A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by David Plouffe

  And Generation Z? Forget about it. Standing in a line even four deep is too inefficient for many of them. They’re going to order ahead so their mobile order is ready at the counter—warm, paid for, and disposable. A busy Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee has more than one designated employee working the mobile ordering line to keep things moving in the morning.

  I go on at some length about this speed thing because I’m convinced it’s very important. The tools we all need to make the case for our candidate must above all else be as easy and fast to use as picking up your latte, ordering the Uber, shopping on Amazon, or booking a room or home on Airbnb. People who are busy helping out the campaign between all the other pieces of their lives will not expect—or accept—a jankier experience or interaction with our nominee’s website and apps than they get from the commercial sites they visit all day, every day. If you are finding that, don’t be shy about pointing it out, and better yet, suggesting ideas for improvement. We won’t win this election by ignoring areas for improvement that are hiding in plain sight.

  It’s clear by now that I hope you will be charging ahead on your own—don’t wait for the campaign—making the positive case, putting out the substantive arguments for our candidate and against Trump, punching back against the lies and Infowars crazy-town stuff with your own rebuttals. Of course this will be incredibly effective. But not everyone will have the time, the desire, or the confidence to do so. Their needs must be addressed. Here’s an idea: make it your job to circulate a weekly list of new links, new articles, and new arguments within your volunteer circle. Then they can follow suit.

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  So the first requirement: speed. The next requirement: accuracy.

  I’m speaking now primarily about the various kinds of data and lists the campaign asks you to work with. All of it must be up-to-date and ready for action. Whether you are working from home, downloading a list of names and numbers of registration targets you are going to call in Florida; or have traveled to Michigan to knock on doors to get out the vote; or are sitting in a phone bank in Biloxi on Election Day, dialing registered voters in Philadelphia who have not yet voted—you want all that information, usually provided by the campaign, to be as deadly accurate as possible. We can’t expect perfection—voters change their minds, and there can be data-entry errors—but perfection should be the aspiration.

  If you are calling a citizen and asking her to register to vote in Miami—and she registered two weeks ago, that’s a waste of your time, her time, and the campaign’s resources. If you are canvassing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in October and two consecutive voters say they are voting for our nominee—and they told someone else from the campaign last week—it’s another waste of everyone’s time, and you may ultimately not have much of it to knock on the doors of two voters farther down the list who really are undecided. And we may have tested the patience of those two voters. Man, you guys are dropping the ball! This is not what we want them to be thinking.

  If you call a voter in West Philadelphia on Election Day, start your pitch, and he says with annoyance, “You’re the second person who’s called. I voted at 8:30 am this morning!,” all you can do is thank him profusely, but it’s still a waste of time on both ends. But he did vote, so what’s the harm? Well, you made that call instead of another one, and it’s a likely sign that the lists, farmed out to people throughout the country from West Philly, have other errors in them too.

  Nothing is more dispiriting for everyone—campaign staffers and volunteers—than when a group of canvassers returns to the local field office exhausted after hours out knocking doors—that’s good—but also annoyed because the voter data was inaccurate. It’s hard enough to find your time to donate in the first place. If you feel it was then a waste of time—you were talking to the wrong voters about the wrong issues and no one pays attention to what you have learned when you return to headquarters—it’s fair to expect that you may not come back.

  The campaign should view its voter data first and foremost through how it will affect the experience their hardworking volunteers are going to have. Sending a GOTV mailer piece to a voter who already voted early, or delivering a “persuasion ad” on health care (an ad directed at someone who still needs persuasion) to a voter who wears a MAGA cap is a waste of some money. But what is far more precious is your time. The campaign simply can’t trade in incorrect and out-of-date information.

  This standard must also apply to all the independent groups doing critical voter contact as well. Whether it’s Indivisible, NARAL, UFCW, or the Association of Flight Attendants, you don’t want your own members or those volunteering with your organization engaging voters based on dated information. There are technical fixes for all these problems, and you will have workers who can implement them, but you have to know about these problems in the first place. You need good feedback from your members. In fact, encourage it. Tell your volunteers you don’t just invite but welcome examples of bad data.

  All of these groups should be working together to pool their data and update the information collectively and in real time. Sounds utopian, I know, but it’s totally feasible technically. We have these resources. Everyone wants to send Donald Trump packing, so let’s get it done.

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  So we have the fast and accurate requirements for information, and I would add to that a third one: it also needs to be as detailed as possible.

  Let’s say our canvasser in Grand Rapids talks to a voter on the “undecided” list who truly is undecided and persuadable. She tells our canvasser she has not made up her mind. She’s wrestling with Trump’s character, and his tax cuts just made the rich richer, she knows this, but she’s also concerned our nominee will be bad for the small business where she works.

