Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump--And Democrats From Themselves

by Rick Wilson

  DEPENDING ON DECENCY

  You want to believe this is a just and good world. You want to believe that good guys win, liars never prosper, and righteousness is its own reward. You want to believe you can run a campaign and a nation along principles that reflect the better angels of our nature, and not our most base desires.

  Are you new here? This is a fallen world, and decency is dead.

  I’ve said this before, but if your campaign ever for one moment believes it can shame Donald Trump over an action, a statement, a tweet, or a policy, quit now. You cannot. Decency and gentlemen’s agreements in campaigns aren’t unknown—hell, I’m good friends with Democratic consultants where our candidates tried to politically slaughter one another—but they do not exist in Trump’s world or this era.

  You will never get the MAGA tribe to back down, apologize, or go forth and sin no more. Their cult and culture is performative dickishness, of never-back-down fuck-youism. Trolling triumphs over argument, and shitfits are their version of a reasoned discourse. This will increase in pitch as the campaign is engaged.

  Everything they say to you, back channel or publicly, is a lie. Every second of weakness or indecision will be exploited. Every assumption is a trap. When you’re across the table from Brad Parscale or Jared Kushner or Matt Schlapp or whoever they delegate to deal with the Democratic campaign, realize that evil can wear a nice suit and have a firm handshake. They’ll wink at you to signal they too understand that Trump is crazy, but we’re all just professionals, amirite?

  They’re not. Trump surrogates, spokesmen, and staffers aren’t punished for lying, for racism, or for whatever flavor of MAGA scumbag behavior they display. They’re not punished for stealing from the campaign, as long as the Trumps get a cut. They’re not moral, or honest, or accountable. Think of the worst things you could do in a campaign. Ponder criminality, incompetence, assault, harassment, or using the fruits of hostile foreign powers to win.

  Those are part of the incentive structure for working for Team Trump.

  I’m not saying you need to emulate them. I’m just warning you that their campaign is life-or-death, and they’ll act accordingly. You are not dealing with your father’s Republicans. You are not dealing with rational actors. They are in service to an utterly amoral man, and by both inclination and necessity they will mirror his behaviors.

  DON’T BELIEVE NATIONAL POLLS

  It’s not simply that they’re often wrong. It’s that they make you focus on doing the wrong thing. The national polling pretty closely reflected the results of the 2016 race: Hillary Clinton was predicted to win the popular vote, and did.

  That wasn’t the ballgame, though, was it? I will continue to beat this message into you until understanding dawns: You need to build your models, your expectations, and your strategy around a basket of states where you will win the Electoral College vote. National polls give you false confidence. They give you the sense that a single, national message or strategy works when you’re not really running a national campaign. You’re running fifteen state campaigns.

  Trump’s narrow skate past Hillary in the handful of Electoral College states wasn’t even entirely unexpected in some quarters. I’m told Clinton’s campaign watched the Wisconsin numbers in their own trackers—not from the pollster, but from their data folks—plummet in the closing week. So they took swift action—deploying the candidate, ad money, and a tidal wave of digital ads and phone banks into Wisconsin, racing thousands of volunteers into the state for a final push to victory…Oh. Wait. That’s on the Earth 2 timeline where her campaign wasn’t complacent and insular.

  They did nothing. They sat around planning where they would sit on Inauguration Day.

  Do not make the same mistake of taking comfort in national polls. Have your numbers nerds build whatever dashboard for your data operation keeps you hungry, aggressive, and paranoid in the target states. Watch it like a hawk. Prepare to die broke; spend whatever you need to spend to move those numbers. Fuck sleep. The candidate can sleep when she’s dead.

  National polls are useful. They are fun. They can be illustrative as hell, and they’re great for understanding sweeping typologies and trends. They tell us Americans mostly dislike Trump, and they do. They tell us Americans think he’s a lying liar who lies, and they do. They tell us his job performance outside the economy is considered, at best, mediocre. They tell us a lot of the things you love are popular.

