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

by Rick Wilson

  Clinton had secretly engaged Morris in the fall of 1994 after the GOP’s wholesale slaughter of the Democratic Congress, which led him to understand that the 1996 campaign would be an uphill climb. The rest of Clinton’s campaign team were less than enthusiastic about the Morris strategy of leading with anti-crime ads, but when the $2.4 million ad buy began seventeen months before the election, the die was cast; Clinton had defined the 1996 battlefield on his terms. This expensive (for the time) effort at an early framing for the campaign was a massive strategic advantage in his successful reelection effort.

  Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, and the rest of the Bush 43 team knew that after the razor-thin, contentious victory in 2000 the world had been radically altered, but the reelection of George W. Bush was by no means a certainty. Drawing lessons from the 2002 Senate races, Rove and his team crafted a choice for voters, a referendum on national security under Bush and the president’s personal likability versus John Kerry. Contrary to Democratic folklore, it wasn’t just the swift-boat ads (I get accused of making those more often than you’d believe, but not my work) that took out Kerry. The Bush team understood early that Kerry would be the Democratic nominee, and they executed a rigorously planned, ninety-day messaging campaign against him.1

  Barack Obama started winning 2012 on Election Day in 2008. He never shut down his campaign machine in the ways some candidates do. The groundbreaking campaign data and digital efforts had been effective, and while they didn’t run at the pace of the campaign, they never stopped collecting data. He prepped relentlessly for 2012 well in advance of any serious resolution of the GOP field. The scary analogy is this: Trump’s team is in large measure agnostic over which Democrat gets the nomination. He’s planning for all of them.

  Given the economy, the election models all say that at this point Trump could have already put the 2020 election to bed. But he’s a day-trading narcissist with a short attention span, unable to focus on anything but his ego, his Twitter feed, and his dick. His kickoff rally was, for him, good enough. His tweets are, for him, good enough.

  Plan ahead, because a plan beats no plan every time.

  START ADVERTISING. NOW.

  Why are Republicans sticking with Trump? What dark magic makes them reject all principle? What keeps them from understanding he’s a bad president, an authoritarian statist, and a raging asshole?

  I’m going to tell you a not-so-secret secret. It’s advertising.

  Donald Trump’s campaign has been spending real money on targeted digital advertising since he was elected. From December 2018 until August 2019 his campaign and super PAC spent well over $20 million on Facebook alone.2 He’s not spending money to expand the base, soften his message, or Make America Great Again. He’s stoking his followers’ worst fears and paranoia. This isn’t a shock, but the content is a preview of the future, and an investment in keeping his people fired up and loaded for bear.

  Yes, the Democratic candidates are all spending on Facebook as well, but they’re talking to the edge in a progressive primary, not to the people who will decide the election.

  His spending on Facebook and Google ads ramp up and up over time with estimates that they may exceed $250 million for the general election.

  Isn’t this chump change in the overall scheme of advertising? Don’t all presidential campaigns rely on billion-dollar TV advertising efforts? Sure, at the very end. Hillary Clinton’s television spending in the last stretch of the campaign dwarfed Trump’s. Trump will have an unlimited ad budget, and spending will likely start much sooner than the Democrats expect; this is the Nixon/Ailes playbook for the 1972 reelection. Spend early, spend often, define the battlefield. One stinging lesson from 2016 came in the advertising pattern in Wisconsin and Michigan, two of the states that cost Hillary the Electoral College: Trump had the advertising field to himself until the closing days of the campaign. That’s right. Hillary Clinton was off the air in Wisconsin and Michigan until two weeks before Election Day.3

  Trump loves digital advertising. He loves it like a fat kid loves cake. The rising power of digital advertising is that you know whom you’re reaching. TV targeting for cable is wildly improved, but nothing rivals digital for delivering a single message to a single person. Expect record spending by Trump on digital, expanding well beyond what you’re seeing today.

  The Trump campaign knows that with targeting so fine-grained and so cost-effective, it can bombard its core voters with a message that absolutely works for them; they’ll be able to keep him at 44 percent instead of the organic 40 percent approval number. They understand that the Facebook and Google (primarily YouTube) ecosystems are siloed and self-reinforcing, and that the political culture of Trumpism means sharing with like-minded morons, which amplifies their message over and over. The Trump campaign spends about 3.5 times as much on Facebook as it does on Google, but that gap will close rapidly as the campaign continues and they work to control their message in search and YouTube results.4

  It took the DNC and its allied groups until the summer of 2019 to start advertising against Trump, even though the utility of a generic Democratic campaign in the targeted swing states of the Electoral College makes eminently good sense. So why didn’t they? Who knows?

