by Rick Wilson
“Win the Trump primary” has become a common term of art, with the wholehearted belief that Donald Trump’s hold over the base is not simply a factor in elections from U.S. Senate to the local Mosquito Control Board, but the factor. Campaigns pandering for the love of the Trump base (and in some cases, Trump himself) may feel narrow and tone-deaf, but look at any primary election on the GOP side of the ledger in 2017 and early 2018 and you’ll find candidates working diligently to out-Trump Trump.
While imitation of Trump is the stupidest form of political flattery, the plague of Trump-like candidates racing toward their own doom keeps growing. Republican primaries have become contests for the Darwin Awards, a political version of hold-my-beer-watch-this bubba-ism.
In their brave, stupid new world, it’s not enough to build the Wall; they want a 3,000-mile lava moat with robot alligators programmed to eat Mexicans, then a minefield to stop the stragglers, and finally laser turrets to fry the ones that escape the alligators and mines. They’ve adopted the swaggering fabulism, grunting populism, short-temper, short-attention-span style and overall affect of Donald Trump in every way but the blond wig. Their cries of “Fake News!” rend the air.
What could go wrong? Um, everything. And it’s all the fault of my colleagues in the Republican consulting class.
My friends, competitors, teammates, and acquaintances in the GOP consulting community have a terrible, horrible, incurable case of ETTD, and these Typhoid Atwaters are spreading death to the Republican candidate pool.
You should understand something about Washington’s consulting community before we dive in. Individually there are brilliant strategists, ad makers, pollsters, speechwriters, communications wizards, and lawyers in the Republican consultocracy. There are also a few talentless, venal, backstabbing shitheels, of course. Collectively, they live in a city that encourages pack behavior, conformity, and caution. The campaign community is particularly sensitive, their gazelle noses sniffing the wind for the slightest changes in the town’s mood. Is that a lion in the tall grass? Are there crocodiles in that grassy verge near the watering hole? Are we Tea Party this week, or back to Bush Republicanism? It’s become a corporate sector, and iconoclasts aren’t particularly welcome.
Being inside the system is ludicrously profitable. It’s all Other People’s Money, and there are rarely penalties for failure. In the SuperPAC age, the business got so much easier. There are few incentives to play outside the lines, and the campaign committees—the NRCC, the NRSC, and the RNC itself—are a cozy blanket for even the mediocrities in the business.
During 2015 you would have been hard-pressed to find a pro-Trump consultant in the entire GOP infrastructure. Driven by ideology, experience, and practicality, their contempt for and disgust with Trump were vivid and justified. I wasn’t some lone genius who uniquely understood the damage Trump would do to the party, the conservative movement, and the nation. They saw how much was at risk and for the most part were vocal in their positions.
Even the consultants who worked for Trump treated him, at best, like a paycheck and a source of future steak-dinner war stories that would take the form of “You will not fuckin’ believe what that fuckin’ moron did.” Once Trump secured the nomination, however, the official apparatus of Washington was, according to the rules of the game, his. Every consultant with an RNC contract was suddenly Born Again Trump, their criticisms of the nominee forgotten. Red hats suddenly blossomed, some from pure party tribalism, more from financial considerations. Honestly, I understood it but warned them against the downstream blots on their political copybooks.
Because packs move as packs will, after the election there was a panicked rush to Trump, a Kabuki dance of elaborate apologies and explanations to anyone they could find in Trump’s orbit. Again, it was almost understandable. They had bills to pay, and if their clients were Republican Party committees or SuperPACs, no ideological deviations from Trump juche were allowed. Many settled into new roles as Trump cheerleaders and defenders. Alex Castellanos, a former Bush and Romney strategist, was a member of the Old Guard of GOP media consultants. Once a vehement critic—mirabile dictu!—he swiftly became a defender of the Trump True Faith in June 2016. I’m sure being hired by a pro-Trump SuperPAC had nothing to do with it.1
Castellanos wasn’t alone. The social pressure of the New Washington, lubricated in equal parts by money and fear of being ostracized, brought many former Never Trump rebels to heel.