  The polls don’t tell us what the issue trade-offs are in the key states. They’re not a solid window into the demographics you’ll be targeting. They don’t tell us what the hot buttons are that could take an issue that’s popular nationally—and with your activists—and turn it into a millstone around your neck. Get into the states with polling and data collection, spend the money—and it’s going to be spendy—and rely on that, not big feels from big polls.

  BANK SHOTS DON’T WORK

  One of the most absurd magical thinking behaviors in politics is the belief in the bank shot. It may work in pool, but it doesn’t in politics. Bank shots are ideas that depend on the electorate to think through complex policy options…hell, any policy options tend to result in eyes glazing over and a quick scroll through their text messages.

  The voters don’t think through tactical voting options or complex policy alternatives; they don’t understand the implications of this or that policy proposal. For them, it’s about love versus hate, hope versus fear, good versus evil.

  That bank-shot idea of “We’ll do A and then Trump will do B and we’ll do C and then we win!” is the Underpants Gnome theory of politics. It doesn’t work. What works is a move from A to B, not A to Q to G to T to X to B.

  In 2008, desperate to reset a flailing campaign and find some way, any way, to interrupt the narrative that Barack Obama was running away with the election, John McCain suspended his campaign. Hit the brakes. Full stop. The idea seemed to be that McCain’s willingness to put the country and the raging financial crisis first by returning to Washington would send a signal that the senator was a serious leader for a serious crisis. It was a bank-shot play—high stakes, high risk, high reward.

  He stopped making a case either for himself or against Obama, and hoped Americans would take the time to watch, learn, and react to his leadership in the crisis. His numbers dropped.

  Bank shots don’t work. Referendum on Trump. Electoral College states. End of sermon. (Who am I kidding? I’m going to keep on the Electoral College thing until you hunt me down with dogs.)

  THE BASE IS ENOUGH

  Bless your hearts. No. No, it isn’t. It’s never enough in any national contest. This contest is going to be waged in places where the base is really short of enough. This is why I will continue to lecture you on not scaring the shit out of Republican squish voters. There are a lot of them in the Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, and Pennsylvania ring suburbs who voted Democratic in 2018 because the Democrats ran center-left candidates for Congress. I know you want to fire up the prog warriors, but they’re already with you. Obama won suburban votes from independents and soft Republicans because he wasn’t a firebrand; he was a technocrat. He wasn’t ideologically hot; he was cool to a fault, reasonable, a TED Talk in human form.

  Base plus. Say it with me: Base. Plus.

  DO NOT EXPECT MIRACLES

  Donald Trump has the devil’s own luck when it comes to getting out of things that would have doomed any other candidate or elected official. I’ve been as guilty as anyone of believing that some issue or outrage would finally destroy Trump. Because I believe we are being tortured by the cruel and capricious gods of politics, he slithers away from crisis after crisis, never tested fully, never held to account, and always ready to detonate a wave of more news to escape the problem of the moment.

  People hoped insulting John McCain would derail him.

  They hoped Iowa or New Hampshire or F
lorida would derail him.

  People hoped that a floor fight at the convention would derail his nomination.

  They hoped pussy grabbing would derail him.

  Then they hoped the Electoral College wouldn’t vote for him.

  Then they toyed with the idea of removing him through the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

  Or that impeachment would be a thing even with Mitch McConnell running the Senate.

  Some hoped that the Mueller Report would lead to his removal from office.

  Some thought Jeffrey Epstein would reveal Trump’s penchant for teen girls.

  Some believed that, facing terrible legal trouble, Trump might simply resign or, at the very least, not run for reelection.

  We do not live in a world of miracles.

