A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by David Plouffe

  You may not have a similar face-to-face with our nominee, though if you live in a battleground state, there is a fair chance you will meet the boss. But understand that it’s not just the registration numbers you are putting up that matter. It’s your spirit and commitment that are the real wind beneath the candidate’s wings.

  Obama went on to convincingly win the second debate, even more so the third debate, then he decisively won on election night and earned the right to continue steering our national ship in a progressive direction. I am convinced that the trip to the local campaign office played no small part in our getting off the mat and turning the corner after the first debate. Those volunteers motivated him, inspired him, and he had them in mind when he took that debate stage in New York and beyond. And, by the way, we carried Virginia. Again.

  If you live in a battleground state, you have a front row seat to history. But why not leave the stands, jump on the field, and help make that history? If your state is called for Trump and lights up red on the big TV maps, the one thing I’m sure you don’t want to feel is that there was more you could have done.

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  One decision to make right now, as you game out the level and intensity of your involvement, is whether you have the time and are willing to develop the skills to play the critical role of neighborhood leader or precinct captain. Accepting this responsibility means you will meet some awesome people, all bound together by a common cause, convinced that our country can be better, must be better, and good people of all kinds need to make it so.

  Can one election really signify all that? You tell me. Tell me how you will feel on election night if that childlike sociopath in the White House is empowered to give another victory speech, his hatred and misogyny and racism ratified for another four years, or if his second inaugural address infects your phones and computers, your kids, our country and our world, and promises four more years of his bile and stupidity.

  Now contrast that with how you will feel if instead you celebrate as a thoughtful, mature adult Democrat lays out a new program to help working people of all races and genders, and who promises to appoint progressives to the judiciary for eight years, who returns the nation to an aggressive stance combating climate change. I’m sure you want to do something to make this happen. Imagine you are not just doing this but leading it, and dozens of other volunteers in your neighborhood.

  Reflecting on the Obama years, I believe we were successful in part because for those years the members of our team contributed not just the best work of our lives but were also our best selves. There is no professional feeling like that in the world, and it can be oh so fleeting. For five or six months this year, as a leader you have the opportunity to do your own best work and know that it counts, selflessly going to work with like-minded people to build a better future for your family and all our families.

  At least twenty hours a week will be necessary for fulfilling your leadership obligations, so make sure you can make that work. If you can make it fit with all your other obligations, seize the moment. Raise your hand to be a local team leader. You’ll work in partnership with the local field organizer from the candidate’s national campaign and a few other leaders, covering a territory that could be large geographically or tiny, depending if it’s rural or urban, and comprises a few hundred people, give or take, depending on the actual precinct numbers.

  That staffer and you—from similar or if you’re fortunate, very dissimilar backgrounds—will have each other’s backs as you make history together and, quite likely, form a lifetime bond.

  Let’s get hypothetically specific. You live in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, population fourteen thousand, and our nominee’s campaign has crunched the numbers and decided it needs 140 votes out of your precinct to add to the 1.6 million total votes they’ve predicted they need in order to win the Badger State.

  This win number, as it is called, will reflect registration goals, as we have seen, and be based on the demographic composition of your precinct. How many new registered voters are required? (The registration “universe,” in campaign lingo.) How many truly persuadable voters do you need to convert? (The persuasion universe.) Who are the sporadic voters in your precinct who will vote for the Democratic candidate if they vote at all? (The turnout universe.)

  If you know Chippewa Falls well, you might even be able to help supply some of that data. If not, you’ll be more reliant on the campaign. Either way, this is how, in rough-and-ready terms, national campaigns work at the local level. This “universe” jargon may not be all that clear at first glance, but it gets superclear and real when applied to the precinct level. You need to register thirty new voters, work a persuasion universe of fifty, and cajole a universe of forty low-propensity voters to cast their ballots. Hey, it suddenly seems doable! You can deliver these votes.

  You’ll need help—and the help is all around you. You will start with names the campaign has from people in your precinct who have already signaled they want to help in the general election. You’ll have volunteer leaders and volunteers from the nominee’s campaign in the Wisconsin primary. You could well be one of them.

  The local Democratic Party will have a list of reliable volunteers. Organizations like NextGen, SwingLeft, and your local union will also have names of people who have worked previously in local efforts and/or signaled their desire to get involved in the general election. The candidate’s campaign will supply contact info on people in the Chippewa Falls precinct who have donated but not volunteered. These are hot leads, and it is up to you or your designated volunteer recruiter to call, text, or email the request that they sign up for volunteer shifts. And/or what other tasks would they like to take on? Do they like to work in groups or alone with their computers? Everyone’s got a role to play.

  And of course, you’ll reach out to your network—all the people you’ve been pestering to register, and your own social network—and build your own core volunteer cadre to supplement the campaign’s lists, and work out from there.

