A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by David Plouffe

  In 2008, our core battleground target list was therefore a long one: Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. (And don’t forget the second congressional district of Nebraska, which joins Maine in awarding electoral college votes to the winner of individual congressional districts as well as to the statewide winning candidate.) Michigan, traditionally a battleground in this era, was conceded early by McCain, in a move that showed just how narrow McCain’s win path was becoming. They pulled out in September, and we ended up winning that traditional battleground by 15 points.

  Our strategy worked. Fourteen battleground states, and we won all but two, Montana and Missouri, and even won the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska, winning one Husker electoral college vote while losing the state.

  That gave our first African American president 365 electoral votes (270 required to win). In the electoral college at least, a landslide. We won 67.8 percent of the electoral college while winning 52.9 percent of the popular vote. That’s what happens when you come close to sweeping all the battlegrounds.

  By the way, I’m still royally pissed about the two that got away. I desperately wanted to color all of those states Obama blue. The battlegrounds become like children to a campaign manager, all precious in their own way, and you want them to be taken care of and come home to where they belong.

  In 2012, we knew we were going to face a stiffer challenge and closer race than in 2008 due to an economy still recovering from the financial crisis four years earlier. Once again we believed we had to widen the playing field to put pressure on Mitt Romney to compete in as many theaters of political battle as possible, thus preserving a healthy margin of error for ourselves. Our core battleground list was smaller than the huge one in 2008, but still historically large: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Michigan? In fits and starts, the Romney campaign claimed that it would contest things up there, making it a quasi battleground, I suppose, but there was little doubt in our minds (and more important, in our data) that the Wolverine State would be safely Obama blue again.

  We won all of those battleground targets save for North Carolina, and yes, that outlier still rankles. President Obama secured reelection with 332 electoral votes. And there was no more important factor in that decisive victory—in both of them, when we outperformed our national popular vote margins in the battlegrounds—than our amazing volunteers who stretched what was possible for us through registration, turnout, and persuasion.

  In 2016? A much different story. Trump won 306 electoral college votes on Election Night, 56.8 percent of them. While, as we all know too well, winning only 46.1 percent of the national popular vote. Which was a lower vote total than Romney received when he lost the electoral college decisively. Give this to the Trump campaign: they squeezed out every electoral college vote they could from their paltry national numbers.

  Now we are near 2020’s campaign, and I can say with certainty that for us to have any chance of beating Trump in 2020, we will need even more effort from you, the volunteers, than we saw in 2008, 2012, and 2018.

  There’s no time to waste moaning about everything that brought us to this crossroads. Obama demonstrated, quite recently, that we can win more than enough to tip battlegrounds over in the electoral college. The volunteers will be the key ingredient, and we will have a fight on our hands in that regard because Trump has large numbers of fiercely committed volunteers.

  I’m not sure bragging that you could murder someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any votes is something to actually brag about, but to his base this is rock solid truth. I suspect Trump will come close to maxing out Republican turnout, which could be scarily high, meaning we have to match it and then some. The MAGA gang is not turning over the keys to the White House to the Democratic Party—that socialist hoard that believes everyone should have access to affordable health care—without an epic fight.

  About a year before the election, as I’m writing this chapter, everyone is already focused on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as the three critical battlegrounds. These three were supposed to compose the “blue wall” that the Democrats could count on last time, but the wall crumbled, Hillary Clinton lost all of them, and here we are today, trapped in the rubble.

  In 2020, those states will be political war zones. Add them to the twenty states plus the District of Columbia that Clinton did collect and our nominee wins with 272 electoral votes. The contest for the presidency may come down to block-by-block street fights in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.

  However, we definitely don’t want the election to come down to a contest in only three states. That gives us a zero margin for error and takes far too much for granted about actual turnout in the so-called safe states. We win only two of those three states and we still lose. Definitely not OK.

  We need to play offense elsewhere, expand the map, as the Obama campaign did in 2008, especially. Almost certainly, our nominee will target Florida. Win those 29 electoral votes (Obama did it twice, narrowly) and Trump’s odds slip to precarious levels. With Florida in the blue column, we’d only have to win one of the three core midwestern battlegrounds.

  Some analysts believe Florida is already lost. Bullshit in my view. Hillary lost it by less than a percentage point, and Democrats Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson narrowly lost their 2018 races for governor and senator, respectively. Note all the “narrowlys,” and of course Al Gore was a whisker away from winning in 2000. The battleground map does change from cycle to cycle, but one constant for almost a generation has been the Sunshine State—always a battleground and superclose at that. And let’s not forget North Carolina. The Democratic nominee has to look hard at North Carolina, a state Barack Obama narrowly won once and narrowly lost once. Although Hillary Clinton lost in the state in 2016, the state still elected a Democratic governor that same year. North Carolina offers a significant fifteen electoral votes. I hope it’s firmly in the battleground state mix.

