A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by David Plouffe

  ELECTION NIGHT

  The campaign is over, your work is concluded, why do I care where and how you take in the results on the big night? How could this be important for our only subject here—defeating Donald Trump? Well, from my earliest days in politics, I’ve believed there’s a relationship between how you campaign and how you handle election night. You want all the positive energy you can get in the final weeks of the campaign, and now you’re exhausted, but you need to keep it going for six more hours. Maybe that energy mysteriously flows both ways. That’s all I’m saying, even if you’re now picturing me as the guy wearing a tinfoil hat.

  And what has been the source of this energy? People. The campaign has been about your fellow citizens—staffers, volunteers, voters, potential voters, potential supporters—lots of people. For the deeply invested, it has been a rich education in human nature. I strongly suggest you make election night also about people—specifically, the ones you’ve worked with so hard. If you have spent the whole of Election Day driving voters back and forth to the polls, or if you’ve traveled to a battleground state, or you’re working at a phone bank wherever you live, you should strongly consider gathering with your fellow volunteers, whether at a local campaign office, a hotel ballroom where an “official” party is happening, a local bar, or at one of the volunteer’s houses.

  If you haven’t been out volunteering on Election Day, you’d better have a damn good reason—like, a really, really compelling reason—why you couldn’t find at least an hour to make GOTV calls from your home.

  You come from different backgrounds, education, jobs, income, family situations, age, race, genders, sexual orientations, and political volunteering experiences—the ultimate Rainbow Coalition. You have the shared experience of knowing how hard it was to find the time to give to the campaign; the rude people who hung up when you called them; the doors slammed but also the doors opened to wonderful conversation and commitment; the funny stories about the funny people you encountered; the days you thought for sure we were going to win and the days you were convinced of the opposite. But you share one thing in common: making Donald Trump a one-term president is one of the most important desires of your lives. And you have banded together, a disparate group of people becoming a powerfully united citizen army. You deserve to share this night with your campaign compadres who have also laid it all on the line.

  It’s just a tremendous experience to share these moments as the returns roll in, states are called, and the electoral college map fills. When a key state is super close, way too close for comfort, after 80 percent of the vote is in, having some people on hand with whom you can talk this through, who may have found a Twitter feed that analyzes the vote that is left to be counted in that state and suggests we are likely to win—isn’t that better than fretting and rooting around the internet on your own? When the powers that be then call Pennsylvania for our nominee, and it returns to its rightful blue color on the big electoral map, won’t it be more fun and meaningful to hug, high-five, and yell “Yes!” at the top of your lungs with others who feel the same elation?

  When the TV coverage cuts to a quiet and concerned Trump election-night party at one of his god-awful hotel ballrooms after Michigan is called for our nominee, don’t you want to laugh, cheer, and take in that amazingly beautiful scene with others? And for the coup de grâce, Trump’s concession speech, or lack of one?

  If for some reason a gathering of your fellow volunteers isn’t in the cards, think carefully where you want to be, and with whom. Alone? With a group? Small or large? Friends and family? Certainly give this as much thought as how you would plan to watch the Super Bowl or the Oscars. I’d vote for any of the above except being alone. Alone is no good. It’s the wrong energy—completely in defiance of your campaigning life. You’ll want the culmination of all that work to exactly suit your purposes and hopefully create the perfect memory of the night America began to erase the stain of the Trump interregnum.

  If you’re with the family and you have kids who were old enough to be traumatized by Trump’s election and all that has come since, make sure they have some friends with them as well. They’ll give you a furtive hug or a high five, but sharing and celebrating a return to the America they want to grow up in and will soon enough eventually contribute to and lead will be most meaningful with people of their own age, both the memories that are created and the conversations they will have.

  After all, they are the most important factor in this election. We want to win for them and their future above all else. Make sure you include them, talk to them about how they want to witness election night and its history. Hopefully they’ve also been engaged in the election in the ways they can, joining you to volunteer at the local campaign office, traveling to battleground states, following and discussing the election twists and turns with you throughout the summer and fall. Make election night a great capstone for them.

  On the other hand, family can be dicey. I say this from personal experience. With two exceptions, I have spent every election in my working life either in the boiler room, talking to the camera on network coverage, or somewhere out in a state where I’d been working on an election. The first exception was in 2004, John Kerry’s race to send W back to the ranch. This was two months after my son was born, and my wife and I huddled together in Washington after I’d spent much of those two months on the road working on the dozen campaign projects my firm was handling. We were really happy to be settling in for the night together. I was going to be off the road now—the new normal postelection—and then the first exit polls suggested that John Kerry would actually pull off this very close race.

