illinois, and in 2008 we wanted it to play a more prominent role in the presidential race going forward. Such a rallying cry would suggest that history and conventional wisdom were wrong, that the cynics were wrong, that a candidate like Barack Obama could prevail and the country could truly change—but only if millions of Americans made the campaign their cause. Only if it was all about “We.”
The concession speech gambit was viewed by most of the pros as quite unusual, by some as worse than that: tone-deaf and arrogant, failing to fully capture the magnitude of the defeat and what it meant to our chances. All wrong. Our supporters loved that speech because it underscored their understanding that this would be a long uphill battle, that there would be setbacks, but our candidate and campaign were convinced there was a path forward that relied on our citizen volunteers to make it happen. The day after the devastating loss in New Hampshire was our best online fund-raising day in the campaign up to that point, bigger than the day after the victory in Iowa the preceding week. It was our biggest day for signing up new volunteers, online and off.
Barack Obama had showed on the night before that even in the face of a stunning defeat he wasn’t going to back down, and the following day his supporters showed they wouldn’t either; they would have his back even when things hit a rough patch. Maybe it was the most successful “concession” speech ever.
You see where that twelve-year-old election story takes us in our 2020 discussion? This election will also be all about us—not them, not even him or her. The air campaign, the ground campaign; playing offense, playing defense; strategy, tactics—no matter what angle from which we look at this election, it’s going to come down to us, you and me.
With all the sophistication possessed by the campaigns, and Russia, you may ask how a lone individual can compete on the message and persuasion battlefields. Wouldn’t this amount to David versus Goliath, horse-drawn carriages versus shiny new cars, dial-up versus 5G?
I understand that you can’t afford to waste time and energy tilting at windmills. Rest assured that you will not be wasting your time. Your engagement with persuadable voters can be incredibly effective and, if joined by enough others, can carry the day. When “me” becomes “we,” suddenly there are millions of us out there fully engaged in this person-to-person effort, making a real difference “at scale,” as we say in the Bay Area. It’s the multiplier effect, where the virtuous circle can take us once it starts spinning.
As John Lennon once proclaimed, “One and one and one is three. . . .” Keep adding zeros . . . 300 . . . 3,000 . . . 3,000,000 . . . maybe more. Very possible. In both Obama campaigns, we eventually had millions of volunteers.
I’m certainly not suggesting that the Democratic nominee lay down the latest weapons of political warfare. The campaign, the party, the big outside groups will all be doing their thing, deploying data and analytics, testing a zillion ads on Facebook and other social media and internet sites to try to coax out that all-important click that will suggest where a voter is leaning, and why. Of course the Trump campaign, the Russians, and other unsavory actors will be doing likewise—maybe even more so.
But it’s mandatory that the big institutional weaponry be coupled with a persuasion army working the ground, block by block, house by house, making the difference in moving enough truly torn and swing voters over to our nominee’s column in a close election.
The candidate’s official campaign and outside actors will have built a profile of millions of potential voters—the same cohort of voters that I hope you will be talking with. These profiles are based on census data, news and internet behavior, consumer data, voting history, and a whole bunch of other information put into the blender to pour out a likelihood-to-support score for each voter and some sense of the most effective messages and mediums to reach him or her. Kind of scary, I know, but that’s where we are today, and it’s only going to become more complicated. But these are demographic models, not real people.
Real people are better. You can ask them what will decide their vote, what problems and issues they’re struggling with, what concerns they have with both Trump and the Democratic nominee. The best rule of thumb: don’t even think about waiting for the party to do it. At this granular, one-on-one level, campaign talking points won’t get the job done. I’m all for a well-executed and targeted ad from the Democratic National Committee, but I understand that it might not have a chance with the intended recipient. No matter how clever or compelling, it is still a passive experience. Do it yourself. Please. I firmly believe that nothing is as effective as two human beings having an honest, open, and real conversation. Your one-on-one “research” may square with what the data suggests. It may differ. Regardless, it will surely have more context, more specificity, and will provide a better understanding of how this individual can be reached and persuaded.
Most voters will likely never meet the nominee, so they will need reassurance from someone they know and trust—a neighbor, a family member, a colleague at work, a former schoolmate. You can and will refer to the campaign material as a helpful guide on the ins and outs of policy and issue differences, but if you want voters to open their ears instead of closing them, you want to sound like the neighbor you are, not a smooth-talking head on CNN.
You and you and you, in short. The sixty-year-old accountant in Pittsburgh who has never gotten involved in politics before this election? Perfect. The eighteen-year-old skateboarding whiz spending late afternoons on the streets, not on Xbox playing Fortnite? Sure! The lifelong Republican, and known as such, now spending weekends at our nominee’s local campaign office? Who could be better?
I realize that many people who follow politics, even intensely, and care deeply about issues hesitate to get down in the trenches because they’ve never done it, don’t fully understand how, or are perhaps worried about the reaction from certain friends and family members. Maybe that’s you. If so, you are one of those we’ve been waiting for, to quote our forty-fourth president.
Your impact would be far stronger than mine if we were to have the same conversations and make the same points with the same people. An important aspect of your official work as a volunteer—maybe on a formal basis, perhaps as a precinct leader, whatever—is to find ways to demystify the process and the work for others who may be thinking about their own volunteering but have reservations or are nervous about diving into something so new and different.
I remember the first doors I knocked on in 1988. I had no idea what I was doing and thought the people who answered them would sniff that out in an instant. But the vast majority of conversations were pleasant, engaging, and interesting (“Why are you out here in the heat? Are you getting paid to do this? Why can’t the Democrats get their act together and win the White House back?”). You just have to get out there, like most things in life, and you’ll be just fine.