  I fully confess that I let myself get carried away with bank-shot scenarios of “If x then y then profit” as Trump shit the bed over and over in 2016. That was before I realized that Trump shitting the bed had a market with enough Americans to win. Sure, it’s a niche product, but it’s a product nonetheless. Obviously, the whole shitting-the-bed brand has continued in the White House. He’s continued this pattern in office, engaging in a portfolio of stupid, shameful, backward dumbfuckery, but his dumbfuckery is not entirely sufficient to defeat him.

  This election is a test of Trump’s opponents to exist in the real world of actual politics, not the hope-as-strategy bubble. It’s why the messaging and strategies against Trump have to be grounded, smart, and simple.

  It’s why the campaigns against him—the Democratic, Republican, independent, and citizen efforts against him—must be effective, accountable, and professional. Inchoate anger isn’t a strategy, even though he deserves every iota of fury we can muster. Every decision needs to be grounded in data, targeting, and return on political investment. Democrats won in 2008 by using this exact model and walked away from it in 2016.

  Outside of the spectacle of Trump’s 2020 rallies and deliberate provocations, serious, professional, and dangerous people are building a massive, sophisticated, well-funded campaign from hell. Democrats who think hatred of Trump alone can compensate for building the greatest campaign effort in the world are accomplices in Trump’s reelection. GOP guys like me beat Democrats pretty frequently because of the simple, nuts-and-bolts operational things, not just message mojo.

  If you stop believing in miracles, your campaigns and your lives will be better off. There is no substitute for organization, planning, discipline, data, metrics, and accountability. In campaign after campaign, the grinding power of those dull things isn’t cinematic; it’s not the genius guru, the insightful pollster, or the witty, dissolute ad man (hey, that’s me!) who’s the real star. It’s the grinding organizers who get volunteers to make the calls, send the texts, knock on the doors, and do the shit work.

  Those folks work outside the Twitter bubble or the N.Y.-D.C. horse-race media coverage club. They work in shitty, temporary offices in shitty, temporary strip malls. They’re the last mile in the campaign, and likely the only real-life contact a voter will ever have with the national election.

  Teaching them that this election won’t be easy, and that no one is going to hand them Donald Trump’s head on a platter, is vital. The campaign rule of God helps those who help themselves proves out time and again, and this will be no different.

  Fox News Election 2020 Special Alerts

  RANDOM BLONDE GIRL: Mr. President, welcome back to Fox and Friends! It’s such an honor to have you here for the 418th time! With three weeks to go before the election, how are you feeling?

  TRUMP (call-in): Well, I’m feeling great. Since the Democrat candidate wants open borders, Satanic child sacrifices, mandatory sex-change surgery, sharia law, and they’re going to bring back Zima, I feel confident we’re going to win bigly. They also want to take away your doctor and replace them with trained raccoons.

  STEVE DOOCY (chuckles): Now, Mr. President. We’ve seen some polls from the swing states like Michigan, Florida, and Pennsylvania that show you’re not doing as well as we—I mean, you—had hoped.

  TRUMP: Well, you and your failing network are poopy, Steve. Poopy doo doo liars.

  (The hosts share an uncomfortable glance. Trump seems…off.)

  TRUMP: Here’s the real news not your fake news, Steve. I’m winning in Pennsylvania, bigly. The last poll had me (papers shuffle in background) at 118 percent to 6 percent against the Democrat. The numbers are even bigger in Florida, Ohio, Michigan, and Ivanka. The people who took those polls will be arrested.

  BRIAN KILMEADE: Ivanka, sir?

  TRUMP: Yes. Since I bought Greenland, we needed to do the right branding for the newest state, so I’ve used my executive power to name it Ivanka. She has 37 electoral votes, which many people are telling me is only fair.

  RANDOM BLONDE GIRL: Ivanka is a beautiful state. I went to camp there.

  DOOCY: Well, that about wraps up all the time…

  TRUMP: Oh, no you don’t, Steve. I’ll call Roger Ailes about you.

  DOOCY: Sir…uh…Roger is…

  TRUMP: Try me. Now, let’s get on with the second hour.