  It will be the campaign’s responsibility, through your field organizer, to ensure that you and your crew have the facts and materials you need—most important, correct and actionable names in the registration and turnout and persuasion universes. What’s “actionable” in this context? Real names of real people with real contact info and real data on where they stand in the election.

  All this then becomes data that needs to be updated in real time as you gather new information: which issues most concern these specific voters; if new voters, will they perhaps need follow-up to support their commitment to turn out, and will they require help getting to the polls? Keeping those records up-to-date is a key job for a volunteer with basic computer skills.

  The office should also supply brochures, window posters, yard signs, door hangers, e-cards for Instagram, whatever else you need to get the job done. If you think another tactic would work with a certain voter but you don’t have what you need, ask for it. If they don’t have it, find or make it yourself.

  Your success—and the joy and satisfaction you get from leadership—will come in part from hitting your numbers in Chippewa Falls, which helps our nominee win Wisconsin, which in turn helps defeat Trump and wins the presidency. But I promise that you will also derive equal joy and satisfaction from the people you work with and meet—the human side of the effort.

  You will become the face of the campaign in Chippewa Falls, even more so than the candidate. For this reason alone, you need to inspire people. Listen to them. Treat them well. Laugh with them. Understand that no two of us are alike, no two volunteers, no two voters. People may sign up to volunteer in the beginning because they are inspired by our candidate, and the stakes in this election are so high. But they will likely keep coming back, and perhaps working even harder than they imagined—because of you.

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  Now what about the 90 percent
of you—give or take—who don’t live in a battleground state? You will have a deep impact nonetheless, in large measure thanks to your social media networks, which don’t recognize state lines and will penetrate deep into every state (the subject of chapter 2). The positive content you share on your social media platforms, and the pushback against the lies about immigration and health care you post, will penetrate deep into every state, including the battlegrounds, reaching swing voters and your compadres whom you have now persuaded to register and vote and have also armed sufficiently to become their own content distributors. You know the drill—but it’s not a drill. It’s the real world.

  So if you live in Wheeling, West Virginia, or Fresno, California, or any of the other states that are probably settled affairs in the electoral college, you should feel that you are playing a helpful and constructive role in the states that are in play. Beyond the winning proposition that is social media, your financial contributions can fuel the campaigns in Wisconsin and Florida (more on that one shortly). And there are of course direct ways to engage in battleground state activity from beyond that state line.

  Your ability to travel to battlegrounds to help out in the closing months and weeks will be dependent on a lot of factors. Do you live close enough to drive or hop on a bus that our nominee’s campaign or a progressive organization is chartering to head across state lines? Can you find the time, given work and family schedules? If you have kids, can you arrange for child care or can you take them with you? It’s a great experience for kids, especially if they are into the election. And when you are knocking on doors, you’ll get a more interested and friendly reception if you are doing so with your ten- or twelve-year-old at your side.

  If you live far enough away that you need to fly or take the train, can you afford the ticket or have the loyalty program points? What about lodging? Do you have friends or family in the area whom you can stay with? I hope that our nominee sets up a program that identifies supporters in battleground states who are willing to have out-of-state volunteers stay with them, defraying the need to pay for a hotel room. Of course this can also be a great way to make a new connection and share stories and motivations about your activism and the election. Only you can answer those questions, but I would suggest that if you have an interest in being in the middle of the action, begin working through those questions now and making a plan to make it work.

  Out-of-state volunteers have a storied history in presidential politics. In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s large family and supporters from Massachusetts fanned out to key primary states and then the battlegrounds in the general election, vouching for his character and leadership and answering voters’ questions directly about their concerns with his age and Catholicism.

  Bill Clinton famously employed the “Arkansas Travelers,” a potent group of friends, family, and supporters to make the case for his candidacy in the primary states and general election, engaging in door-to-door and phone activity, generating helpful local press coverage in those key media markets about why folks from Arkansas felt so strongly about Clinton’s candidacy that they would travel to New Hampshire and Ohio to spread the word.

  George W. Bush had large contingents from the big state of Texas making the case for him in his historically close win over Al Gore in 2000, and helping to drive up Republican turnout in his tough reelection fight four years later.

  In 2008, the Obama campaign used the power of the internet, on full display in presidential politics for the first time, to “scale” a focused effort highlighting the need for supporters to travel to battleground states, recruit volunteers, and/or do what they (or we) could to help with logistics and cost. Buses from the Bay Area of northern California rolled east to Reno, Nevada. Buses from Birmingham, Alabama, traveled down to northern Florida. We tried our best to make sure that when these amazing volunteers who traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles from home to Nevada or Florida or Virginia or Colorado, they were welcomed with open arms.