  As is often the case, the exits were off. Way off. So that first family night ended up being a huge bummer.

  The other time, my wife and I invited friends over to our place (in San Francisco, where we now live) on November 8, 2016, and prepared to celebrate the election of our first woman president. Tears flowed instead of champagne, hangdog faces instead of high fives. This is why I say family-oriented election nights haven’t worked out so well for the Morgan-Plouffes. We’ll have to think long and hard about November 3, 2020. We’ll be mixing things up.

  I’ve always been superstitious about elections. David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, and I all wore the same ties on election night 2012 that we wore in 2008; I think I wore the same suit. In 2016, we had ordered food from a BBQ place in San Francisco. I’ve never been back there again, and I never will, and I’ll never have anything even related to barbecue on any election night ever again. If you are the least bit superstitious, please don’t do anything in 2020 that you did the night Trump won. Do the opposite. What’s the opposite of barbecue? That’s one of the issues I’ll be determining in the months ahead.

  You don’t think any of this could possibly matter? My answer: what if you’re wrong? Leave no stone unturned. That has been the ruling mantra in your campaigning life for a long time. Carry it forward one more night. Find a superstition and indulge it. Humor me, if nothing else. I certainly will need all the good vibes possible on November 3.

  * * *

  —

  Next question: How do you want to follow the results? There are so many more options than there used to be—the internet, apps, social media, and probably newer categories I’ve never heard of. What do you watch out for? How do you handle expectations? How have you developed those expectations over the preceding weeks? You’ll have the polls, what the predictive modeling experts are saying, your own gut. Healthiest to kind of ignore it all and assume the odds are 50-50. This approach should keep you working hard and best prepared for any outcome on election night.

  I grew up watching the results come in on network television, and this is still how I envision election night. It’s how the majority of Americans spend the evening. Sure, the commentators can be annoying, and they never seem to remember basic things (early Virginia results will skew heavily Republican, for example), but they�
�re still what counts for most people. Even for us with both Obama campaigns, even though we knew pretty early, based on our internal evaluation of the actual vote count, that we had won both elections, it wasn’t quite “real” until the networks made it official and declared Barack Obama the president-elect and then declared his reelection as president.

  In our media-soaked environment, the standing of the networks is necessarily diminished, but their calls in a presidential election are still a defining moment in our shared American experience. Even the one time they got it wrong, in 2000.

  If the networks’ old-fashioned election-night coverage is your jam, which one do you want to watch? A lot can factor into that decision—preference for the anchors’ and analysts’ talent, the graphics, maybe even the music (on this last count I’m partial to NBC’s accompaniment and hope they don’t change it for 2020). Some people like to flip around among the stations. Be my guest, but there is something about turning on the set at 7 or 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time and keeping it on the same station all the way until the bitter end. This is a calmer experience and you can follow consistent commentary about the status of the returns, trends in battleground states, analysis of the exit polls. The one exception to staying on one network the entire night is if our nominee is declared the winner, then I’d suggest dropping whatever other station you are watching and flip over to Fox. Watching them deal with declaring that their central product and moneymaker has lost the White House may, by itself, make all the hard work you put in during the election worth it.

  If the networks are not your jam, if you’re interested in looking at the returns in more detail than they can offer on the air, many news sites such as nytimes.com, cnn .com, and washingtonpost.com give you both the broad-brush overview and maps that link all the way “down” to the county level. This is important information to augment the networks’ data that, for example, 50 percent of the precincts have reported in a given state. Which precincts?! This makes all the difference. Perhaps that 50 percent is a fairly representative sampling in terms of demographics and past voting results—a solid mixture of traditionally blue, red, and purple precincts—and therefore is a good clue about the direction the election is taking in the state.

  But often the outstanding precincts skew one way or the other.

  I noted previously that the early Virginia results will skew heavily Republican, as the more rural parts of the state post results before now heavily Democratic northern Virginia. The same discrepancy often happens in Ohio. In those two states, our nominee’s standing will strengthen considerably as the rest of the precincts report. The opposite may be the case in Pennsylvania, where it’s the smaller, redder counties that come in later. Then of course there is Florida, which always seems to be close from the moment that first results are posted to the bitter end.

  A combination of sources works well. Perhaps you prefer having the analysis and map clicking done for you by skilled analysts like John King on CNN or Chuck Todd on NBC. But if you live in a key battleground state or simply want to follow them closely, I highly recommend having a computer or iPad open so you can scroll the site of your choosing. It’s a more active and engaged way to watch the numbers roll in that will determine both our next president and our future.