Bobby Kennedy, the best presidential campaign manager of all time, in my view, famously said in a speech in South Africa: “It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
I draw no direct analogies between apartheid South Africa and America today, although I sometimes fear they may become warranted, especially if we don’t win this election. Nor would I claim that all political campaigns qualify for the ripple-of-hope treatment. But this one certainly does. Sweeping away oppression and striking out against injustice? If that’s not what we are doing here, well, what are we doing? As Obama often said in 2008, one voice can change a room, but that voice being joined by enough others can change our nation and the world. Strength is in numbers.
Defeating Trump by electing the Democrat is a mighty cause. That’s all there is to it. I don’t retract my early contention that November 3, 2020, will be a pivotal day in the history of our country.
The 2020 election is right in front of us. Your mission is not to turn every person into a lifelong voter, as much as we hope that will be the case. It is not to encourage everyone to become active in politics. It’s not even to get them to look ahead and vote for Democratic candidates in the 2022 midterms. It’s to get them to cast one vote in one election to get rid of one really horrible and dangerous president. That’s it. Keep it in mind. If you are responsible for persuading just a handful of your fellow citizens who are on the proverbial fence—about voting at all or about voting for the Democrat—to register and then vote for our candidate, if you are joined by thousands and hopefully millions around the country, we will win.
Yes we can and yes we did in 2008 and 2012—and yes we will again in 2020.
We need a decentralized, fifty-state, rapid-response persuasion army. We also need a parallel content-creation army. There are a million ways to use your passion and creativity to advance the cause of defeating Donald Trump. If you have an idea you really like that can be put to video, song, paper, the sidewalk, or a sign, full speed ahead. Your overall goal is first to recognize your own skills, talent, and expertise that can be rallied to the cause, and second, to inspire other people to find and recognize the ways in which they can contribute. Numerous case histories follow.
Potential voters and volunteers might—no, will—respond better to these down-home creations than to official campaign jargon; they may be more inspired or, frankly, better identify with your content than they will with efforts from the campaign. You’re quirky, even amateurish creation will be more effective than any ad created at a Belarusian content farm—or at DNC headquarters or in Trump Tower. Your pitch may not be as polished or as professional, but that’s exactly the point.
You can reach someone in your community or family with more authenticity and more understanding. Your effort will not be a poor substitute for what the official campaign or progressive groups could have done, would have done, might still do. Just the opposite! Your contribution will be, by definition, more authentic, more organic, more relatable—simply better in all important respects than what would come out through official channels.
Pertinent proof comes to us from that 2008 Obama campaign in the form of a video mash-up from the New Hampshire speech, created by will.i.am, formerly with the Black Eyed Peas, now of American Idol fame. Other notable musicians and performers, including Common, John Legend, and Scarlett Johansson sang or delivered some of the lines.
We had absolutely no input on that video. We didn’t even know it was coming when it landed out of the blue on February 2, just days before the crucial set of twenty primaries and caucuses on a Super Tuesday that would be either our Waterloo or our stepping stone to the nomination and presidency. In those ancient days, Facebook and the other social media networks didn’t have much reach. The will.i.am mash-up was one of the first clips to go viral, thanks mainly to young people, garnering more than twenty-five million views and tremendous attention from the press and on YouTube. The phenomenon drove many new donors and volunteers to join our campaign during this crucial window of opportunity, or disappointment, which was still possible.
What if the official campaign had produced exactly the same content, with the same talent? The impact would have been far more muted. Even to the supporters of a campaign, the officially produced campaign content has the veneer of propaganda. Now, I realize will.i.am is a celebrity, a subject for future discussion, but his video was so powerful because it was produced and disseminated organically. It demonstrated the true passion these artists had for Obama, which made it much more interesting, consumable, and shareable with Obama’s confirmed supporters, and it led to new supporters and activism. Even back in campaign HQ in Chicago, when it started popping up on staffers’ laptops, a new energy bounced around the office.
Remember the famous Obama Hope poster created by Shepard Fairey, the immensely talented graphic artist, visual designer, and activist? As with will.i.am’s mash-up, Fairey’s terrific piece was not a creation of the campaign or even anything we discussed with him. He created it and started disseminating it in early 2008, and within weeks it had begun to show up everywhere—on telephone poles, in dorm rooms, and in union halls. No, people don’t vote because of signs, but we heard over and over again how much they loved the piece, and it further motivated them to lay it all on the line to elect Barack Obama. Whether it’s a poster, a T-shirt, a hat, a bumper sticker, if you have talent in these spaces, put it to work on behalf of our Democratic nominee.
We, Democrats and progressives, have nothing like Fox and the conservatives’ industrial-media-infotainment complex. The reasons are complex and beyond my scope here, but all that doesn’t matter right now. What matters is offsetting that advantage with another of our own. It is absolutely mandatory that we weaponize our own social media and email lists. So, yes, that means you need to make sure you are signed up and active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. For those of you who are adamantly anti-social media, I understand your feeling; the whole thing can be overwhelming, often toxic, but understand that your reticence plays right into the Trump playbook.
To be in the game you have to be in the arena, and social media is the primary arena this race will be fought in. Fact of life. If each of us spends just a couple of minutes a day moving message and content through our channels, thinking about smart ways to work with the local media, and doing some offline distribution, we can aggregate something that is real, authentic, and powerful.