Then the curse hit.
In 2017 it became evident that these smart, crafty, and experienced consultants were advising their clients to “go Trump” and embrace the folly and absurdity of Trump’s style and to cling tightly to the man beloved by the base. These folks knew Trump doesn’t translate outside the base. We’re all reading the same polling results over and over again; the hard core of the GOP loves Trump and hates everyone and everything that doesn’t. Everyone else will crawl through broken glass to vote against anyone even Trump-adjacent.
These consultants understood that Trump was poison with voters outside the base and that you can’t go with a “just the tip” approach to Trumpism. To put it in terms Mike Pence might like, you either abstain or marry it.
The DC consulting community got hitched to Trumpism and obsessed with winning over Trump voters. That’s why you saw ineffective, centrist-repellent ads about MS-13 and illegal alien criminals in states like Virginia, where the blowback cost Republicans the election. The desire to draw The Donald’s favorable tweets and perhaps win the coveted Rally with the President overcame judgment and experience.
For these folks, winning the Trump primary, while necessary, is not necessarily sufficient. As the losses started to stack up in 2017 and 2018, and a bleak 2020 election cycle loomed on the horizon, the DC campaign advisors who have bound themselves to Trump are looking at long odds, sweeping electoral losses, and a trip into the political wilderness, but because they’ve sold themselves on the fantasy that Trumpism—with or without Trump—is the future, they won’t change a thing about it.
It’s political malpractice of the highest order.
Trump’s unlikely win, driven by his shambolic, half-assed campaign, has convinced a generation of Republicans that the careful use of data, polling, analytics, and media placement can be replaced by grunting, atavistic “Build duh wall, deport ’em all” populism, Twitter, and rallies. They’ve convinced themselves that everyone who votes is a Fox News viewer.
In the Reagan era, the tools of campaigning were still recognizable from 50 or even 100 years before, except for a deeper reliance on television advertising. In the Bush era, we started to understand the primacy of data and targeting. With the two Obama elections, we recognized that the Democrats had a data and analytics advantage over us. As a party we—and by “we” I mean both the GOP inside data team from the Data Trust and the Koch-funded i360 data archive—started to insist campaigns and candidates focus their message, target their resources, and hit the right targets at the right time with the right message. You think campaigns are hideously expensive? Imagine them without targeting and data.
That’s fine with Trump’s acolytes. They don’t need all that modern-day witchcraft and science. They’ll just outsource that to Moscow.
Now we’re about to see a generation of candidates driven by rage, with Fox-level intellectual constructs (mostly simple, brightly colored pictograms) that have all the subtlety and introspection of the Breitbart comments section. A pollster friend of mine lamented that his otherwise bright candidate is convinced that if he can just be on Fox enough, the rest of the campaign doesn’t matter. They’ve sold themselves that the rest of America sees Trump’s chaotic, sloppy behavior and his clown-show government the way they do; as a charmingly eccentric slap in the face of the politically correct and moribund Establishment, not as a calamitous shitshow.
They’ve also come to believe that the base, and only the base, matters. They’re looking away from a universe of survey data that show Donald Trump is narrowing t
he base into a demographic box canyon. There are only so many white dudes over the age of 50 with a high school education or below, and they’re a shrinking pool.
Well, I’m just a simple country campaign consultant who’s run ads in 38 states and been to the electoral rodeo a time or two, and I can tell you, the idea of running as a Trump Republican if you’re not Donald Trump is a catastrophically long reach anywhere outside of seats the best redistricting money can buy. If you’re in a safe seat in a district with a 15% GOP voter registration advantage in Asscrack, Arkansas, that might work. Almost everywhere else, the lesson from January 2017 until today has been that Trump is a mighty headwind for GOP candidates.
