I wrote this book because I had to.
Donald Trump becoming president of the United States was unimaginable because, to the very end, I believed that skilled and committed people would stop him. I knew a lot of working Americans might just take a chance on Trump given my own frustration with the direction of the country, but only clueless leaders and campaign malpractice would have allowed him to end up in the White House.
I felt compelled to write as quickly as possible what I believe really happened in the 2016 November election, and thankfully The Guardian, The New York Times, Democracy Journal, Democratic Strategist, and most of all, The American Prospect gave me the space to shout. (The Washington Post was first to publish my argument a year before the election.) I never wrote so fast and intently. The moment was too urgent to wait on a book. Thank you to Robert Kuttner, Harold Myerson, and Paul Starr; John Judis; and Andrew Levison.
Democrats “don’t have a white working-class problem,” I wrote. “They have a working-class problem.” After the financial crisis that wiped out so many jobs and so much wealth and the bailout of the big banks, white working-class voters scorned the Democrats, while their own base of voters disengaged. The base declined to defend Barack Obama at the polls, even though he called on them to “build on the progress.” I was pretty angry Democrats were not introspective after their deep losses down ballot in the states election after election, leading The New York Times to headline my piece with Anna Greenberg, “Was Barack Obama Bad for Democrats?”
I jumped at the chance to write a review of Shattered, the first inside account of the Clinton campaign. I wrote with exasperation of the campaign’s malpractice, which I got to observe fairly closely. Their failure to contest or even poll in Michigan and Wisconsin and taking for granted the discontented Bernie Sanders vote cost them the election. Hillary Clinton was hamstrung by her dogged determination to hew as closely as possible to President Obama, particularly on the economy, even when she encountered everyday people in so much pain.
I didn’t believe the lazy assumption that the country wanted an Obama Third Term. The country was going to vote for a disruptor.
I knew with my history of writing about disaffected white working-class voters and “Reagan Democrats” in Macomb County, I needed to listen and write about them, too. To start, my new polls needed to better represent them. Those with some college or a high school education or less would comprise 61.5 percent of all my polls in the 2018 election cycle. And no more second-guessing who is a “likely” voter. My polls are now of registered voters, open to the kind of surge of white working-class voters that happened in 2016 and of women voters that happened in 2018.
After the 2016 election and 2018, I went to Macomb County to talk with working-class independents and Democrats who had voted for Trump. I knew they were under pressure. And I knew the elites had trouble respecting their choice, though I believed they had legitimate reasons to support him. My liberal friends would be unforgiving soon, pressing the Trump voter to regret their choice. I knew academics would soon bring back the studies on the “authoritarian personality” or start looking for nodes on the brain that make them “conservative.”
My wife, Rosa DeLauro, is a member of Congress, and she chose to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration; and because she is in the Democratic leadership, Rosa attended the private lunch with the president in Statuary Hall. She avoided him and never had to face shaking his hand.
So, we were in Washington for the inauguration, with its very modest crowds compared to those for President Barack Obama. The streets in Washington were pretty quiet, but not the next day, for the Women’s March. The streets, shops, and cafes were overrun with people. Such energy and excitement. Our house on Capitol Hill was full of family from out of town, and our children and grandchildren and friends gathered there before joining the half million who formed a crush in all the streets. Rosa brought me and the grandkids up on the speakers’ platform where we joined the women members of Congress and hugged Cecile Richards, head of Planned Parenthood, and Sister Simone Campbell, head of NETWORK and Rosa’s ally in her battles for the Affordable Care Act and against the Ryan budgets.
When I woke up the next day and every day, I asked myself, What have I done today to resist and make sure Donald Trump is repudiated? I couldn’t sleep most nights and it turns out, many millions were reacting in the same way. They got involved, gave money, attended marches, descended on town halls, rushed to airports to protect Muslim refugees.