There is not just strength but also comfort in numbers. When people see a video or any content from someone they construe as very much like themselves, making the same arguments they themselves have been wrestling with, they can be tipped to take action and vote. In 2008, many voters said on their own, unprompted, “I really can’t believe I’m doing this, but I’m voting for Obama. We need a change and he’ll be better for working people like me than McCain, who will just keep doing the same old things Bush did that got us into this mess.” We invited some of these voters to be in ads. This worked. When people see someone making the leap, it creates a “permission structure” for following suit. Fancy term. Sounds suspicious, I know, but I’ve become a believer in it. It’s getting people to do the thing they think they might do, even the thing they ought to do, by creating acceptable models so they’ll feel better about doing it.
Facebook, the new public square, turbocharges the delivery of permission-structure content. At the same time, I’m all too aware that in terms of disinformation, doctored videos, audio bytes, and downright confusion, the platform presents a serious ongoing challenge to our nominee and our democracy.
That goes for its sister platform, Instagram, as well as Twitter and YouTube. However, there are some positive features about these platforms as they relate to politics: you can use them to create voter registration drives, remind people about early voting and absentee ballot deadlines on Snapchat and Twitter, and recruit for local Facebook groups that allow supporters of candidates to communicate and recruit others to join in the cause.
Many young people are opting not to sign up for Facebook accounts, preferring other social media platforms such as Snapchat and TikTok. Because that is where so much of the action is, and the voices of passionate young people are so powerful, if you fall into this cohort, you need to get on the platform. You can delete your account on November 4 if you must.
Trump ran a Facebook first campaign in 2016. He will do even more this time. As I write this sentence in August 2019, the Trump campaign is spending up the wazoo on Facebook advertising to reach voters in battleground states.
The big social media sites were weaponized by the Russians and others in 2016, but you can turn these networks into your own personal communications weaponry in 2020. The first step is to take an inventory and make sure you’re in touch with everyone in your life who you think you should be in communication with, so you can stay in touch and you can also see what they’re sending around. Write a list, type into your notes on your phone, think comprehensively.
Make sure your own personal network does not restrict membership to only the politically like-minded. Now is not the time to prune your uncle John, who is MAGA through and through. His presence allows you to see firsthand and in real time what propaganda he is seeing and spewing on behalf of Trump. Do you have a decidedly nonpolitical but certain-to-vote friend from work? Send a friend request with the intention of expressing sympathy for a true undecided voter trying to negotiate this hellscape of misinformation. Help this friend sort fact from fiction.
The social media landscape can be a modernized version of the Fight the Smears website in 2008, a one-stop shopping destination of refutation, so millions of supporters around the country and on the internet can fight back with links, videos, and credible independent voices.
See a Facebook post from your third cousin saying the Democratic nominee hasn’t paid his or her taxes in twenty-five years? Don’t simply get into a frustrating and unsatisfactory exchange voicing your opinion. Respond with something like, “Jennifer, I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. The Democratic nominee has paid an effective tax rate of 28 percent over the last ten years. We know this because he/she has released his/her tax returns. Has Donald Trump? We’ll never know but speculation is that he paid zero or close to it in taxes, despite being the self-proclaimed billionaire, while all the rest of us pay our fair share.”
Then link to a Fox dispatch or a Wall Street Journal article that covers the topic and makes the points above. Again, the nominee’s campaign should make this research easy for us, but if not, or if you think you can find something better, and quite possibly you can, a few keystrokes will find you what you need.
Did I say link to Fox and the Wall Street Journal? Absolutely. It’s more effective to post genuine information from what will be seen as credible sources to those voters we have the best chance of reaching. Maybe your cousin Jennifer has zero chance of changing her mind or her vote (especially if you send her an article from The Nation or by Paul Krugman in the New York Times, or a clip from Rachel Maddow), but maybe one or two people in your network will see the exchange and factor it into their decision.
This principle always applies: look online for compelling, shareable content that makes the best case against Trump and for the Democratic candidates’ leadership and ideas. Then put these arguments in your own words. You have an authentic message to communicate. Don’t be concerned that you may differ from the official talking points, or you are sharing unpolished content. The more real your engagement is, the more it sounds like you, not me, and the more effective it will be. Tell a story, show a picture—that’s what will move people, not vague threats or promises about gross national product or ozone depletion.
In the introduction I noted this election’s “90 percent problem”: most of us live in a state that isn’t a battleground. But this is where social media becomes very useful: online we are all one big country. Online there are no state lines. Maybe a response you post will have no effect with most people who see it because they already agree (or emphatically disagree) with you. That’s okay. Most of us have connections throughout the country, so a few people in your feed may live in Wisconsin or Florida or another battleground state or have a cousin or college roommate there. They had seen in their feeds some of the same bullshit you responded to in your post, but they’d had no idea how to fight back. Now they have such an idea, and they can then pass along the message in their more embattled communities.
It’s a long and winding road online. Rest assured, that powerful post will somehow end up in the feeds of people in the battleground states, where they grab that same content and insert it into some of the discussion happening in their own online battleground communities. Welcome to the rapid-response army. From your haven in San Diego or Birmingham, you’re having an impact in all theaters of this war. And for everyone who sees your response in your feed or email chain, hopefully you have shown them the way, and encouraged more people to do just as you did: get into the fight. And the virtuous circle strengthens as their responses reach and encourage others.
And then there is the advanced social media campaigning, understanding the clever use of hashtags, native content, photos, what gets pulled. Many of you, certainly the digital or almost digital natives, know more about this than I do. For those who don’t, go get an education! I know I need to. These simple techniques can rocket your posts way beyond your own personal universe.
Intensely personal expressions of the stakes in this election can be extraordinarily compelling. An eighteen-year-old in Ocala, Florida, who will be voting in her first election, creates a series of iPhone videos for YouTube capturing the stakes this year. One video might be about the impending doom from climate change, especially pronounced in Florida. A disproportionate percentage of Trump’s supporters will not have to bear the weight of their collective failure on this threat, which is exacerbated by their ignorance and selfishness, but Gen Z will actually be alive and living through the worst of the predictions if the curve is not bent drastically enough on emissions.