In 2017 Republicans had two chances to either hold or take governor’s mansions. New Jersey and Virginia were outstanding object lessons in the ETTD effect, and Republicans stubbornly refused to either learn from them or even acknowledge that Donald Trump’s divisive leadership and character led to their defeat.
In New Jersey, Chris Christie’s designated political heir was Kim Guadagno, his lieutenant governor. New Jersey hasn’t been a Republican stronghold for a long while, and it was never going to be an easy race for Guadagno, but as a moderate voice in the GOP, she would have at least had a fighting chance. After running a campaign about menacing illegal aliens (where have we heard that before?), she got her ass handed to her in a sound defeat. It wasn’t a shock, but the signs were building.
It was in Virginia where we learned how bad it was about to get.
OH, VIRGINIA
In a painful case of ETTD, Virginia’s Ed Gillespie learned the hard way that keeping the Trump base happy is a short path to a humiliating loss. The Democrats held on to the Virginia governor’s mansion in a race that was a teachable moment on the utter political poison of Trumpism, and yet another example of a decent, modern, smart Republican trapped in a vise between disqualifying himself with the Trump base or disqualifying himself with the other 64% of the electorate.
As a candidate for governor, Gillespie was surrounded by a team of smart, practical, experienced campaign hands. Two of his most senior consultants are among my closest friends. And yet the virus of Trumpism caused the campaign to fixate on themes that kept the Trump base happy while ignoring the simmering mass of voters who would move heaven and earth to vote against anyone running in the ideological or stylistic footsteps of Donald Trump.
Gillespie ads against the overhyped threat of the MS-13 Central American drug gang were fodder for the Trump base and poison for the enormous northern Virginia population of independents and moderates. (As an aside, independents and moderates are not the same things, though they are commonly conflated in the mind of many analysts. This simple category error leads to much campaign heartache.)
The grumbling from the Trump base before and after the election was that Gillespie wasn’t sufficiently fulsome in his praise of Trump, even though poll after poll showed that Trump’s numbers in Virginia were execrable: 57% disapproved of Trump, and of that 57%, 87% voted for Democrat Ralph Northam. The Trump headwinds were powerful; running a campaign that recapitulated Trump’s shittiest themes made it impossible to win.2
Afterward, in a moment that must surely have stung the decent, dedicated Gillespie, Trump tweeted, “Ed Gillespie worked hard but did not embrace me or what I stand for. Don’t forget, Republicans won 4 out of 4 House seats, and with the economy doing record numbers, we will continue to win, even bigger than before!”3
Virginia was an important lesson; in purple states, Trump activates low-propensity Democrats, and the themes and style of Trumpism activate them more, even from candidates who aren’t explicitly running as Trump Republicans. Oh, and while Democrats were at it, they took 15 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates, moving from the GOP 66–33 majority to a 51–49 split.
SENATOR PEDOBEAR
In my 30 years in politics, I’ve worked against two Republican general election candidates. The first, as I think you may have picked up on by now, was Donald Trump.
The other was pedo-curious mall stalker and overall creep Roy Moore. The Alabama race tested a number of Republican electoral verities, and one of the most important was that even in the deepest of deep red states, there’s a limit.
Roy Moore was a stain on the American political system not simply because he stalked and molested underage girls but also because he was defiant toward the rule of law, ignorant of the Constitution, and—I know you’ll find this surprising given he was from Alabama—not a fan of African Americans, Muslims, immigrants, or gays.4 If it hadn’t been for the girls, though, Roy Moore would be in DC today being hailed as part of the nationalist populist revolutionary front in the pages of Breitbart, the Der Stürmer of our time. It was a delight to be brought in to do SuperPAC ads against him.
The election was full of warning signs for the GOP. Even in the most heated of races, Republican and conservative turnout was flat. African American turnout, never a sure thing in off years (or even in on years—as Hillary Clinton learned), was stratospheric. Younger voters showed up for once and voted strongly against the Republican candidate. Even in the reddest state in the nation, Trump couldn’t juice the numbers.