I decided to write a book because of the resistance, most of whom were painfully uncertain how this would all turn out. I wrote it because of the opposite. I believed Donald Trump’s victory was the last, desperate battle of a Tea Party–dominated Republican Party to stop an unstoppable New America from governing, and they would fail. Indeed, Trump getting the nomination confirmed the story. Trump winning the election accelerated the defeat of his party, whose battle against modernity would leave it shattered. Trump governing would make the great majority of the country newly conscious of their own values, beliefs, and priorities.
People thought I was smoking. I hope you are right.
Nobody would believe me until the country was swept by a blue wave in 2018, but not then either. I couldn’t even convince James Carville. So, not until the 2020 blue wave.
I sent my book outline to Thomas Dunne, who was loyal and published nearly all my recent books. He and Stephen S. Power, executive editor at Thomas Dunne Books, came to see me at my office. Tom said he had already copyrighted a title, RIP GOP, which fit what I wanted to write. It was perfect.
Compelled by the moment, I got up at 4:30 most mornings and wrote for hours as a kind of therapy and relief that I was doing my part. I blew past the 70,000 words of my book contract. I met every deadline for the first time in my life. Remarkably, Stephen would send back line edits within a day or two. Something was happening there, too.
I was able to step to a new scale of research and work to influence key players because a cadre of progressive allies were also asking themselves, What more can I do? And they pushed Democracy Corps into areas we could hardly have imagined.
Page Gardner created the Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund and the Voter Participation Center to advocate for the underrepresented, which has come to encompass the rising American electorate—African Americans, Hispanics, millennials, and unmarried women, those whose values and liberties are most under threat as the GOP throws off all limits to hold on to power. With more than a little help from Ron Rosenblith, Gardner pushed her programs to be the most innovative and accountable and challenged us to do the same. Progressive donors invested more than $50 million in her efforts in 2018 alone.
Felicia Wong is president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, which leveraged the work of Joseph Stiglitz to elevate a bold policy agenda to rewrite the rules of the economy. She understood the big forces that would fight them and how much their policy work needed to be embedded in a narrative and employ messages that could win the public debate. She invested in a sustained, innovative, and engaged program that should have allowed a Democratic presidential candidate to win on the economy.
When President Trump and the Republicans finally passed a bold, shameless tax cut for corporations and the richest and argued they were delivering tax cuts for the middle class and the “greatest economy ever,” it was Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a force of nature in the labor movement, who said, “I’m in.” They backed a year-long effort to listen to the working people, the supposed beneficiaries, and expose who it really benefited. We branded it as a “tax scam for the rich” and helped campaigns win the economic and tax battle in 2018.
Lori Wallach is director of Global Trade Watch in Public Citizen and stands alone among progressive leaders, understanding how much globalization and our prevailing trade agreements have hurt working people. She bravely fights on, building coalitions finally strong enough to win, and enlisted me in the battle against TPP and to change the renegotiated NAFTA, and listened to my counterintuitive, crazy recommendations. She even made me a believer in the importance of progressives getting the trade issue right or paying a big price at the polls.
James Carville and I founded Democracy Corps nearly twenty years ago, and he pushed for Democracy Corps to conduct research with Republican base voters. It seemed like a mad idea but he asked, “What country would go to war without knowing what’s going on behind enemy lines?” Steven Katzenberg gave us the seed money for the first research, and Steve Bing, who funded us for a decade, allowed us to pay for the research ourselves. That changed fundamentally when Michael Vachon, adviser to Soros Fund Management said, “This work has to happen.”
William and David Harris play a special role in the progressive world that mobilized on so many fronts to confront the danger of Donald Trump. They’ve pressed every day, year on year for a lifetime to see an America free of child poverty. They are relentlessly effective in making progress, and more than anyone they have said, do whatever research you think is right to get a president and Congress that will do the right thing.
Nancy Zdukewicz helped direct Democracy Corps and oversaw all the research it conducted in 2016 and 2018 and coauthored the focus group reports. She assisted in getting my last book, America Ascendant, to press. Henry Hoglund, my project coordinator at Greenberg Research, took over the editorial direction of this book and helped me maintain the quality of the writing as I took the book in so many unexpected directions. Chad Arthur, my lead analyst at Greenberg Research, took over the book in its closing phases, but that meant bringing in our latest research, making the graphs live, and answering every last question of the copy editors. He was joined at the end by Adrian Palau-Tejeda, my new project director, who helped get the book across the finish line.
