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 simila
r 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.
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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?
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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 resu
lt 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.
A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump Page 5