The video captures the urgency of the moment—the cataclysmic fallout of famine, floods, unlivable heat, and historic migration. Gen Z wants a chance to thrive, not merely to cope with this apocalypse. Perhaps this young voter says the Democratic nominee is not perfect, but where the future of the planet is at stake, the nominee will get us back into the Paris climate accords, reverse all of Trump’s reversals of President Obama’s environmental executive orders, and try to enact a version of the Green New Deal or key parts of it.
Our nominee, no matter how skilled and persuasive, could give fifty speeches on the urgency of the climate threat and the plans to tackle it, but their collective impact on eighteen-year-old voters throughout the country will be insignificant compared with the power released by this video from the young voter in Ocala. It will be more interesting. More accessible. More relatable. More believable. More actionable. Young voters can identify with it. Maybe it gets them to decide to do more personally, to volunteer in addition to voting. And they will likely share it, perhaps with comments, or send a like. More ripples will spread throughout that cohort and the country.
Or our young voter in Ocala may post another video on student loans because she’s already scared to death about what will happen as she begins her own debt-laden college experience, having seen older siblings coming out of college with crushing debt. Trump is in the tank with the lenders and the for-profit university sharks. The Democrat wants to make community college free for all and likely will have a plan for all other colleges—perhaps middle-class students or below will have free college tuition, maybe with some interesting service- and income-based repayment models.
A second-term Trump will just double down on approaches and policies that screw young people. With Democrats in office again, young people have some reason to hope things will change with our nominee. That message will be far more compelling coming from a peer. It will be authentic and present the point with words that are inherently nonpolitical.
This same really busy eighteen-year-old will capture the experience of volunteering in a YouTube video as she heads out on a canvassing shift with some friends on a Sunday afternoon, showing what it feels like to inform voters in the community that their future depends on this election, and to persuade other young voters not to sit it out or vote third party.
Be sure to record the hilarious moment when an ignorant Trump supporter slows down his car as he passes by your group on the street and yells out, “Finding illegal votes for your candidate, I see!” If you and your team do much canvassing on the streets, you will encounter such negative “feedback,” I guarantee—and more than once. No problem. Take it as proof that you’re making an impression, because you are. Team MAGA is scared because you’re out there.
Let’s say ten thousand young people throughout the country each make their own videos capturing their volunteer experience and imploring others to join the cause. Maybe another five young people who see each video decide to get more involved. Amazingly, ten thousand volunteers turn into fifty thousand just through a few minutes of video on your phone and a quick upload. Fifty thousand is a powerful number in any community, but especially in battleground precincts.
The kids are more than all right. Their power of devoting themselves to a cause is so infectious that swing voters will be interested in why an eighteen-year-old is out knocking on doors instead of staring at a device in the bedroom, perhaps like their own kids are doing; other young people will be curious and, I hope, be motivated by their leadership and activism. The enthusiasm can have a powerful effect on other family members, all the way up to grandparents, who may be so inspired by the grandkids’ commitment that they’ll want to join them and give time themselves.
A Republican voter who voted for candidate Trump but cannot stomach President Trump and will vote Democratic has the foundation to create and share powerful and inspiring content. It may be as simple as turning on the phone and riffing:
“I voted for Trump last election. I saw it as the lesser of two evils, but I also thought that no matter what, Trump would stick up for the little guy, the working person in this country. Now I see that that was all an act. Everything he’s done, like the huge tax cuts for the top 1 percent, has been for people like him. We have enough billionaires in this country, and they certainly don’t need extra handouts and help from the government. We need workers to make more. That’s why while I don’t agree with everything they stand for; I’m voting for the Democrat, who, when push comes to shove, will make decisions with people like me in mind, not the Wall Street gazillionaires.”
Post it, share it, create other videos like it. Odds are you’ll reach someone who is wrestling with some of these same questions, and your video may influence them to make their own video.
Does this extended scenario seem utopian? Maybe, but it matters. It’s another virtuous circle, not from doing anything extraordinary but from capturing the feelings, views, and activity you are already experiencing and sharing them with your network—who may just share it with theirs. Plus it will just feel good to articulate how you are feeling about this election and what you are going to do about it.
Are you canvassing in the suburbs outside of Madison, Wisconsin, on a beautiful Saturday in early September? Combine social media expertise with real-world, boots-on-the-ground activism by capturing the experience through your own Instagram story: the excitement (or chaos) in the Dane County HQ as you get your instructions and information on the turf and the voters you will be trying to talk to today; the peace and beauty of the neighborhoods as you walk through them; your pride after persuading a voter on your list to support our nominee; the fun banter back and forth with your friend who’s working the other side of the street; the mandatory local bratwurst and beer you share with other volunteers after your shift is done as you reminisce about the poignant and funny conversations you had with your voters and share that great feeling of pouring yourself into a mission you believe is as important as any you may see in your lifetime, and definitely as important as any you have seen to date.
Others in Wisconsin and throughout the country will see your Instagram story. They will share it with others, some of whom will decide to hit the doors the next Saturday afternoon. Some may decide to head to a local phone bank in California and New York, calling rather than canvassing into battleground states, making a big difference and also having a wonderful shared experience with their fellow phone bankers. Some may not physically be in a battleground state, but you know the mantra: online there are no state lines. Your video will be seen in all fifty states. Moreover, you may have a key congressional race in your district, and our next president will need as many allies as possible to move forward the progressive agenda this country so desperately needs. Your video may cause your neighbors to get out and help these great local candidates too.
