by Sean Spicer
Romney came into the 2012 convention dead broke (to steal a Hillary Clinton phrase) because, prior to becoming the official nominee, he could not legally tap funds he had raised for the general election. Unbeknownst to many, we actually made it possible for Romney to appear on the first night of convention just to give him a forty-eight-hour advantage.
When Reince announced his intention to move up the primary, many prominent, Democrat political operatives mocked the action as being short-sighted. Ironically, not too long afterward, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) followed our lead. No one reform was going to win us a national election, but combined they gave us an edge.
At the beginning of the 2016 presidential election, one of our first and most urgent tasks was addressing the dysfunction we had all seen in the 2012 debates that dragged on for too long, exhausting the candidates and draining voter interest.
We came up with a new plan to streamline the debate process, and I outlined it in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. There was a debate about the debates, I wrote, because the 2012 debate schedule had kept candidates off the campaign trail, robbing them of time they wanted to spend meeting voters and listening to their concerns. There was also, I noted, “frustration about debate hosts and moderators, some of whom had concocted bizarre and irrelevant questions.” This was a reference not just to George Stephanopoulos’s question from the previous cycle, but also to Candy Crowley’s during the general election. Candy had interjected to rebut Governor Romney’s assertion that President Obama had failed to call the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi “an act of terror.” President Obama, basking in her apparent support, treated her as his de facto debate partner and said, “Can you say that a little louder, Candy?”5 Romney later told radio host Hugh Hewitt:
Well, I don’t think it’s the role of the moderator in a debate to insert themselves into the debate and to declare a winner or a loser on a particular point. And I must admit that at that stage, I was getting a little upset at Candy, because in a prior setting where I was to have had the last word, she decided that Barack Obama was to get the last word despite the rules that we had.
So she obviously thought it was her job to play a more active role in the debate than was agreed upon by the two candidates, and I thought her jumping into the interaction I was having with the president was also a mistake on her part, and one I would have preferred to carry out between the two of us, because I was prepared to go after him for misrepresenting to the American people that the nature of the attack.6
At the RNC, we wanted fewer and fairer debates, but it wasn’t entirely up to the RNC to decide. The idea that the two parties had zero role in the debates that would decide their nominee was malpractice. The media should be able to ask questions of our candidates, but we also should ensure that issues important to primary and caucus voters be addressed and not outsourced to the mainstream media. Televised debates constitute free air time for candidates and are regulated by the Federal Election Commission. Federal election law holds that only a 501(c)(3) organization or media outlet can stage debates, determining their criteria and format. If we organized a debate, the Federal Election Commission could consider it a financial contribution to the participating campaigns.
But the RNC was not powerless—and should never act like it is powerless. We set out to do four things.
First, we would give our candidates an advance schedule instead of forcing them to continually adjust their campaigns for pop-up debates. We accomplished this with a schedule that included one debate a month starting in August 2015 and then two a month beginning in 2016. There would ultimately be twelve debates. Never again would we have one debate on a Saturday and another on a Sunday, as had been the case in the previous election cycle.
Second, we wanted to lessen the stranglehold of liberal, mainstream media by bringing diverse voices to the debates, including conservative media outlets like Salem Radio, Fox News, and the Washington Times. This would not only add balance, it would also ensure that the issues of primary interest to many Republican voters would be addressed on a large stage.
Third, we wanted more geographic diversity with each debate held in a different part of the country to bring more people closer to the process. It may not be as convenient for the media to leave the coastal power centers and head to “fly-over states,” but we felt it was important to include the middle of the country and connect with voters there, too.
Finally, we recognized that even a big stage wasn’t large enough for all of the Republican candidates to appear at once. With so many major candidates running, the debates would have to be tiered with an objective standard to determine who fell into the upper or lower tier (the first or second round of a debate). Some argued that preference should be given to candidates who were currently holding elective office. In retrospect, that would have left out our eventual nominee and the future president of the United States. While there was no perfect answer, we ultimately found the fairest solution by dividing candidates into tiers based on their standing in the national polls. The one thing we never imagined was that we would have seventeen well-qualified candidates running at once. And remember—those are just the seventeen you’ve heard of. There were more than one hundred candidates on the New Hampshire ballot that November.
Publishing our debate plan in the Wall Street Journal and getting early buy-in from the candidates was itself a major part of our strategy—establishing ground rules right away. Another part of our strategy was requiring that debates be “sanctioned” by the RNC. If a major media organization announced it was going to have an unsanctioned debate anyway, and our candidates said “yes,” there was nothing we could do about it. To give our plan teeth, we warned candidates that appearing in unsanctioned debates would disqualify them from sanctioned debates.
We were essentially drawing a line in the sand and daring candidates to step over it.
One of my personal goals, and greatest regrets since it never materialized, was to create a debate that consisted entirely of conservative media, was available to be streamed on the internet, was possible for all to carry, and had no dedicated network host. The balancing act of getting conservative media outlets to pay for such a debate and getting candidates to buy-in made reaching this goal impossible.
