6
MONEY
If money is such a big deal in politics, why does it merit the smallest chapter in this book? Because my main point throughout is the supreme power of volunteers in a modern American presidential campaign. I want you to volunteer. This is how we’ll win in 2020. Believe it or not, your time is more valuable to the campaign than your money.
Also, there are so many ways to lay out the big picture of volunteering to pique your interest and then show you all the ways you can join up. I hope you try many of them. Meanwhile, there’s only one way to contribute money. Contribute money. Boring, though of course vitally necessary.
Finally, volunteering will be an amazingly fulfilling experience—and always challenging too because you are dealing with human beings, and human beings, well, they have issues. Getting the most out of any collection of men and women, building a culture of trust and honesty, and valuing empathy and selflessness? Extremely gratifying. Writing a check? Not as much, let’s admit it.
Many people have asked me if their money is really needed, if their one-millionth of a billion-dollar nut will make a difference given the tsunami of money, billions and billions of dollars, now inundating the American electorate.
Well, think about your family. Is your financial contribution to the budget important? Yes. Incredibly so. Is it as important as your love? No. There’s a rough analogy here, I think: yes, your one-millionth of a teaspoon counts; no, it’s not as important as your time.
If you are thinking about making a sacrifice in order to make a contribution—perhaps forgoing a trip with an aging parent or putting off a car or appliance repair—please don’t. Should we tragically lose in 2020, or win by too close for comfort, there will be a lot of reasons, but money will not be at the top of the list. There are enough financially secure people in this country to properly fund our campaign and make any financial sacrifice from you unnecessary. Prioritize your volunteer work, not your bank account. Devote as much time to the campaign as possible, helping us register, persuade, and turn out voters, while also recruiting other volunteers to do the same—and while always fitting this sacrifice around your family life and your work.
Of course it’s easy for me to give priority to the volunteering because I know that the one campaign activity in the past most of you reading this book probably have in common is that you have already donated dollars to Democratic candidates, up and down the ballot. For those of you who did so in 2008 and 2012 to help elect and reelect Barack Obama, thank you, thank you, thank you. Your generosity helped us hire the staff, reach the voters, and communicate the message that secured two presidential victories. Many if not most of you have donated to one or more of the Democratic primary candidates in this election cycle, and you’ll contribute to the winner pretty soon. My emphasis of the value of your time does not diminish the value of your money. If you can afford to give, we can’t afford for you not to.
Why do you donate so generously? It’s not for bragging rights, that’s for sure. I do urge you to post news of a donation to your social media, explain your reasons, maybe spur others to follow suit. But the main reason we contribute is to send a message. Perhaps you were motivated by an answer to a tough question in a YouTube clip or in one of the gazillion debates. When we see and hear a candidate who speaks to us, the easiest way to register our approval is to whip out the phone and make an online donation. It feels good to put some teeth behind a positive reaction.
You may react in the same way to certain issues, controversies, and in this of all years, the latest outrage from the incumbent. During the “Muslim ban” travesty at the start of Trump’s term, many Americans marched and went to airport protests, but the way most of us could register our horror at what was unfolding was to log on to the ACLU site and make a donation. Likewise, when Trump’s accomplices instituted their vindictive policy of separating children from parents at the Texas border.
Most of us couldn’t travel down there to help the heroic groups on the ground. The best way for us to fight back was to give money to local advocacy groups like RAICES (the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) and the Texas Civil Rights Project, who were doing all they could to stand up to our racist president’s policies and help those affected. It most definitely could be that a tweet our sociopathic president sent out was so over the top and filled with so many lies that it motivated you to send another twenty-five dollars to the candidate you think has the best chance of ending the tweeting, at least from those under the imprimatur of the presidency. In any event, it feels like the best way to fight back.
And it is a great way to fight back. On these issues you probably can’t send too many messages. Contributions really can unlock a ripple effect. If you let people know that you clicked and gave, many more will then follow suit.
Maybe your contributions to presidential campaigns have been spontaneous expressions of support. If so, you’re an outlier. Most people don’t volunteer their money, so to speak. One of the big problems with raising cash in a campaign is that it’s so expensive. Maybe you supported another candidate in the primary but went straight to our nominee’s website the day she or he clinched the nomination, and then you gave a donation. That’s terrific—the candidate will need a donor base four or even five times as large as the one that sufficed for the primaries—but realistically most of this expansion will result from smart and persistent digital marketing that identifies, motivates, and secures financial support throughout the country.
In the end, our candidate should receive about five million individual donations, totaling close to a billion dollars. Many of these donors will also become volunteers directly through the campaign, a twofer.
There are still many donors who still respond best to mail solicitations (especially older donors). And such solicitations are not cheap. Fund-raising event costs, whether headlined by our candidate or a surrogate, add up. Dozens of events are held every week all around the country. Travel costs are a big-ticket item for our nominee, his or her spouse, and all the politicians, athletes, and celebrities whom we need on the ground in battleground states.
Legal costs, compliance costs, office rent for all the local offices throughout the country, insurance, and so forth. Thousands of staffers will be required to organize the work of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, especially in the battleground states. If they can’t afford them, the staff is spread too thin, our volunteer leaders are not properly supported, and the entire organization gets creaky, leaky, and less effective. The staffers are mostly young kids right out of college, and they’re not making much for the sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days they are working, seven days a week, but it adds up fast, and all of it adds up even faster. The campaign is a large, complicated enterprise. It’s a massive start-up.
Then there’s the biggest of the big-ticket items: advertising and other forms of voter contact to reach all of our target cohorts. Television ads may run for five to six months in some major cities like Miami, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, expensive markets. Radio ads. Mail pieces. Literature dropped at doors. I hope the largest segment of this category of spending will be for digital advertising on any and all platforms. The creation of all this content—film shoots, editing, video and print production—is very expensive. The market research and testing to determine the exact messages for these ads, and the targeting guidance behind the ad buys, is an almost-around-the-clock enterprise and on its own will cost millions.
