A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump
Page 1
ALSO BY DAVID PLOUFFE
The Audacity to Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama’s Historic Victory
VIKING
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Copyright © 2020 by Stand Up Strategies LLC
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For Olivia, my guide.
CONTENTS
Also by David Plouffe
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1.
OFFENSE/DEFENSE
2.
CREATE
3.
REGISTER
4.
HOSTING
5.
BATTLEGROUNDS
6.
MONEY
7.
THE CAMPAIGN
8.
VOTING
9.
ELECTION NIGHT
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
November 9, 2016, 2:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Do you remember how you felt the moment the United States of America elected a racist, misogynist, accused sexual predator; business fraud; and obstructor of justice to represent America and you on the world stage? To the most important job in the history of the world? Of course you remember. Still feel this way? Maybe more so. So do I. This pain, and the desire not to extend it for four more years, is why I’m writing this book and why you’re reading it.
Twice I’ve forced myself to rewind the 2016 election- night coverage by the anchors on Fox News all the way through, from the first closing of the polls in the East to the final call of Wisconsin—and therefore the election. And I’ve stared at the time-lapse sequence of the New York Times election tracking needle more than once, and every single time it swings, slowly but inexorably, from blue to red. God’s honest truth is that in terms of long-lasting emotional resonance, the gut punch from Trump’s victory had a greater impact on me than the elation eight years earlier when Barack Obama won—and I’d worked nonstop as his campaign manager for two years.
Without a doubt, I will be proudest of that victory professionally when I finally kick the bucket, but I’ve never gone back and watched more than a few minutes of either its election-night footage or the reelection four years later. I do admit to enjoying occasional reruns of Karl Rove’s meltdown on the Fox set in 2012, when he insisted Mitt Romney could still win Ohio after his own network had just called the Buckeye State for Obama. That still gives me a laugh—less funny is that there were few people I respected more when it came to Presidential numbers than Rove, but it shows how even experts can be seduced by the alternative reality of the Fox set.
How could anything possibly top the emotion of that unseasonably warm night in Chicago in 2008? And yet it had, and I know that many Obama alums—including our amazing volunteers, the “ordinary” voters who stood in long lines in 2008 and then again four and eight years later, the kids who were too young to vote but not too young to understand and care, and people all over the world who were studying America’s revered political system in action—all of them felt the same way in 2016, and not just because we were gobsmacked by the unexpected result. Almost all veteran politicos and voters alike have been crushed by other surprise election results. But this one hit us with its own especially awful, cruel, hard-to-get-out-of-bed-the-next-day effect. And then it was still hard to get up the day after that. The year 2016 will scar us for as long as we breathe the same air that Trump befouls with his every word.
It’s not that we were simply horrified by the reality show performer and his grifter family appearing on stage as America’s next first family—though what a horrifying sight that was. It’s not that we were petrified and panicked about what Trump would do to our economy, our planet, our alliances—though everything we feared and much more has come true. And it’s not that Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes and somehow won the presidency. That’s the way politics can break in our system. The electoral college is the only scoreboard that matters. It’s how many points you score, not how many yards you gain. My advice is to just get over this inequity. Until we change the system—and I hope we do—you have to win the game as the founders designed it. Because what’s the choice?
No, I suspect that this loss still cuts so deeply for so many of us because we wonder what else we could have done to prevent this historically disturbing and perhaps democracy-destroying outcome. We’ve all got excuses, or ways of shifting blame upward or outward. We didn’t run the Clinton campaign. We didn’t help prep her for the debates. We didn’t counsel James Comey to throw the most overcovered nonscandal in recent American history, Hillary Clinton’s emails, right back on the front pages in the closing week of the campaign. We didn’t make the editorial decision at the New York Times to cover that bogus issue more than any policy issue or difference between the candidates
All true. But the brutal truth is that the election was decided by less than 70,000 votes in three states. And this wasn’t the first time either; other elections have been decided on even smaller spreads, with huge consequences. Think about 2000, Bush versus Gore. But for 537 votes in the state of Florida, 4,424 U.S. soldiers and more than 600,000 Iraqis would not have died in Iraq, and we might have more than a flickering chance to prevent the planet from catching fire. In 1960, JFK beat Richard Nixon by grabbing the decisive state of Illinois (perhaps with more than a little “help” from his father and Mayor Richard Daley) by less than 9,000 votes out of more than 4,000,000 cast.
In presidential elections, the ballot totals seem so big—more than 130,000,000 votes cast in 2016—that you can’t believe the margin of difference in an entire state might be the vote count in one large neighborhood. That is a terrifying realization—and a lesson I learned from the first campaign I worked on, a U.S. Senate Democratic primary in 1988 in Delaware, my home state. Voting took place on a Saturday in September, and our campaign was declared the winner in a big surprise on election night. Margin of victory, almost 2,800 votes. Cue the beer and cascading balloons, then sleep it off and start planning for the general election.
But on Monday morning election officials discovered a vote count error. Due to a data entry mistake, our guy had been credited with 2,828 votes in a precinct in which he’d only gotten 28. Oops, as Rick Perry would say. That error prompted a recanvass of the results to find any additional errors, and by Thursday, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. We lost by 71 votes. A powerful lesson learned. If any of us on staff, or even some of our most committed volunteers, had magically intuited that we’d wi
n if we persuaded only 36 voters to change their minds, or made sure that 72 additional supporters had gotten to the polls—well, we could have done that, and we would have worked a little harder, a little smarter, dotted a few more i’s and crossed a few more t’s, knocked on one more door and offered one more ride.