As neutral as we were, we couldn’t help but wonder: would it be Bush? Rubio? Walker? Cruz?
Few said Trump. When Donald Trump burst on the scene, taking that famous ride down the escalator at Trump Tower, he was in the single digits. He had no real campaign infrastructure. He’d never run for any political office of any kind. Some overheated commentators even suggested he was a Hillary campaign plant, meant to disrupt the Republican primaries. But from the start, we at the RNC recognized that he had a following. Our concern was that if he lost in the primary, he’d complain that he had been robbed and finance his own third-party bid, splitting the Republican vote the way Ross Perot did against George H. W. Bush in 1992, which helped put Bill Clinton in the White House.
And this was not just a hypothetical. In the Fox News debate in Cleveland in August 2015, moderator Bret Baier posed the question we all wanted answered.
BRET BAIER: Is there anyone on stage—can I see hands?—who is unwilling tonight to pledge your support to the eventual nominee of the Republican Party and pledge not to run an independent campaign against that person?
Nine of the ten candidates in attendance that night stood still as stone. Donald Trump thrust his hand up into the air.
BRET BAIER: Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump, to be clear, you’re standing on a Republican—
DONALD TRUMP: I fully understand . . . .
BRET BAIER: And the experts say an independent run would almost certainly hand the race over to Democrats and likely another Clinton. You can’t say tonight that you can make that pledge?
DONALD TRUMP: I cannot say . . . .I am discussing it with everybody. But I am talking about a lot of leverage.7
It was easy enough to say that Tru
mp wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. But there was more at work here. Trump was under pressure from parts of his base. Taking the pledge was seen as a betrayal by some of the more ideological factions of the Republican Party. “The GOP has not been loyal to members of its own party during previous election cycles,” Katrina Pierson, then a spokeswoman for the Tea Party Leadership Fund, told CNN. “I can’t see any reason why he would give up that leverage considering a lot of his supporters like the idea that he’s running against the establishment.”8
Fortunately for the RNC—and ultimately for Donald Trump himself—we already had two reasons for him to sign the pledge. First, Donald Trump was able to run a skeleton campaign, lightly staffed and with very little advertising, because he knew that if he won the nomination, he’d be able to rely on the backbone of the RNC. Second, we had the data.
Trump’s admission that he might not stay in the party if he wasn’t the nominee presented the RNC with a major problem. Almost the entire Republican field was using RNC data and had signed a pledge to support whoever became the nominee. The RNC has comprehensive voter data going back to 1992. That data was available to all candidates who signed the pledge. As long as Donald Trump kept his options open, his competitors had an advantage he lacked. The other candidates clearly did not want anyone to have access to data that might advance the candidacy of anyone but the Republican nominee.
I explained this to Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski: if you want the same data the others are using, you’ve got to sign the pledge. When Corey protested that this was unfair, I pointed out that it would be unfair for an independent candidate to exploit resources developed and paid for by Republicans for a Republican nominee.
Right before Labor Day, I was exhausted and went to Dewey Beach in Delaware to take a few days off. I spent my entire “vacation” walking up and down the surf line on my phone, handling conference calls between Reince and Corey. Yes, we were told, Mr. Trump is going to sign the pledge. Next call: No, he cannot. Next call: Yes, we’re on. In my dealings with Corey, I found him to be unwaveringly wavering.
On the other hand, Hope Hicks, who served as Trump’s lead on media affairs, was steady, calm, and impressively professional during her debut in national politics. She possessed a poise that complemented another invaluable asset—she was a loyalist and had worked for Donald Trump before he was a candidate. She believed in her boss and his message, and, most importantly of all, he trusted her.
By early September, Donald Trump had decided he wanted to sign the pledge. To ratify the deal, Reince and I met with him at his twenty-sixth-floor office at Trump Tower. Corey and Hope were standing by. Reince presented two copies of the pledge and Trump immediately signed them.
“So, let’s go down and show this to the press,” Donald Trump said.
Reince immediately stared at me while I stared at Corey.
Corey and I had previously agreed that there would be no press conference.
Trump turned to Corey and Hope and said, “What do you think?”
Corey had an instant change of heart. They both nodded and responded, “Great idea.”
The other candidates had signed the pledge without fanfare and were tired of being asked if Trump would sign. Trump’s refusal had also started to cost the RNC money. Republican donors were being asked to help fund a costly data program, and one of the candidates was not pledging to stay in the party.
I knew that a press conference between Trump and Reince would elevate the displeasure of the other campaigns into high orbit.
Reince and I told Trump why we thought a joint press conference was a bad idea—the RNC couldn’t look like it was taking the side of one campaign over another. He understood, and as we left, he went down to the lobby and made the announcement himself.
“The RNC has been absolutely terrific over the last two-month period, and as you know, that’s what I’ve wanted,”9 Donald Trump said, holding up his signed pledge.