  Maybe not wined and dined, exactly, but well taken care of. They were expected, and the work they were asked to do was well-organized, smart, and meaningful. We felt so strongly about the value these long-haul travelers could provide our campaign that we pushed all those on our email list to consider signing up to travel. Tens of thousands did, some for a day, some for a month. It was amazing to watch the commitment and energy these amazing citizens brought to the effort.

  One natural question you may have: How useful is it to have some stranger from Los Angeles engaging voters in exurban Wisconsin? Well, of course no two voters are exactly alike, and neither are two volunteers, so it’s difficult to accurately predict how each conversation is going to go, but it can be quite effective with those Democratic voters who may not vote and others heavily negative on Trump who are considering the third-party option.

  Let’s say you and a friend have driven to Philadelphia from Syracuse, New York. You let the campaign know through an online sign-up form that you will be there for the third weekend in October. You are asked to show up at the campaign office on the north side of Philadelphia at ten a.m. on Saturday. You arrive on time and find yourselves in the company of dozens of other volunteers, both local and those from out of state.

  The person in charge—maybe from the campaign, maybe a volunteer leader—explains that the focus for that day is to reach out by door and by phone to a universe of possible voters who the campaign believes are no risk to vote Trump, but a huge risk not to vote at all.

  Maybe they’ve told a campaign volunteer directly that they’re unsure about voting; or the campaign has not been able to confirm that they have pledged to vote; or they have registered for the first time so we have no voting history for them; or they are registered but have not voted in the last couple of elections; or they may have moved and therefore have a new polling location but probably don’t know where it is.

  You and your friend listen to the boss’s introductory explanatory remarks and learn that you will be given a list of voters and a map. These could be downloaded on your phone with a walking route laid out just for you. Just follow the blue line. Here’s hoping the best tech is fully operational during this cycle.

  Let’s say there are twenty voters. The campaign believes these are all voters who support our candidate, but you and your friend have to make sure they materialize in actual votes.

  It’s time to head out.

  A good percentage of the doors you knock on will remain unopened. Of course it is a just a couple of weeks before a historically important election and almost everyone will know what you’re up to and why you’re ringing the doorbell.

  But maybe they’re not home, don’t hear the door, pay no attention to politics, hate politics, aren’t going to open the door for a couple of strangers if this visit is not preceded by a text from someone they know.

  But eight people do open their doors. Eight out of twenty is a good haul. Through these conversations, you’ll get a variety of critical data and have important conversations that you’ll report on. The campaign will take in the new data, and take appropriate action to follow up.

  Let’s say four of the voters say they are definitely planning on voting. At your urging, they share their plan for when they will vote, where, and how they will get to the polls. Great. You can report on them as four votes that the campaign can believe are now in the bank.

  Two of the voters are not sure if they are going to vote. The first voter says something like, “I hate Trump. But getting somebody new in there won’t really change things. I’m busy and really don’t have time for politicians. I doubt I’ll vote.”

  This is your moment! You may decide to ask this potentially crucial voter what issues matter most, then explain our party’s position on those issues, whether it’s taxes or border security or anything else. You’re prepared. You stress the differences between our candidate and Trump. You may say something as simple as, “If you hate Trump, do you rea
lly want to live through another four years of him?”

  More quickly than you might believe in the beginning, you’ll get a feeling for these conversations with your fellow citizens. You’ll know whether it’s best to go on the offense or the defense, or maybe someone just wants to talk about what’s going on in their lives, about how this election will affect it. And you’re prepared to talk with them for as long as it takes—this could be the most important conversation of your outing.

  Let’s assume that your engagement—whether on offense or defense—has an impact and this guy says, “I guess you’re right. I’ll do my best to vote. But I can’t remember where I go to do it.”

  Pennsylvania has not enabled widespread early voting options, so most voters will need to show up at the polling place on Election Day. Boom! You just happen to have the polling location for this precinct right there in the canvassing app on your phone and written on your clipboard.

  “You vote at George Washington Carver High School, down on W. Norris Street. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.”

  “Thanks. I went there. You from around here, by the way? We just all call it Carver.”

  “Nope. I’m from Syracuse, upstate New York. Because New York is definitely going to vote for (ID our candidate, of course), I wanted to help somewhere where it’s a jump ball. Pennsylvania is the main reason Trump is president. He won it last time. We have to make sure he doesn’t win it again. I’ll be thinking of you up in Syracuse on Election Day, hoping you can make it to the polls.”

  And of course you will leave this voter with a card with the polling location. That exchange has a very good chance of sticking. On Election Day maybe it’s raining, traffic is bad coming home from work, this voter needs to run an unexpected errand for a family member, so it will not be our candidate who gets him to the polls. It will be you. He told that woman from—where was it? Syracuse—that he would vote, and he will.