Your four hours on the ground in Dane County, captured on social media, will have huge direct and indirect impacts. Directly you will be engaging with the most critical voters in the presidential contest, and hopefully you helped persuade a few to support our candidate or to vote if they were unsure of doing so. Joined by thousands of others throughout Wisconsin on that same Saturday afternoon, you collectively have taken big strides in returning the Badger State to its rightful electoral color. And it’s OK that blue will conflict with Badger red just for a night.
You might also get more adventurous and orchestrate a bigger event. If you know the former sheriff and a local crime victim activist, and if they are willing to say they trust the Democratic nominee to keep us safe, you have all you need for an effective event. Send out a note to the local paper announcing an event at two p.m. tomorrow on the Manitowoc County Courthouse steps, when former Sheriff Young and crime victims’ advocate Wright will respond to Donald Trump’s outrageous assertion about all the rapists and murderers overrunning our society. People with experience can explain how our candidate will focus on resources in your own community for real threats, not scapegoating immigrants and scaring people, Trump’s favorite ploy—his only ploy, really. They can show how our candidate will create better-paying jobs and invest in education, which will keep more people out of prison, and how the Democrats want to reform the criminal justice system—more rehabilitation, less recidivism.
Do not worry that these are not “professionally” planned events. They won’t be perfect. The answers to questions by your star performers might be a bit off. Maybe it rains. Whatever. What people in your town will see are people they know and trust taking issue with Trump, the fear-mongering liar, and educating people a bit on the Democratic nominee’s approach to the criminal justice system and related issues.
Now, about email. In the first Obama campaign, email lies and slander were the central battlefield. In a texting/Snapchat world, emails as a political weapon—or quite frankly, email as a tool for anything—can seem prehistoric, relegated by social media to a more distant theater of war. Maybe they are archaic, but there will be millions of email chains bouncing around the country throughout the general election campaign, especially among, ahem, older voters. Said with all due respect! Post-fifty, I’m closing in on that label myself and still remember when I found email to be groundbreaking and revelatory.
But in a close race, you have to be prepared to compete everywhere. Email can still be a potent arena to spread misinformation at warp speed that gets shared and shared again, and pretty soon you are looking at big numbers. And older voters tend to, well, vote.
Fortunately, the tactics for dealing with weaponized—or just downright crazy—email chains are very similar to social media rapid response. Know or heard about someone who voted for Trump but rues that error of judgment and would never do it a second time? Capture him on video and distribute through your email channels. Someone who didn’t vote in 2016, but now regrets that and can’t take any more of this debased White House? Capture and share. A lifelong Republican who has never even imagined voting for a Democrat—until now. Beautiful raw material to be bouncing around the country’s inboxes.
Finally, newspapers may be considered beyond prehistoric by many, but don’t kid yourself—newspapers still reach millions of people, especially a lot of our older citizens who are by far the most likely to vote.
Write op-eds and letters to editors to point out the simple fact that Trump is the most fiscally reckless president in history. Ask how true conservatives could support the most humongous deficits in history—and not with programs that produce jobs but by the largest giveaway to the rich in history.
A quick word to campaigning celebrities. You’re probably not one of them, but to Angelina, Brad, LeBron, George, Jennifer, and all you other A-listers who may be perusing this volume—if you do happen to be tuned in, I implore you to think more expansively about how you can use your creativity and prodigious social media assets to further the cause you support. Like it or not, you can create waves, not ripples, waves. Exhibit number one was that electrifying impact of will.i.am’s mash-up of Obama’s concession speech in New Hampshire in 2008, as reported above.
Now, you celebrities are no match or substitute for the combined might of the grassroots’ social media activism and ground game drawn from the tens of millions of supporters of the Democratic nominee. We have just seen—and will see again—how that works. But we also need to exploit the fact that this nominee in 2020 will enjoy the support of most of you who have tens of millions of followers. Your passionate activism can be a major advantage for us. With all due respect to those who have toiled in the political vineyards for years and decades, a truly dedicated creative class will generate more effective and clever content and arguments than we professionals have been able to deliver on issues like climate, taxes, health care, Cuba, and many more.
Just imagine, if all the celebrities with social media assets of more than ten million followers would just once a week post a response to a common lie bouncing around the internet about the Democratic nominee, that wave would reach a far larger audience than Sean Hannity could ever hope to and thereby accelerate the building of the national rapid-response network I have described here. It would be a tragedy if this asset were not leveraged effectively and fully to win the most important election of our lifetime. Ideal would be a coordinated campaign among you. Any volunteers?
Or imagine you’re an actor with a massive social media following who travels to a small town in Pennsylvania with no film crew, just the phone. Say Mount Pleasant, a town of four thousand less than an hour outside of Pittsburgh. You hit a local diner like the Main Street Deli and Café and engage the patrons in a discussion about the election, and shoot a little amateurish video while you’re at it. You edit the piece in the car on the way to the airport and before you take off, you post it to your millions of followers and ask them to share it. By the time you’re back on whichever coast you live on, you’ve achieved virality, reaching far more people than are watching the highest-rated Fox News show on any night. You are not spitting into the foul wind. You are standing up to it with powerful weaponry—your voice, your art, and your massive audience.
Imagine a singer (or maybe a band) who decides to record a musical call to action for the climate and the election, releases it on YouTube and other platforms, asks the fans to share it, implores them to vote, and provides how-to links for volunteering. That call to action would be more effective than three speeches in the candidate’s “climate week.” As someone who has put a lot of time into planning and thinking about such speeches, this is a sobering fact. But the world has changed. Trump knows this—it’s a large reason why he won in 2016. The bottom line is that Trump has the Fox/Sinclair/talk-radio axis of evil echoing and amplifying his every argument and wild-ass assertion.