  And an exciting new core battleground entrant is likely to be Arizona, where Clinton came closer in 2016 than Obama did in either of his races. She lost the Grand Canyon State less than she lost Iowa and Ohio. The whisker Gore lost by in Florida was the whisker Kyrsten Sinema won by in a Senate race in 2018, and Democrats showed down-ballot strength throughout the state. Arizona is shifting demographically, with Latino voters becoming a more powerful force and suburban voters trending more and more Democratic. Win Arizona and its 11 electoral votes, add wins in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and our nominee can lose Wisconsin and Florida and we’ll win. That’s the math to remember.

  And what a night to remember that would be, watching one Donald J. Trump deliver his concession speech on Election Night. Wouldn’t that be an amazing, amazing pleasure? What a motivation.

  Or, in a fit of rage and denial, he doesn’t concede. I’ll take that too, as historically narcissistic and petty as it would be. Grace notes? Not how our current President rolls.

  If the economy weakens in the year before the election, more states could easily be deemed authentic battlegrounds by the Democrat. Or once battlegrounds turn into safer Democratic territory. This happened very late in 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Bros. on Wall Street on September 15.

  In 2020, Ohio and Iowa would be the most likely late-arriving battlegrounds. Both are still quasi competitive, so a weakening economy should make them full-blown competitive.

  Georgia, believe it or not, may be a top target as well. It would take a herculean effort by the volunteers in the state to put together a winning coalition, but Stacey Abrams showed us the way with that narrowest of losses in her stirring gubernatorial race in 2018. The troops are waiting to charge if HQ decides to open up the Georgia front. And if it doesn’t? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you don’t have to wait for the campaign. Good things will come up a
nd down the ballot.

  Defensively, Democrats need to watch Minnesota carefully. Clinton won it by only 2 points, and it shares many demographic characteristics with its neighbors to the immediate east and south, Wisconsin and Iowa, which fell to Trump; it would be surprising if the Trump campaign doesn’t decide to make an all-out effort in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. They could also try to win Maine statewide (they won the northern congressional district in 2020, garnering one electoral vote), and they may decide to make a stand in New Hampshire and Nevada, if only to annoy us and drain some resources. It’s a chess match of sorts. Nobody has a bottomless war chest of resources, and decisions about where to direct time, money, and people are not made in a vacuum. If we’re pretty confident about a state, Nevada, say, in our case, but the Trump campaign decides to push hard, well, we can’t let them run completely scot-free and risk turning our steady 2-point lead into a dangerous dead heat.

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  In any presidential campaign, the battleground states suck up the lion’s share of the dollars—a subject I’ll return to in the following short chapter—but the most important currency in the battle for the battlegrounds is not money or campaign staff or even the candidate’s own time. It’s you and your time. I believe a successful presidential campaign is built on healthy connective tissue that runs from the candidate all the way down to the high schooler stuffing envelopes. It includes a presidential nominee who builds and inspires a talented and motivated staff; a staff in turn who recruits, inspires, and believes in strong local volunteer leaders; staff and volunteer leaders who welcome, train, listen to, and believe in volunteers; and volunteers who motivate, give strength to, and make the impossible possible for the candidate. Another virtuous circle in presidential campaign politics.

  Given how close the battleground states have historically been and will definitely be again in 2020, your effort and those of your fellow committed citizens can flat out be determinative. What if in 2016 in Wisconsin the Clinton campaign had done all they could from HQ to win it and that effort was matched by a ferocious, well-supported volunteer effort? Well, I think we know. But that’s hindsight, which is worthless. We made mistakes in the Obama campaign despite our victories and no doubt our nominee in 2020 will as well.

  The point is we need close to a perfect campaign to be run by the campaign professionals matched with a large-scale, effective, and intensive volunteer effort in the core battlegrounds. One won’t matter without the other.

  Let’s dig into the battleground states. Some of you volunteers will be in residence while others will be pitching in from afar (which might not be very afar, maybe right across the state line).

  Let’s start this discussion with those of you who do live in a battleground state (or have long desired to, in which case there’s no time like the present to finally make the move!) The first thing you want to do is let the campaign know that you exist and are interested in volunteering. You can easily do this through the candidate’s website. You raising your hand will be shared—in close to real time, I hope—with the staff and volunteer leaders who are already in place in your area. They’ll contact you. Make clear to them that you intend to be part of a winning effort. If you don’t hear back, and there’s an office address listed, just drop in. If they’re shorthanded, you might quickly get enrolled to start replying to other volunteers’ inquiries.

  Be prepared to tell them what you can contribute. Think about this before you check in. What are you great at and like doing? Making posters? Cooking food for the other volunteers? Phone calling? Door knocking? Signing in people at events? Data entry? Can you help feed and house volunteers coming in from out of state? Do you drive and do you have a car? The point is we need help not doing just one thing, but a whole lot of things, by a whole lot of people to make this all work.