  We hope our canvasser is prepared with an effective pitch about all the ways our candidate will help small businesses; we hope the canvasser seals the deal, but that’s hard sometimes. Maybe the canvasser is not all that prepared on the issue. Either way, the next step is critical: the canvasser needs to capture the details of the exchange and feed them into the voter database as explanatory notes. Back at the office, someone will key in this feedback and that voter will start seeing ads about our candidate’s plan to help small business in her mailbox and on her phone.

  But you, the volunteer, can also zero in on this voter. Get into her hands more information on what seems to be her key concern. Who should do this? Your friend who runs a small business sounds like a good idea. Have her write a note or send an email to personally address the issue from the small-business owner’s perspective.

  This mechanism for following up should be SOP, but it won’t happen without the richness of those explanatory notes. It’s tragic if we lose this voter because no one takes the time or has the technical means to put on the electronic record the incredibly valuable and specific information about this torn battleground voter, so the campaign never finds out what would get her off the fence and into our corral.

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  How do the volunteers access the voter data? Through the electronic tools provided by either the campaign or one of the progressive organizations. By definition, just about, the tools delivering it are as important as the data. In the old days we used mimeograph machines, stuffed envelopes, and dialed phones. Ideal today—mandatory, I’d say—is a single app that works seamlessly on the smartphone, tablet, laptop, or big-screen office computer. It can be used by anyone authorized to interact with voters on behalf of the candidates. Download a list of target voters onto your phone when you’ve created a free hour in your life. When you auto dial a given voter, the correct script to use pops up on the screen. Maybe your exchange concerns registration, or follow-up on an issue involving the voter (he’s thinking third party), or follow-up concerning a key issue of concern reported by a canvasser three days ago (the “small businesses” voter) issue. Whatever
it is, the app has a one-stop link for recording the important and relevant information from the conversation, which is then fed back into the campaign’s servers.

  Tools, data, and support should be at your fingertips when you are canvassing. If Waze can direct you through traffic jams in Los Angeles and El Paso, surely our candidate’s campaign can provide equally accurate technology that directs canvassers on a walking route, hitting the target doors, skipping the others, feeding you the pertinent information about this house call as you walk up the sidewalk, then recording your results instantaneously and easily as you walk back down the sidewalk. What a huge leap in efficiency and accuracy from the old ways—a significant motivation for the digital natives to return again and again.

  I know—some volunteers will want to work with a more traditionally analog interface, making their phone calls from paper lists or from names and numbers on their laptops, or canvassing off printed maps and with paper voter lists. This will be less efficient on the back end, but that’s okay. I hope our nominee enables volunteers in this way too. This election will likely be incredibly close. Can the campaign afford to turn away anyone’s offer of help? No. It should supply them with whatever material they feel comfortable with. Plus, a printed map never crashes or runs out of battery life! We have to meet volunteers—young or old, hip or vintage—where they are, just as we seek to do with important voter groups.

  Only a firm and unshakable commitment to funding the field operation will pull this off. Which may seem obvious, but the campaign’s commitment to you, the volunteer, will be tested from day one. There is always pressure from HQ to underfund the grass roots in order to feed the media budget. This is true in just about every campaign, large and small.

  But the decision about funding the airwaves or the ground game is a decidedly false choice, just as the choice between focusing on “persuasion” voter targets or turning out the vote in the Democratic base is also false. Set your goals, then allocate your resources, not the other way around—that’s the better approach, for both political campaigns and businesses. A business wants new customers, wants to retain old customers, wants to disrupt itself (R&D), wants a stable workforce, wants to make money. Based on these basic elements, funding choices have to be made, and those choices reflect the company’s highest priorities at any given time. Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, and many other internet start-ups famously put the emphasis on bringing in new customers. Thanks to venture capital, they didn’t need to worry about actually making money. That could come later. Sometimes, much later.

  A political campaign does not have the luxury of playing that long game, calibrating and adjusting all the angles over many years. It has a very short time period in which to maximize performance and win an election. In the discussion of the battleground states, I took us into the sausage factory to see how campaigns make the crucial decisions, how the “win numbers” are developed, how resources will be allocated among the various expense categories. One of those categories is the volunteers’ grassroots ground game. The budget for each potential battleground is unique, and the percentage allocation formula for all states won’t work because expenses vary by category from state to state. Obvious example: overhead costs and media buys will all cost more in Florida than in Michigan.

  After that background, this point: far too many campaigns want to think the grassroots work, the campaign’s field operation, can be done on the cheap. Even a well-funded campaign, even a well-funded presidential campaign will often try cannibalizing the field operation money in order to beef up the advertising budget to reach swing voters. This campaign may hire fewer paid campaign field organizers than they originally planned, meaning each organizer is responsible for a greater area as measured by geography and voters. This would mean that you, a volunteer leader, will have less access to your organizer partner, whose attention and workload may be spread too thin, making your job harder and making it more difficult for the campaign to reach its organizational goals in your area.