  Many of you will spend time on sites with data experts such as Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, Nate Cohn with the New York Times’s The Upshot, or Dave Wasserman with the Cook Political Report. In the weeks leading up to the election, these sources will average all the polls in the battleground states as well as factoring in other historical election data and offer a new prediction each day for the percentage chance each candidate has to win each state and the overall election. Those sites are fun, and on average, they are more right than wrong but of course far from perfect. If you are not careful, they can also drive you crazy, if not induce a state of outright paralysis. Check one or more once a day, if you must, but don’t refresh every fifteen minutes and certainly don’t waste precious time fretting or bed-wetting. Stay focused on the task at hand.

  Some of you will remember the New York Times election meter from 2016, part of The Upshot coverage. Before the returns started coming in on election night, based on all the polls and other data, the needle registered a more than 80 percent likelihood that Clinton would win the presidency. As actual state returns started to come in, the needle began to oh so slowly drift to the right, the Florida numbers pushed the needle farther, and then as we started to get enough raw vote from Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, Clinton became the smallest of favorites. At some point, the needle favored Trump slightly, for the first time. It was like watching the proverbial car crash in slow motion.

  If you were following that needle, that was a moment you will not soon forget. And then the needle kept slowly but apparently inexorably moving into the red, favoring Trump more and more strongly. Clinton’s path to victory was narrowing precipitously.

  That needle captured the election-night emotions perfectly: early confidence . . . a little unease . . . a little more unease . . . not going to be a blowout . . . but she’ll still win . . . the terrible realization that it’s now a jump ball . . . followed too quickly by the horror of understanding it would now take a miracle to keep Trump out of the White House. Then the needle was at 100 percent, and it was accurate. Donald Trump would be our next president.

  For the congressional elections in 2018, the needle was accurate again on many races and overall House and Senate control. It will probably be pretty accurate in 2020 too, but I would not recommend staring straight at it for five or six hours. Include the needle as part of your potpourri of election-night inputs. Mix up your sensory inputs and sources of information.

  On the social media front, there are an infinite number of choices, folks who will be interpreting the results in real time, and some of these sources actually know what they’re writing about. Jon Ralston, @ralstonreports, is a journalist in Nevada who knows the numbers in his state cold. Steve Schale, @steveschale, in Florida helped Obama win the state twice but looks at the numbers in a clinically nonpartisan way as they come in. In each state, there will be local political science professors, journalists, and operatives who will add experience, context, and value to your election night.

  * * *

  —

  You have probably noted that I’ve emphasized the positive in this little chapter, even though we all know it’s quite possible that the incumbent could win. If we don’t get right all that each of us can do, he probably will. This possibility has been my entire emphasis for the preceding pages. Election night is fun to think about—my images of the celebration are blissful, I can tell you—and I do believe that the positive-energy circuits between that night and the campaign can work in our favor—but what I really believe is that now it’s time to set the daydreams aside and get back to work.

  Election Day will be here before you know it—there’s literally not a day—or hour—to waste.

  Let’s go win this thing.

  Acknowledgments

  When I first raised writing this book, and then added a young reader’s version to the mix, my family did not blink. They were all in, enthusiastically, and gave great ideas and advice. That kept me motivated to push through and try and do my best work, but most importantly to try and make a meaningful difference, which was and is our North Star.

  I hope we have done that with this book, but even more important than that to me is that Olivia, Everett, and Vivian are proud of it and that as a family we live out the ideas and lessons laid out here in 2020 and beyond.

  When I first broached the idea of this book with David Larabell, my agent at CAA, his instinct was clear and true—if at all possible I should work with Wendy Wolf and Viking, who published my first book more than ten years ago. Don’t talk to anyone else, this would be the right home for Citizen’s Guide.

  He was right and once again I was reminded of Wendy’s cl
arity, firmness (even when not entirely welcomed at first), judgment, loyalty, and belief in her authors and their projects.

  So thanks to Wendy, and Mike Bryan, who had some great thoughts on content and structure that are reflected in the final product.

  Thanks to the whole team at Viking, from the editors to the marketing and PR whizzes and all the staff who made this book a reality.

  This book is for and inspired by the millions and millions of Americans who fight for change and progress, in ways large and small, each and every day. You give me hope on the darkest days and confidence that, as Dr King said, The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

  About the Author

  David Plouffe served as the campaign manager for Barack Obama's primary and general election victories in 2008 and later joined the White House as a Senior Advisor, with responsibility for his re-election victory in 2012. He was previously a senior executive at Uber and currently leads policy and advocacy efforts at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. He lives in San Francisco, CA.

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