  An important point that may not be self-evident: a campaign will make targeting and resource decisions based in part on the strength of the organization that they anticipate they can muster at both the state and precinct level. So signing up early signals to the powers that be in the campaign that they should deploy resources to your community. This is what you want, because you want to win.

  If your time is limited or your availability fluctuates week to week, say so. Every hour counts, every task is vital—housing other volunteers, driving them around, driving voters to polls, the list is endless, really. And be realistic in your appraisal of your availability. Do all you can, but don’t overpromise. It’s not as if, after volunteering, you will magically have fewer work and family obligations.

  Do all that you can, but be realistic and honest about how much of all that there can be.

  In an election of this magnitude, when the only way we will win is with enough volunteer activity in certain states, many of us throughout the country—and the world—will be counting on you. Don’t add to that pressure by signing up or signaling you can do more than you can.

  Speaking of pressure, the pressure on any presidential candidate is enormous. The pressures on the Democratic nominee in 2020 to rid us of the scourge of Trump? The weight the candidate will feel, the obligation, the unrelenting pressure—I really don’t believe the rest of us can properly imagine it.

  Aside from the confidence you can provide those of us outside the battlegrounds that you are taking care of business, you should know you are providing comfort to our nominee, making her or him perform better and become a stronger candidate. I want to buttress this important point with a couple of stories from the 2012 reelection campaign.

  After President Obama’s horrid first debate that year with Romney in Colorado—his first time in the ring with that opponent—after he had finally and totally accepted the scale of our defeat, his major observation to me in the Oval Office a couple of days after the debate was his disappointment in letting all of his grassroots supporters down. This was what he felt worst about. I don’t remember his exact words, but in essence he said, “Everyone’s out there working their hearts out, and now I’ve made it harder for them. I’m sure I’ve disappointed them as well. I care more about not doing that again even more than winning.”

  Now, that sounds like an implausible line, written by Aaron Sorkin for President Bartlet in The West Wing. But it’s true and not a unique attitude for the man. Time after time, when we hit rocky shoals during those nine years, his biggest concern was how his volunteers would react. They really were his North Stars, the most important people in his political universe, and I think they understood this. It was an incredibly powerful connection, which was brought home to me in even starker relief a few days after the Oval Office conversation. We had decamped to the Homestead, a resort in central Virginia, to hold a three-day debate camp to prep for the second debate, to be held at Hofstra on Long Island.

  Candidate Obama was much more dialed in this time, as were we all, hoping that the first debate had been nothing more than a probationary moment, if a dangerous one. The major impact was probably an acceleration of the movement back to Romney by voters who were always going to end up there by Election Day, but we couldn’t afford two lemons in a row.

  At debate prep camp, candidates may take a break and go out and hold one event nearby in order to generate some press and social media activity and not be “dark” (no media coverage) for three full days. We suggested, and Obama readily agreed, that our one outing outside the camp’s confines would be to the campaign office near Williamsburg, Virginia, to meet with local volunteers and thank them for all they were doing.

  While we felt pretty confident about keeping Virginia in our column, Romney was mounting a fierce challenge. It was going to be relatively close. We could not be too overconfident. After all, in 2008, Obama had been the first Democrat since LBJ to win the state.

  A necessary quick flashback: for the first debate, the camp was held outside Las Vegas. We Obama staffers had not put much of a premium on these excursions in 2008, an
d neither had Obama. Four years later in Nevada, however, he kept pushing us to come up with ideas for cool things to do. In the end we toured Hoover Dam, which is an awesome place and was an awesome experience for him and those who went, generating some great photos. He was like a teenager wanting to get out of the house and clearly had a grand time for those hours, a much grander time than while actually prepping, with all of us staffers nitpicking his lame prep work with our own lame advice. It’s no surprise that his parting words to David Axelrod and me before he jumped on stage for the first debate, was a desultory “Let’s get this over with.”

  Like going to the dentist for a filling, and it showed.

  Now, back to the local headquarters in eastern Virginia during the second debate prep camp.

  Obama brought pizza, laughed, hugged, listened, made some phone calls himself to voters, thanked and, I’m sure, motivated the couple dozen volunteers on hand whose work, multiplied throughout the fifty states, was going to determine whether he would be a one- or two-term president.

  I know for sure these local volunteers in Virginia motivated the president because when he got back to the resort and we were getting ready for that night’s mock debate—a full ninety-minute sparring session with John Kerry, who had graciously agreed to inhabit and play the role of Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger in 2012—our man was full of clarity and purpose. He also said to me, “I was kind of nervous going to the office, because I just feel like I let them all down. But to a person, they said they had my back and they’d been working harder since the first debate. I told them I wouldn’t let them down in the second debate. They all said, ‘You better not!’”