  THE CULTURE WAR: WHERE DEMOCRATS GO TO DIE

  Trump’s campaign team desperately, passionately wants 2020 to be about socialism, abortion, gun control, left-wing anti-Semitism, gender pronouns, the news media, and identity politics. It’s their safe space, and Democrats who get lured into playing the Social Justice Olympics of Political Correctness are going to lose forty-plus states.

  The 2020 election is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to break bad habits, rebrand the party, and win seats that looked off-limits before Donald Trump. The Democrats won forty-two seats in 2018 in large measure because they stayed out of the culture-war quicksand.

  Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential race is the perfect example of this winning approach. Clinton understood that the Ted Kennedy flavor of Democratic politics was hopeless as an electoral strategy, so he wisely became a champion of both job creation and deregulation. Even more wisely, he adopted a line on abortion that defused the cultural potency of it with a large fraction of the Republican base. The line was simple, brilliant, and devastatingly effective: “I want abortion to be safe, legal, and rare.”

  Compare that to the flailing, blazing political stupidity of Virginia governor Ralph Northam and other Democrats swinging for the fences to defend abortion in the last moments of pregnancy. Of course Trump turns that into vivid tales of doctors killing newborns. Why?

  Because you let him. Because you are so determined to never, ever let any question about the morality of the pro-choice stance get in the way of ideological purity. Because today, “safe, legal, and rare” is too far to the right for you.

  I’m not trying to change your minds on the moral question of abortion in the last trimester, but I am trying to tell you that the vast majority of Americans disagree with you, and that there are political consequences. Get this number in your head: 13 percent. That’s the percentage of Americans who think abortion in the third trimester should be legal. Legal, not acceptable.

  Sixty percent think it should be legal in the first trimester, and 28 percent in the second.1 This is part of America’s uneasy truce on a painful issue; the nation is split down the middle on abortion, with equal numbers saying they’re pro-life versus pro-choice. (And please, don’t quibble over the terms. No matter how you cast it in the surveys, the results end up in the same band of 50-50 percent.)

  Donald Trump’s greatest culture-war victory will be the Democratic nominee on camera making excuses for something only 13 percent of Americans approve of. Expect Trump to talk about late-term abortion. This will be an electoral tentpole for his messaging. He understands that a solid evangelical base is mandatory for reelection, so more tweets like this one won’t surprise anyone: “Democrats are becoming the Party of late-term abortion,
high taxes, Open Borders and Crime!”2

  Because it’s Trump, you should know that he’ll cast it in the most vivid, dishonest light possible, just as he did at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on April 26, 2019: “The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully. And then the doctor and the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”

  Execute the baby. I am not shocked that he said it; Northam made it easy for him by conducting a radio interview that sounded more like ideological-purity-check idiocy. Trump has a keen appreciation for the things that rev up his base, and this was a slow pitch over the plate.

  Would it kill you to talk about third-trimester abortions in a better framing? Even in the third trimester, a majority approves when the “Bush rule” conditions apply: the life of the mother, rape, or incest. Would it kill you to say, “For women whose pregnancies are in the third trimester, outside those rare and narrow conditions, we hope they’ll also at least consider adoption, and we should give them the help they need to do so”? Generations of pollsters have studied this question, and try as the pro-choice purists like, there’s still a stubbornly pro-life element of the population, and it’s not all old white dudes.

  I know you’re mad reading this. Good. Because the lesson is about to get even more pointed.

  You know those swing states Trump stole from you? Ohio. Michigan. Wisconsin. Florida. Pennsylvania. Remember those? The pro-life movement in each of those states is organized, and relies on their large Catholic and evangelical populations. Oh, you know who else isn’t as far to the left on abortion as you might think? Hispanics. And African Americans.

  Trump may be wildly exaggerating on abortion, but those voters are listening, and Democrats ignore them at their peril.