The other factor that stood out was also seen in Virginia: college-educated voters have broken hard for the Democrats, even in red areas. In 2012, Mitt Romney took 64% of Alabama’s college-educated vote. In 2017, Roy Moore won just 43%.5 Though Steve Bannon, who was then still very much in the Trump orbit, campaigned passionately for Moore, the corollary to ETTD applies to Steve: everything he touches gets infected with something that oozes and smells of rotting meat.
A SMALL RACE. A BIG LESSON
The statewide elections are interesting, but sometimes the devil pops up more clearly in the details of small races in places you know best. It’s why I paid particular attention to a mayoral race in my old neighborhood. It’s the story of Rick Baker, Rick Kriseman, and the job of mayor of St. Petersburg, Florida. I know the area well. I was born and raised just across the bay in Tampa, and I was a field director for both Senate candidate Connie Mack and George H. W. Bush.
Pinellas County was one of my early political stomping grounds. Once reliably red, it had drifted into the center lane, giving Obama wins in 2008 and 2012. It went for Trump by just 6,000 votes. The city of St. Petersburg, however, is different from much of the rest of the county. It has African Americans.
Republican Rick Baker held the mayor’s office for two terms and was wildly popular. He was called America’s best mayor for a good reason; he was the kind of local leader Republicans saw as the future. Baker was a diligent, honest force in working with the African American community, something Republicans locally had not, to put it kindly, been terribly motivated about in the past. He really engaged, built relationships, and reached across party lines to treat African Americans with respect and to address the needs of their neighborhoods and families.
Baker won wide support in the African American community at the ballot box because he put in the work by doing more than just talking the talk. He won 90% of the African American vote in one election. He was the crossover-vote dream, where our rhetoric was consonant with political reality. Rick Baker was, and is, a man who did well while doing good.
On housing, education, crime, and race, Rick Baker was the kind of Republican Republicans claimed they wanted and needed to be to win over African Americans. His book The Seamless City was a cult favorite among Republican leaders from Jeb Bush to Mitt Romney.6
Then came Donald Trump.
Baker and his Democratic opponent, Rick Kriseman, who was then mayor of the city, fought to a draw in the ugly primary election in an ostensibly nonpartisan race. Kriseman beat Baker by 69 votes out of 56,500 cast. The razor-thin 48.36 to 48.23% meant a runoff election, and unfortunately for Baker, his running mate was Donald J. Trump.
This was Baker’s race to lose. Kriseman had been a frankly terrible mayor, beset with a record of city projects that flopped or hung in limbo and a record of d
elay, incompetence, and mismanagement that would make a 1950s Soviet bureaucrat proud. In the end, though, the petty scandals and failures didn’t matter. Kriseman could have stayed in bed eating bonbons and still won because Donald Trump couldn’t help but defend his base in Charlottesville.
The moment Trump drew a moral equivalence by using the phrase “both sides” the die was cast. African Americans in St. Petersburg and across the nation heard loud and clear that the president thought there were some “fine people” among the Klan, the neo-Nazis, and the white separatist scum in Charlottesville, and that they were morally equivalent to the people protesting them.
All Rick Baker’s work was washed away. All his relationships with the African American community were broken. Rick Baker hadn’t changed. He was still the good-hearted and proven leader he was before. There isn’t and wasn’t a single iota of racial animus in Baker. Rick Kriseman certainty didn’t suddenly become less of a moron and terrible leader.
Baker faced the same terrible problem every other Republican outside the most lily-white district faces: the Scylla of large majorities repulsed by Trump’s overtly racist dog-whistling and the Charybdis of a Trump base that will turn on anyone who utters the slightest condemnation of him.
Baker had two and a half months to denounce Trump’s position with passion and clarity. That’s a lifetime in politics, but his advisors lived in terror of losing the Trump vote, blind to the costs of holding it in the first place. Baker simply couldn’t do it. Ignoring the 800-pound Klansman in the room doesn’t work; African Americans and independent voters were listening and never heard Baker say the words they needed to hear.