  Skimping on the budget may mean the campaign will pay to open fewer offices. Fewer everything—yard signs, literature, pizza. You name it. Everything gets squeezed. Potential volunteers will have to travel a longer distance to reach a local field office, providing a disincentive to volunteer at all. Fewer volunteers means fewer voter contacts, which means you may end up with fewer new registrants, fewer persuadable voters converted at the doors and on the phones, and ultimately, fewer voters who turn out on Election Day.

  To me, what’s crazy about this skimping—and should be frustrating to you should it happen in your locale—is that the decision to skimp does not result from a debate about the number of votes the grassroots field operation needs to produce to get to the win numbers in the state, the region, the precinct. That’s settled. No, the decision comes all too often from a belief the one element the campaign can risk starving is the ground game. The belief rests partly on the fact that it’s hard to measure what your opponent is spending on the ground. Meanwhile, both sides’ expenditures on TV, radio, and digital are public. If the campaign is being outspent in those mediums, especially if it’s getting outspent heavily, or if it believes that turning the tables and outspending the opponent on the media front will gain a decisive advantage, it becomes incredibly hard to maintain discipline and stick to the original plan, keeping the grassroots funding wholly in place. Great will be the temptation to buy one more ad rather than support one more volunteer, to spend more on screens, less on screen doors.

  We call that robbing Peter to pay Paul. Perhaps the ads do gin up some additional “persuasion” targets who may pay dividends on Election Day, no guarantees, but likely more votes are lost by not having the resources in place to execute the registration and turnout strategy fully.

  Such was the situation for Team Obama in 2012, when unlike in the 2008 race against John McCain, we were getting badly outspent by the Romney campaign over the summer as Romney exited the primaries and built out for the general. Don’t get me wrong. Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we were raising funds effectively, and at the end of the campaign would reach our finance goals, but sometimes you just get outspent no matter how well you do. The culprit was mainly the “outside game,” those supposedly independent efforts supporting the candidates. The Republican super PACs were flooding the airwaves and computers with negative ads, while our equivalent outside resources were anemic and not closing the gap. Many Democratic donors—understandably but frustratingly, in my view—had and still do have a revulsion toward funding super PACs. They consider it too “dirty,” a game played by Karl Rove, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers, not by clean and pristine progressive donors.

  There was no magic $100 million sitting around to solve our problem that summer. In some markets, including Orlando and Des Moines, we were getting outspent two to one, which made a lot of us more than just a little uncomfortable.

  Our staff and consultants on the creative and paid media side of the house were treating this as a DEFCON 1 alert. In the absence of the magic pot of gold, or even just a plain vanilla surplus, they demanded that we raid the field budget so we could survive the advertising onslaught. This painful situation created one of the most important calls of the campaign, and the one I’m probably proudest of.

  It was the first Saturday in September and I was in Iowa with President Obama, who was speaking on a farm in Dallas County, surrounded by hay bales. I hopped on a conference call with Jim Messina, our campaign manager in 2012, and David Axelrod, my partner in crime and our senior strategist. We had to make a decision—do we stay the course, or do we cut back the field budget, especially in expensive states like Florida, Ohio, and Virginia?

  It’s no fun getting outspent by your competition in marketing and advertising dollars, whether you are marketing a candidate or a car service or a face cream. You know your opponents are reaching people critical to your success with more messages, and you have to assume, smart messages. It hur
ts. But for Messina, Axelrod, and me, it came down to two things—the numbers and our Obama campaign four years earlier. In Florida, as explained earlier, registering tens of thousands of voters in Miami-Dade County was critical to having any prayer of winning the state. In exurban and suburban Ohio, we had to have door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor, almost-around-the-clock contact with persuadable voters. In the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, we needed the ultimate turnout to ensure a win there. And we knew from 2008 that none of this would happen if we didn’t believe in the power of the grass roots—and not just belief but backup for that belief by funding it fully. So we decided to accept getting outspent in media, at least for that period, and take our chances with our volunteer troops on the ground.

  After Obama finished speaking and shaking hands and doling out hugs and high fives to the Iowans in attendance, he made his way to “the Beast,” as the presidential limo is called by the Secret Service. We were on our way to . . . somewhere. The roadshow becomes a blur. I had walked over to the limo, anticipating his arrival, but was still on the call. He saw me on the phone, pacing around and looking intense, as he shook the last few hands of the local volunteers who had helped out at this event. I was pretty much always on the phone, but when I finally jumped in beside him, he asked sardonically, “Were you dealing with a real problem or talking Philly sports with someone?”

  Obama did not have much interest in the minutiae of campaign budgeting decisions, but given what I thought was the import of our situations and the decision we had to make, I filled him in.

  He asked, “How long was your call?”

  “About forty-five minutes.”

  “Well, that’s about forty-four minutes longer than it had to be. We’re here because of the grass roots and will be reelected because of the grass roots, so don’t mess with that.”