GQR carries on, led proudly by Anna Greenberg and Jeremy Rosner, offering polling and strategy in the United States and globally. Their professionalism and ethics run deep, and they were my subcontractor for all the surveys and focus groups reported in this book. Many just noticed these changes when Anna became the pollster for presidential candidate John Hickenlooper, that my daughter (and Jeremy) had taken over the firm. Quite proud indeed.
GQR is now led by Chief Operator Officer Lindsey Reynolds, who deftly manages how we partner and maximize our shared legacy. Jade Kish heads human relations and operations for GQR, yet takes responsibility for all my hiring. Dave Rooney is systems administrator at GQR, yet sits calmly at the vortex of my work with ready solutions, keeping my whole team integrated globally.
As with all my books, I only risked giving Rosa and my brother, Edward Greenberg, the whole book to read. Ed is a professor of political science with his own major textbooks in political science, and his comments helped me get to much greater clarity and sooner.
One observation was particularly insightful about our times: Who is your audience? He wrote, “Is it the people and groups that are resisting or the broader group of social and political commentators that usually engage with your work?” It was a smart and revealing question. I wrote this book in a determined frenzy and viewed Democracy Corps’ clients and donors as partners and allies, resisting the Trump presidency. So, throughout the book, I wrote what “we” had concluded and done, rather than “I.”
With Ed and the copy editor’s help, I got back to first person, though it underscores how much Donald Trump has disrupted.
I presented the main argument of this book at a conference, “The Trap of Polarization,” at the Italian Academy at Columbia University, as I was turning in the final manuscript to the publisher. I want to thank Professor Michael Walzer, who was wary of my asserting the need to “destroy” the Republican Party. Before President Trump, our democracy was secure because each party would vacate the White House when it lost an election. Would my goal encourage Trump to refuse to leave?
Actually, I never use the term “destroying” in the book. I am pressing for “shattering” electoral defeats and fractures that allow the Republican Party to be renewed and win again.
I also want to reassure Ece Temelkuran, author of How to Lose a Country, that America is not Turkey. Our country is indeed led by a populist ultranationalist with few self-imposed bounds. He would like nothing better than to hang out with authoritarian thugs like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and with other ultranationalist populists like Benjamin Netanyahu, Victor Orban, Andrzej Duda, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte. But Donald Trump is president because he is leading the Tea Party’s losing battle against the New America. His shattering losses represent the triumph of democratic forces, expanding freedom that heralds a new era of progressive reform.
Our children and their spouses—Kathryn Greenberg and Ari Zentner, Anna Greenberg and Dana Milbank, Jonathan Greenberg and Justine Gardner—each is so engaged, committed, creative, accomplished, ethical, and loving. All joined the Women’s March and accept that this is my first book not dedicated to the family.
Our grandchildren—Paola Milbank, Rigby Zentner, Teo Zentner, Sadie Delicath, Jasper Delicath, and Augustus Greenberg—are part of this moment, too. They cried when Hillary lost. They stopped telling us to switch off the news. They marched and created their own signs.
This is Rosa’s moment. And we all love her for being such a force of nature who will prove me right about this progressive moment. She is the chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, and line by line, thread by thread, she is restoring the social safety net. She’s restoring research on gun violence. She is already calling them to account for sabotaging the Affordable Care Act, bailing out nonprofit colleges, separating children from their parents at the border, and hollowing out the Department of Labor. How many of us have fifty million views like her confrontation with Betsy DeVos? It will not be long before the next president is signing into law the bills she has fought for over so many years: equal pay for women, paid family leave, paid sick days, and an expanded young child tax cut that cuts child poverty in half. That is why one of the young, freshmen women on the House floor described her as a “feminist disruptor.”
We are partners in each other’s work, and I love her. Rosa lost her 103-year-old mother last year. Luisa and her husband, Theodore, were also forces of nature and partners who said, never take no for an answer.
We know.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
JULY 1, 2019