Or maybe a basketball star with tens of millions of followers, who each time they travel for a road game, records a quick video. In town to play Giannis and the Milwaukee Bucks, they say, “Hey Wisconsin. I hope we win tonight in Milwaukee, but the bigger contest is the presidential election. It could all come down to Wisconsin. So, I want you all to make sure you’re registered to vote, you have a plan for voting, and you’re giving whatever time you can to the campaign. Go to democraticnominee.com to find out how. We have to beat Trump. But it will take a team to do it.” The more specific and actionable, the better. Less sentiment, more strategy.
You have been given more than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. How about using a mere fifteen minutes of your fame a week to defeat Donald Trump?
As discussed in the previous chapter, playing offense requires sharing our candidate’s ideas and plans and attesting to his or her character. Playing defense requires calling out all the opposition’s lies, deception, and attempts to sow division—exposing them for the utter bullshit they are. Let’s talk about specific ways to deal with voters one-on-one, sometimes playing offense, sometimes defense.
Let’s start with the deeply conflicted voter who testifies: “No way I can vote for Trump. But the Democrats have gone too far off the deep end. They support killing babies after they are born, want no immigration laws, and are gonna raise taxes on everyone. I’m going to vote for the third-party candidate to send a message to both parties.”
Music to Trump Tower and Putin’s dacha.
“I hate Trump, but they’re all pretty much the same. A Democrat wins, and nothing will change. What’s the point of voting?”
More music to pro-Trump ears. Both sentiments fulfill a fundamental aim of the Trump campaign: taint our party and nominee to such a degree that such voters either don’t vote or choose a third party instead. Here’s what we want instead from this conflicted cohort:
“I voted for Gary Johnson last time. I didn’t like Trump or Clinton. Trump’s been even worse as president than I thought. I liked Obama OK, but I’m not sure about this new Democrat—but the choice is better than Trump, or at least less annoying and embarrassing. And the only way to get rid of Trump is to have the Democrat win. I don’t want to throw my vote away this time.”
Now that’s the tune of a Democratic victory song. The question is how to guide voters away from those first two answers and toward the last answer. My recommendation when talking with them: do not launch into a speech about how horrible Trump is, or how great the Democrat is. I recommend something simple that acknowledges where the voter is right now:
“I completely get that. I struggle with it too. Let’s pretend for a minute that who we elect as president could make a difference. What would be most important to you to see happen?”
If they share something—they want more done about the climate, or someone who cares about working people, or resolving the national crisis of student loans and debt, or ending corruption—you have your opening. If you happen to have knowledge about the issue—and the related case against Trump and for the Democratic nominee—jump in and make the case. You don’t have the facts or the nominee’s position on the issue? That’s OK. Ask this voter for contact info and make sure you send good information.
Meet them where they are—but go no further. Spare them the lecture on the responsibilities of citizenship and how awesome our nominee is. They’re not in the mood for it. Such exhortations usually fall flat.
Flat, just like one of my favorite riffs to lay on young people at colleges and other venues:
“In our country we settle our disputes at the ballot box, not the battlefield. And even the one exception to that, the Civil War, was propelled by the result of the 1860 election. Every war we fight or don’t. Tax we cut or raise. Health care we provide or deny. Air we clean or dirty. Roads we pave or not. On every single issue the results of those questions and decisions flow directly back to whom we elect. I get it that politics these days can seem small, silly, depressing, and hopeless. But it’s the system we have, and the people we elect in this flawed system have the same power, and likely more, than Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. Opting out is surrendering our future, your future, to the old cynical protectors of the status quo.”
Maybe that works well with the kids; I’m not even sure, but I can’t help myself. You can do better; when talking with voters on or anywhere near the fence, do not get up on your soapbox like that. They don’t need speeches. They need real talk. With college students who are getting killed by student loans from a for-profit university and no one is helping, a productive response might be: “I’m sorry. I know that’s hard. The Democratic nominee may not have all the answers but will crack down on those for-profit colleges. Trump has made it easier for them to duck accountability and screw students. The Democrat has promised to increase the number of people eligible for Pell Grants. Trump has cut them. And the Democrat has interesting ideas about loan forgiveness and income-based repayment. Trump could not care less about your individual situation. He always puts the lenders before students. Do we really want four more years of this?”
Maybe that spiel won’t get the job done. Most likely they won’t tell you then and there. But you’ve planted a seed. Maybe you send them some reinforcing info. You connect them with a young person who shares their major concern and is voting for the Democrat. Turn a random conversation into a peer-to-peer conversion.
Many voices and many types of content will be essential for conveying the superiority of our candidate into the digital bloodstream. One would be a farmer from southwestern Wisconsin who whips out her phone in June and says while sitting on her tractor, “Trump’s trade war is killing me. Most farmers agree. I also don’t like the example he’s setting for kids like mine. I gave Trump a chance last time, but I’m voting for the Democrat, who can’t be any worse and is at least saying all the right things about ending Trump’s dumb war on farmers. It won’t take too many of us to flip Wisconsin. I might even paint a sign on my barn saying ‘Dump Trump.’”
Once the sign is painted, she can post a photo on Instagram and also capture by post and video some of the good—and funny—reactions to it. This content is a trifecta of goodness: great message about the effect of Trump’s trade war on a farmer in a key battleground state, a video that may encourage others who feel the same way to follow suit and create their own content, and a sign on a barn—instant attention-getter. There are unlimited similar options. Ask yourself these questions: What visible areas do you have on your property? What image can you create that drivers will see and snap and post? Live in Florida on a route busy with tour busses all the time? Hit ’em with a sign or poster.