  Oh, wait. I do know. It’s because the Democratic Party is holistically bad at politics. That said, the Democratic National Committee is showing some signs of life in the early spending department, and recognition of how a thirty-person field has complicated the money, media, and organizing equations for 2020. As Maggie Severns of Politico notes, “Some of the Democratic operatives most focused on Trump worry that by the time Democrats winnow their…field to one, the president may have secured himself a hard-to-beat advantage” unless Democrats “mount a sustained push against Trump in a swath of 2020 battleground states.” They’ve already fallen behind. Severns reports that in June 2019 the DNC had raised less than half of what the RNC had.5

  “I take very seriously the fact that Republicans and Trump are already communicating under the radar to sets of voters they are already in threat of losing,” said David Pepper, chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party, who has been working to raise funds and counter the Trump campaign’s advertising online in his state. “If Trump has an entire year to be hitting these voters with all sorts of garbage, the mindset will be cemented in with a lot of voters by the time we find them.”6

  Democratic-leaning groups need to get on the air right now. Right. Now. In swing states and in one specific market I’ll address in a moment.

  Instead of jerking off running impeachment ads or launching a futile run for president, Tom Steyer should be on the air in the swing states, nuking Trump into a glowing crisp on the trade war (for Iowa) and for the lies over new jobs (Wisconsin and Foxconn, for instance).

  The DNC, allied groups, and the Democratic billionaire class need to start eroding the Trump base, today. They need to poison the well for soft Trump voters in targeted states, today. What part of “today” is unclear?

  Research the audiences you want and need in the target states. Here’s a good thought experiment: If the shoe was on the other foot, what do you think some Republican asshole like Rick Wilson would do to spoil your whole day?

  Hire pollsters. Hire a lot of pollsters. Get the data you need for targeting. Ask for help. Data scientists, pollsters, researchers, ad developers, and the digital platforms themselves understand this better than most campaign hacks.

  You’re not looking to merely reinforce your core voters. You’re also trying both to identify and grab back every Democratic voter Trump won and to dig into the soft sectors of the independent and female Republican base. Your ad makers should develop messages and media that move votes from pro-Trump to Trump-questioning. You’re not going to flip them all at once, so use the “kick ass or bypass” rule. Don’t spend money trying to persuade the hardest targets.

  2020 Debate Fact Check no. 4

  During
the first of three presidential debates last night at Bryn Mawr College, President Donald Trump made the following claim:

  “Since I purchased Greenland, America is safer than ever, and greater than ever. No other president has ever expanded the United States like I have.”

  FACT CHECK

  Greenland is not a U.S. state or territory at this time.

  Greenland is, at this time, still an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.

  President Trump’s 2019 attempts to buy Greenland were both rebuked and mocked by Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen.

  Contrary to President Trump’s claims, many American presidents have expanded United States territory, including acquisitions such as the Louisiana Purchase by President Thomas Jefferson and the Alaska Purchase by President Andrew Johnson.

  Eric Trump’s extensive holdings of territories in the MMO Second Life do not, according to legal experts, constitute actual U.S. territorial claims.

  NO MORE POTEMKIN CAMPAIGNS

  This is the most critical technical chapter in the book. The Democrats must run a real, modern, data-driven campaign from the top down. They must make themselves accountable, including and especially the candidate. This is about operations, not ideology.

  Democrats commonly miss the fact that, while politics is often emotional, campaigns are empirical. They are driven by data, by facts on the ground, by budgets and programs. They are not simply deus ex Obama miracles. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any winning campaign is indistinguishable from magic. Obama’s 2008 victory looked like a movement, but it was really a world-class data and targeting operation, optimized digital and television media buys, a highly organized field program, and a tightly disciplined team hunting votes on the Electoral College map.

  Charisma, likability, electability, and—for fuck’s sake—policy are fool’s gold if the campaign doesn’t have its shit together.

  I’m going to call hard bullshit on the Clinton 2016 campaign because they deserve it. They were lazy, smug, wasteful, insular, arrogant, incompetent, fractured, tone-deaf, sloppy, and worst of all they lost to Donald Fucking Trump. No one was accountable, ever. Hillary Clinton could have taken Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan but didn’t do the work, leaving those prizes wide open for marginal efforts by Trump and his Russian allies to tip the scales.

  HIRE THE RIGHT TEAM

  Do you know the biggest mistake made first by the sixteen other GOP candidates and then by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign in 2016? They built teams without real leaders. They patched together the candidate’s friends and brought in people who allegedly had the secret sauce, but at the top of each campaign was a person who was more a manager than a leader.

  All national (and statewide) campaigns are filled with factions, alliances, enemies, ass-kissers, and hacks. Some of them are worth their salt. Some of them are just along for the ride. Some of them are going to bust their asses twenty hours a day from the moment they come on board until Election Night.

  For the 2020 Democratic nominee, the campaign’s national structure needs to be as light, nimble, and smart as possible. Heavy on politics and press, light on policy and favor hires. It needs to avoid the “hire my guy” problem to which too many operations fall victim. “Hire my guy” is that moment at the end of the primary campaign when, in order to make peace, secure an endorsement, or lock in some core demographic of support, the victor agrees to hire some of the loser’s campaign staff.