The subject of the previous chapter—battleground states—and the subject of this chapter are synonymous, for all practical purposes. Follow the money and you’ll know which states are the battlegrounds. Or from the campaign’s perspective, determining the battlegrounds will determine where most of the money is invested. The campaign may throw some money at a few states just to test the waters; or to try to trick the opponent into matching an expenditure with its own expenditure.
These are not the big decisions. The most crucial decision of any presidential campaign is the identification of the real battlegrounds, where the real money is invested—the full-court press is composed of candidate time, surrogate time, staff, advertising, and the all-important registration and GOTV efforts. Those last two efforts are volunteer driven, but only the volunteers’ time is free. Supporting it is cost intensive.
In short, the campaign has to ensure that the volunteers’ time is carefully invested. Waste it and the election is lost.
A lot goes into the battleground decision. Let’s take a quick look inside that sausage factory, where the first stop is the clear-eyed and cold-blooded assessment of whether the candidate can win a particular state. Do the various registration and turnout models look promising? Even if there is a credible path forward to compete in a close election in, say, ten states, this good news doesn’t end the analysis. Can the candidate afford to win each of these states? Detailed budgets will be prepared throughout potential target states. Arizona will cost millions, North Carolina tens of millions, Florida upward of $50 million, and Texas, should it truly become a possibility, Lord knows how much the Lone Star State could cost, maybe $75 million, maybe more. A mistaken judgment on Texas could be fatal.
Are these resources really and truly on hand? No fairy-tale dreaming allowed. Then do the math. Is the appetite for states to target larger than the wallet? In all likelihood, yes. Incredibly tough decisions follow, as the computer software and the campaign leadership’s instinct and judgment mix and match combinations of states and their costs. So many permutations. States like North Carolina and Arizona could have a strategic value above and beyond the cold hard numbers. If we contest them, we make the Trump campaign defend a wider swath of territory under the fear that their 26 combined electoral votes become as winnable for the Democrats as the blue wall’s Wisconsin and Michigan, also 26 votes, guaranteed battlegrounds in 2020.
Taking a state off the electoral college chess board due to a lack of resources is one of the toughest decisions a campaign manager has to make, and it will be tougher still if in the end, the lost electoral votes would have made the difference between victory and defeat. Even worse is to green-light a battleground state, only to realize a couple of months later that you really don’t have the resources to see it through. You’ve wasted millions, maybe more, and the optics are terrible. McCain pulling out of Michigan in 2008 is a good example of that terrible dynamic. Even for the Obama campaign in 2012, we sank a huge amount of resources into North Carolina, only to pull back on our spend in the closing weeks when it looked like it would be close but just out of reach.
The campaign will make its fund-raising and budget assumptions based on predictive modeling: number of donors now, how much their numbers will grow, and how much they will donate. The assumptions usually turn out to be quite accurate. Eerily so.
So you donors will have an enormous influence on the most important strategic decision the campaign makes—the target list for battleground states—especially if you give early in the cycle, when the big decisions are made.
As with volunteering, you must look at your financial contribution as a catalyst for others to act. As noted earlier, posting your donation on social media may spur others to do the same. But I repeat: do not sacrifice necessities for your family in order to contribute to this campaign. Just as there are more than enough people in the United States to defeat Trump if we can get them to the polls, there are more than enough people who can comfortably contribute and make sure money is not a reason we put ourselves at a disadvantage in the upcoming battleground wars.
So please give what you can if you can. And make it fun, and even meaningful along the way. I devoted an earlier chapter to the importance of hosting supporters and volunteers in all kinds of venues under all kinds of circumstances. You can make fund-raising a communal activity as well. This doesn’t have to be an elaborate program. Pick a night and send out an email to everyone you know and suspect is a supporter of our nominee and/or hates Trump.
Say something along the lines of, “I know many of you have already contributed to our candidate. I thought it would be nice to get together to thank those who have given, celebrate those who might this night, and coax the fence-sitters to join us so we can tell them how important their participation is. I’ll have our candidate’s best hits teed up on the TV, as well as some of Trump’s worst. It will be a casual night, and folks are welcome to speak about why they have gotten involved, but it’s really just a way for us to share our hopes, dreams, and fears for the election and strategize about how we can do more. And you can feel free to scream and shout about yesterday’s presidential tweets. Because I promise you, there will have been something new to scream about.”
It’s that simple. Maybe have some snacks and drinks on hand, ask a few close friends to bring some as well. No fancy catering allowed. Have a sign-in table and a laptop or two as people enter. They can both contribute online as well as sign up for volunteer activities. If you want, ask a local elected official to come and say a few words, but that is by no means necessary. It’s just a nice opportunity for people to gather and make their financial support more communal, and come to life, and perhaps encourage some new donors to give and some existing donors to give again. It would be a chance to process the election generally and the specific events of that week with others, laughing, sighing, chewing fingernails, whatever is appropriate for the moment.
If you can’t host an event but are invited to one, please think hard about attending, even though it’s not the kind of thing you usually do.
You could even do a lighter-touch method, asking all the people you think may be interested to give together, virtually. Maybe it would be after a particularly great day for our nominee that gets you pumped up, or a day where Trump reaches new depths of depravity, getting you pumped up in a less inspirational way. “OK, everyone, let’s all make a donation in the next twenty minutes and post about it on Facebook. Let’s tag each other and thank all those who do give in the comments. Let’s try to get a hundred people to join us right now.”
You know my theory: This election will be hard enough for us all to live through. It will be far easier to make it through together, on line and off.