Because we live in an increasingly visual world, you might create signs and posters for your yard or windows, and paint the side of the barn. Search for infographics and charts that are crystal clear at a glance.
A quick Google search will yield dozens, hundreds, thousands of sites demonstrating with graphs and pie charts that the lion’s share of Trump’s tax cuts went to the wealthy and large corporations. They show how almost all of the largest of the big corporations used their share of the boondoggle to buy back stock to feather the already gilded nests of the wealthy, not to create jobs as promised, further demonstrating how the reckless tax cuts have blown up the deficit.
Copy the results of your search onto fliers and drop them at doors throughout your community. Make the point that these horribly misguided policies were also a complete betrayal of Trump’s claim that he would fight for the “forgotten” American. Instead, he forgot about most of America and did all he could for the top 1 percent.
Medicaid will be a pivotal issue throughout the country. If you live in a state like Virginia, which expanded Medicaid, and you or a family member receive treatment you didn’t have before, share that story and testify that four more years of the incumbent puts your health at risk. Tell a story about someone with a disabled child or an aging parent whose doctor visits will be cut if Trump and the Republicans get four more years to gut the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare.
It could be that your child has respiratory troubles, and you were so hopeful when the Obama administration cracked down on mercury emissions from plants in your area—a commonsense initiative that Trump’s stooges have now reversed, allowing more toxins to be released into your community’s air. Your child’s very health is at stake.
Maybe you work at a company in the green energy space that started and flourished due to support during the Obama years. Tell voters that the Democrat will expand such initiatives. Trump and his political appointees in the pertinent federal agencies will do their best to crush them and kill jobs.
Playing offense with all possible voters and conflicted voters, we need to make sure there is plenty of content that they can see and share as they work through their decision. Maybe it’s a pie chart. Maybe it’s personal testimony. Maybe it’s a big sign on the barn, or a sandwich board on your Labrador. Make it factual. Make it personal. Make it count. Keep it going until November 3.
On the big issues, we have both powerful truth and powerful truth tellers on our side. Regarding climate change, for example, every major environmental group, scientists, high-profile voices like Leonardo DiCaprio’s that have credibility on climate, and credentialed politicians like Al Gore are likely to have statements, op-ed pieces, and interviews explaining how the Democratic nominee is all that stands between us and climate catastrophe. Share that content with a young, concerned voter who has “heard” otherwise.
Health care professionals, experts on public health, even Barack Obama himself will have produced scads of material on Medicaid and other health care issues, all driving home the point that it’s Democrats and Democrats only who will build on Obamacare, not destroy it, and fight for more coverage for more people and further bring down costs.
As for immigration, elected officials, including sheriffs who patrol the southern desert border, Dreamers, business leaders, and many other supporters of sane immigration laws will have declared on the record that Trump is the most anti-immigrant president in U.S. history. His Democratic opponent will be proimmigrant and committed to fighting for comprehensive immigration reform that will finally solve our immigration challenges. Univision and Telemundo will also provide meaty content evaluating the two candidates on immigration policy, plans, and attitudes.
There is no shortage of good content, no shortage of ways to share it. Let there be no shortage of supporters doing this.
Trump unleashes lies at an unprecedented rate, and his accomplices in the Fox News/Sinclair/Breitbart media-entertainment vortex from hell defend every single one. It won’t get better as we approach the election. The voter-suppression and voter-confusion efforts we saw in 2016 will be perpetrated on a much grander scale in 2020, some based in Moscow, Belarus (and other foreign locations), Washington, or Trump Tower. Young voters will be served ads claiming that the Democratic nominee is in bed with the fossil-fuel industry and won’t do anything on climate change. Health care sensitive swing voters will hear that our candidate is opposed to universal health care. Young Latino voters will be told that Trump is the only candidate for comprehensive immigration reform, that the Democrat has no plan.
Unbelievable claims—except that they aren’t unbelievable to everyone. In fact, the Trump campaign is already spending millions on these types of digital ads in core battleground states while our candidates battle it out in the primary. We have a lot of catching up to do.
As already explained, the Republicans’ hope is that some anti-Trump voters will give up on the Democrats too, and be driven to third-party candidates or not vote at all. For us, stopping this drive to suppress turnout is, to borrow the term from NASA, “mission critical.” We can’t let these incredibly duplicitous tactics succeed.
We don’t have to match the Trump machine blow for blow, but we do have to unleash responses in such numbers and in so many mediums that his one huge presidential megaphone is matched not with volume, because that’s impossible, but with numbers. Millions of smaller megaphones.
In the opening chapter I talked about how important it is to fight back—play defense—and proposed some general ideas about how to do so. Now let’s examine how to use our own specific voices proclaimed into our own, maybe homemade, megaphones.
You see something in your Facebook feed from one of your old college friends about a “study” demonstrating that if the Democrat is victorious, crime will rise 50 percent and rapes and murders by undocumented immigrants will triple. Take a minute to shake your head in frustration, sigh in sadness, but then respond calmly and by sharing content that shows the Democrat’s commitment to increasing funds for local enforcement; stats showing that immigrants commit fewer violent crimes than those native born; our candidate’s commitment to solving at long last the immigration challenge with comprehensive reform, including smart, humane, technology-based border security. It’ll take you just a few seconds to search out the good stuff. Put up links to those interviews, statements, and videos in a comment on his post to give something new to think about to those who roll their eyes and say it’s a choice of the lesser of two evils.