In the most heated moments of the primary in March, Donald Trump seemed ready to renege, but he never did. He went on Morning Joe on MSNBC at a time when Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski had become his on-air confessors. Trump was being pummeled by negative ads from his opponents, political action committees, as well as prominent Republicans like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney.
Donald Trump could hardly believe such hostility. “I brought in millions and millions of people to the Republican Party, and they’re going to throw those people away,” Trump said. “And I-I’ll be honest, Joe, whether I ran as an independent or not, those people will never go out and vote” for another Republican candidate.10 And by then, what Donald Trump said was undeniably true. How he got there was one of the most amazing ascensions in the history of politics.
Like everyone else, I was mesmerized, perplexed, and astonished by the 2016 Republican primary debates. Donald Trump was the center of every single debate, the sun around which all planets orbited.
Trump dominated the debates by making one unorthodox move after another. He voiced what many were thinking but didn’t dare say, calling the Iraq War “a big, fat mistake.” He denounced the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact as “a horrible deal.” He denounced the lack of enforcement of America’s immigration laws and demanded the construction of a wall along our southern border.
Donald Trump recognized the economic stresses between Main Street and Wall Street, and his message was directed not at the titans of finance but at workers and mom-and-pop businesses. While Wall Streeters profited from corporations that achieved higher valuations by shedding unnecessary workers, many Main Streeters had family members who had been laid off from manufacturing jobs or had their jobs outsourced overseas. Trump appealed to them, in large part because he made a case for “fair trade” that few other Republicans did. Wealthy executives had long funded campaigns extolling the benefits of free trade. As one of the spokesmen, I had seen firsthand at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative how Republicans sometimes glossed over the realities of trade. Trump indirectly posed the question that if free trade was such a wonderful, conservative thing, why was it supported by the Clintons and Barack Obama, and why weren’t its benefits felt by all Americans beyond the single measure of lower consumer prices? Putting America first, in Trump’s formulation, meant putting American jobs ahead of international economic efficiency—and many voters thought he had a point, which they listened to because many Americans were hurting financially. They wanted someone to hear them. And they wanted relief.
Trump was disruptive. Everyone else played by an old set of campaign rules and sounded like yesterday’s candidates compared to the dynamic, dramatic, unscripted businessman. He was a master of branding and psyched out his opponents by defining them with nicknames that stuck. Jeb Bush became “low-energy Jeb.” Marco Rubio was cut down with “Little Marco.” Ted Cruz’s turned into “Lyin’ Ted.” And Rand Paul’s eccentricities became “Truly Weird.” Trump would later, and most effectively, slap a moniker on his general-election opponent, “Crooked Hillary.” To the pundits, this all seemed like a joke, typical of a candidate they thought was unseemly and unserious; but to Trump’s opponents, the nicknames were like caps they couldn’t shake off.
I am often asked if Donald Trump permanently changed campaigning. The answer is yes, but only up to a point. I don’t think we will ever again see a candidate like Donald Trump. His high-wire act is one that few could ever follow. He is a unicorn, riding a unicorn over a rainbow. His verbal bluntness involves risks that few candidates would dare take. His ability to pivot from a seemingly career-ending moment to a furious assault on his opponents is a talent few politicians can muster.
While the public saw the candidates sparring in front of the cameras in the primaries, the RNC communications team reinvented how we supported them behind the scenes. For decades, candidates had “spin rooms” where the campaign communications directors acted as post-debate analysts to deliver their message to the press.
Inste
ad of that outdated model, the RNC communications team looked for new ways to help the candidates communicate their messages and add their own “spin” after a debate. I had established a partnership with Google so that, through the technological assistance of Google Trends and Google Analytics, we could give reporters instant data on audience reactions to debates, instant fact-checking, and instant access to movements in the polls.
Since 2014, part of my job had been making sure the RNC debates went smoothly. The first two debates—the Fox News debate in Cleveland, Ohio, on August 6, 2015, and the CNN debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, on September 16, 2015—both went according to plan. Then came the CNBC debate at the Coors Events Center on the campus of the University of Colorado on October 28, 2015. From the start, some candidates grumbled about doing a debate at a university given the anti-conservative slant present on many college campuses. I reminded them, though, that this would be the first debate televised by a business network, surely a comfortable venue for Republicans.
I would come to regret this.
First, CNBC pulled a fast one and informed us they were going to have a live Twitter feed crawl across the bottom of the screen, adding a layer of interpretation to what the candidates had just said. I told them this was a last-minute surprise and the candidates would not like it. CNBC didn’t care. Worse, CNBC angered the candidates by refusing to allow opening and closing remarks. They did agree to give the candidates an open-ended question at the beginning, but they ultimately reneged on that too, opening with pointed questions. As CNBC changed the rules, I threatened to pull our candidates out by not sanctioning the debate, but our candidates undercut any leverage I had with CNBC by saying they would turn up anyway.