  For the love of God, just this once, don’t. The nominee needs a disciplined team of people who are honest and direct behind closed doors and who are smart, loyal communicators in front of the cameras and on social media.

  REGISTRATION

  Talking shit about doing voter registration is the “my Canadian girlfriend” of politics. Democrats keep talking about it, and keep claiming it’s going to swamp the Florida, Texas, and other state GOP branches in the next election. Or the next. Or the next.

  Voter registration is the key. New voter drives in the swing states should already be well under way, and if they’re not, it’s grotesque malpractice. All the issue groups Democrats love so much need to be out hustling registrations as though their political lives depend on it, because—spoiler alert!—they do. Planned Parenthood, Moms Demand, the unions, and the rest need to stop driving for policy concessions and bring real, hard voter-registration drives to the fore of their agenda. That’s value to a campaign.

  The Democratic billionaire class should be directed to push resources into registration as well, since the state parties in the places Democrats need to win in 2020 range from merely competent to utter train wrecks.

  TURNOUT

  The election isn’t fought on Election Day. It’s fought for three to six weeks before Election Day as an increasingly meaningful fraction of voters cast early ballots. If Democrats fail to understand this enormous strategic aspect of the 2020 race, it doesn’t matter how November 3, 2020, looks. The GOP professionals around Trump will be banking votes early and often.

  Early voting is the not-so-secret weapon the GOP has used in Florida and elsewhere for a generation now. Democrats have started to close the gap, but early and absentee voting require a culture shift for the Democrats, and fast. The old model was warm-body turnout on Election Day, moving meat to market. While that’s still important, early voting not only banks votes but shows you what’s happening on the ground.

  Almost every state allows some form of early voting, whether in-person or absentee balloting.7 Some are more restrictive, but early voting is a powerful strategic indicator and barometer; it lets you focus resources, serves as a kind of live tracking poll, and warns you if the people you’re paying to turn out voters are doing their damn jobs. (Often, they aren’t.)

  Republicans have aggressively sought to close off early-voting programs that disadvantage them in places like Florida. For once in a generation, the Florida Democratic Party seems to have its shit together; by the spring of 2019, they had a team of attorneys working to ensure protections for early-voting access, Spanish-language ballots, and voting access for ex-felons who regained their right to vote after the passage of Amendment 4 in 2018.8 Democrats complain a lot about voter suppression, for which I can’t blame them when it comes to cases like this. Yes, part of “voter suppression” is the way GOP majorities set the rules (elections, famously, have consequences), but much of that “suppression” can be counteracted with a moderate investment in pipe-hitting election lawyers.

  Field operations, even in this digital era, still count. They’re still where the rubber meets the road, and where the winners and losers diverge. Field operations is the place where Barack Obama stole a march on John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. To be sure, Obama was a compelling speaker, a charismatic liberal leader, and a media darling with a killer targeting operation, but the Obama campaign also out-worked, out-hustled, and out-organized my side. Twice.

  Don’t even get me started on the nothingburger of Hillary’s field operations. Even against Trump, who had no field operations, she lost. Democrats need to track all of those people down and put them on an ice floe. Republicans may bleat about Alinskyite progressive organizing principles, but here’s the stark reality: They’re investing in them right now, training and prepping field organizers who will be knocking on doors in 2020.

  If the first topic on Tom Perez’s mind every morning after raising money isn’t deploying a fired-up, motivated field army, he’s not doing his job.

  2020 Debate Fact Check no. 5

  During the second of three presidential debates last night in Santa Clarita, California, President Donald Trump made the following claim:

  “I have been tougher on Rusher than any president in history. Vladimir Putin sleeps in a different place every night because he’s so scared of me. I am now considered by many to be a czar of Rusher, probably the best czar they’ve ever ha
d.”

  FACT CHECK

  Noted historians and foreign-policy scholars consider the following U.S. presidents of the past decades to have been “tougher” on Russia than Mr. Trump: Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman.

  There is no evidence that Russian president Vladimir Putin has adjusted his overnight locations for fear of Mr. Trump.

  The title “czar” does not exist today.

  It’s Russia, you dolt.

  MAKE THE WORST OF TRUMP’S BASE HIS RUNNING MATE

  The self-image of the deplorables is that of the honest, hardworkin’ people of the Christian American heartland and South who have been screwed by Washington, D.C., and the coastal elites since the dawn of time. I’m sure there are some good folks inside Trump’s demographic, but there are also some people who repel the voters you need to get to in 2020. Suburban moms and the alt-right? No bueno.

  After decades of fighting back against accusations of racism in the GOP, it’s no longer deniable that Donald Trump’s remarks after Charlottesville were a reflection of his character as a man and as president. His birtherism, his long, grotesque flirtation with the worst elements in the alt-right, his racial and ethnic animus, his sliming of “shithole countries”—all this is a feature, not a bug. The fact that he surrounded himself with people like Steve Bannon, Seb Gorka, and Stephen Miller—men who don’t just flirt with racial superiority theories but take them out for candlelit dinners—is another proof.