Maybe there is one person in this particular Facebook chain who will factor in the information you share. Two is better, but one is okay. Any “lesser of two evils” voters will understand the profound differences—and the profound stakes—for them and their communities in this election.
Even if zero people in this chain are directly influenced, others in the feed who share your views and are committed to defeating Trump will now have more confidence to engage in their own rapid response. They will have their own ideas about how to do so, weaponry from their own personal arsenal.
Now that crazy Uncle John is at it again, sending a new email full of misinformation, the infanticide conspiracy theory, for example, your wisest course of action is to take a moment to inwardly vent your frustration and sadness, then get down to business:
“Uncle John, I respect that you support Trump. As you know, I do not support Trump. While I don’t support everything about the Democratic nominee, I think on balance our country would be better off with that nominee in the White House than four more years of Trump. But let’s make it an honest debate. You have plenty of arguments to make on Trump’s behalf that are true and maybe persuasive to some. The article/video/infographic you just shared to suggest the Democratic nominee supports infanticide is a lie. No credible person in our country, much less a presidential candidate, supports infanticide. My candidate is pro-choice, yes. Trump used to be pro-choice; now he says he is pro-life. So there’s that difference. My candidate wants abortion to be safe, legal, and rare. Trump would like to see it outlawed—for every woman. Check out this article below from the Wall Street Journal, hardly a liberal source, that captures the candidate positions on abortion and makes clear the infanticide charge is a hideous lie.”
I realize that sending such a message will likely engender an intolerably large number of replies, perhaps from people from both sides. If you choose to weigh in again, perhaps simply respond with, “Here’s another article from another conservative source.”
Your search will yield plenty to choose from, pointing out the truth.
Again, maybe it will have an impact on someone on the chain. Maybe not. But it gives both confidence and ammunition to others on the chain and may even give pause to some Trump supporters about the content of their own chain or posts on infanticide. Maybe they will think they are not on supersolid ground.
I know some of you who may be younger or live on the coasts may think talk radio died in the 1980s, but it’s alive and well in many parts of America, mostly in Trump and maybe-Trump country. And there are lots of sports call-in shows, where the presidential race is sometimes a hot topic along with why my Philadelphia 76ers may win the NBA Championship.
Tune in sometime and try to target a show originating in a maybe-Trump region. If the blowhard host or deranged caller makes a patently spurious charge about Democrats wanting to throw open the border, take health care away from veterans, free all prisoners regardless of how violent their offense was, et cetera, grab your phone and wait your turn, and then, before they know what’s hit them, point out the indisputable fact that Trump is the most fiscally reckless president in history, the champion deficit increaser, and not due to programs that also produced jobs and infrastructure but with the largest giveaway to the rich in history.
Go right at them. If you get the opportunity, use the same points you would online, provide websites or sources people should look up online for verification.
You’ll drive them nuts. The Hannitys, Carlsons, and Limbaughs of the world, as well as the second-string local talk show hosts, simply cannot handle being directly challenged. They bully, bloviate, and dominate.
Even if they taunt you, even if you convince no one, the Trumpsters will be forced to spend precious airtime defending their man, not launching errant missiles at our nominee. Time of possession is important in sports and politics. So is setting the tempo of the game.
Also, there will be people listening in who actually are going to vote for the Democratic nominee, even if in small numbers. Perhaps they get enjoyment out of all the crazy talk or want to know what the other side is peddling. I happen to believe that from time to time it’s a very smart thing to drop into crazy town and listen to Limbaugh and the rest. I certainly find it motivational.
Besides, piercing the reality distortion field they live in can be a whole lot of fun.
Maybe you’re listening to the Buck Sexton Show in the evening, running on WMEQ in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The host is leading a discussion about whether Trump has delivered on his promise to drain the swamp. He believes Trump has succeeded—look how many scientists have left certain agencies!—and he welcomes callers with other examples of how swamp-drainy Trump has been.
You call in and say, “No doubt that is one of his appeals. But in fact, it’s the biggest promise he’s broken. He has used the presidency to personally enrich himself and his family, has likely illegally meddled into business mergers and acquisitions. No administration has had more lobbyists working in it or designing its policies. DC is now more corrupt and swampier than Wall Street and Hollywood, thanks to Donald Trump.”
And have the objective content ready to cite, if you get the chance.
Say Trump spends a week in September barnstorming the handful of true battleground states on what might as well be labeled the Democrats Love Rapists and Murderers Tour. Much more likely to happen than not, sadly. Let’s say you live in one of those battleground states, Wisconsin, say, in the town of Manitowoc. The Democrats’ nominee will drive the party’s different message that week, let’s hope effectively. The nominee may have press events scheduled in Madison and Milwaukee to reference the absurdity of the attacks and fire back. Local Democratic officials, current and former law enforcement voices, and crime victims will be on hand. The campaign may run some ads pushing back. All good, but the circus that is Trump will surely gobble up lots of news and social media. Our events will get some statewide TV and radio coverage—not as much as Trump’s stuff, but some—but what the campaign won’t likely be able to execute is a local event in your hometown, Manitowoc.
It is therefore imperative that local Democratic supporters are readily available to all media and are armed with good talking points and easily shared content. You will serve as good rapid responders on the spot. Same principle here. Don’t get spooked; don’t be afraid you won’t be “professional” enough; and don’t worry that you don’t have a suitable podium. Who cares that you’ve never done anything like this? The local voices, including yours, will be much more trusted by your neighbors than those from the “liberal” big counties. They won’t drown out Trump, but they will ensure that the Manitowoc Herald Times Reporter and WMOT, the local radio station, give the Democratic nominee’s positions prominence. Thanks to you.