The lesson I took forward and deployed in every subsequent campaign I worked on over two decades in politics was to assume that each one would come down to a single vote per precinct. Act like it. Work like it. Think like it. Prepare for it. Accept responsibility for it.
When I close my eyes at night, do I sometimes see the electoral college map, state by state? Yeah, I’m one of those political-numbers geeks. Not everyone is. I understand this. And I confess that this may not be the healthiest way to live—with this level of obsession—but I also contend that desperate times require desperate measures. We may survive these four years of Donald Trump with the relatively happy result that history then remembers our self-proclaimed stable genius as a onetime, one-off leader. The jury is very much out on that question. But I’m fairly certain we won’t survive eight years of him or be happy with what we’ve become as a society if we do.
Hyperbole infects our political coverage and commentary, but I believe this statement is thoroughly warranted: November 3, 2020, may well be the most important Election Day in American history and one of our most important days, period.
* * *
—
I write these words in the late summer of 2019, more than a year before the general election and just as the Democrats’ primary campaign kicks into high gear. I have no idea when that campaign will be effectively settled, much less who the nominee will be. I don’t know how various important issues, including the economy, the tariff wars, the border wall, North Korea, Iran, and impeachment will play out over the next year. Will the Democratic nominee be up to the task of entering the Thunderdome with dumb but ferocious Donald? It’s not clear yet, but it looks like some in the early field would not be up to it. That doesn’t concern me here. How good a job will Trump’s campaign do? We should assume at the very least a good, perhaps historic, job of getting out their vote. That concerns me a great deal, and I hope you will be concerned too, and here’s why.
When this book hits stores and websites in the spring of 2020, the unwieldy group of twenty-plus initial candidates will certainly be much smaller—in two or three survivors is my guess—but we may still not know the nominee. So I understand the argument that I should wait to publish until we do know the candidate. Wrong! My timing is intentional because knowing the candidate does not matter in terms of getting ready for the main event, the general election. And it will take time for all of us to get ready and to win.
Please, please, do not waste vital energy and time worrying about events we do not control, or spinning our wheels trying to overanalyze and bed wet about all the stuff that will happen every day before election night. There is only one fact that you need to focus on now: our candidate will be infinitely preferable to the incumbent, and electing her or him will be up to each of us. That’s the big takeaway here. Even for professionals, the transition from the primary campaign (directed at the party faithful) to the general election (directed at everybody else) is difficult and takes time. For the grassroots activists—you—it’s vitally necessary to start planning and working not after the last primary, not after the convention, not after the big kickoff speeches on Labor Day, but now. And by now, remember that a lot of you live in states that have already had their Democratic primaries and caucuses. The intramural part of the campaign is over.
At least sixty-five million Americans are almost certainly committed to voting against Trump. Growing that number by five to ten million is entirely in our control. We’ll do it through persuading the Obama voters who voted for Trump to come back to the light, and we’ll do it by persuading younger voters in particular to stick with the Democratic nominee and not throw their critical votes to third-party candidates as symbolic gestures of rebellion and blanket denunciation. We’ll do it through turnout—growing the overall number of people who walk the walk and actually cast votes. Democracy isn’t a metaphor or a game. This year especially it’s a deadly serious test.
All of us who want a different occupant in the Oval Office need to do more than we ever imagined, and more than we have ever done before, to win this fight. I’m talking about you, my readers, not the paid campaign staff, not the candidate’s family and surrogates, not the pundits or strategists. You simply have to own this idea and accept that responsibility. No pointing fingers, no assuming someone else will pick up the slack, no waiting for a nonexistent cavalry to muster on the horizon. There is only you. That’s a scary thought, I know. How can one average citizen win against Trump, Javanka, Fox, Breitbart, those Russians, and billions of dollars in lies and distortions? One person can’t. But when you become we, and we becomes us, millions and millions of us, then we have an embedded grassroots force too powerful to be denied. That’s the virtuous circle in presidential campaign politics.
If I’ve been asked once. I’ve been asked a million times by supporters of candidates whose campaigns I’ve managed: “What can I do?” “What else can I do?” The answers are what I’m going to lay out in this book. You may believe you’ve given your all and couldn’t possibly do more. This book will serve as a checklist to test that assumption and, I hope, a quasi-mathematical proof that there is always more to do. That there has to be more.
Over the course of my career, every campaign, it seems, offered more opportunities than the previous one, mainly thanks to new technology. The year 2020 will be no different. Seize the weapons at hand! Which means, for one thing—yup, you naysayers are going to have to reactivate your Facebook and Twitter accounts. Social media can be a nightmare—soiled by trolls and hate—but it’s also a powerful megaphone for average people. You don’t need a big ad buy to create a big megaphone.
Of course 90 percent of the electorate votes in states that are not really competitive. They’re not battlegrounds. “I live in Alabama. We’re going to lose Alabama. What’s the point of working here?” Or substitute California or any one of the other forty-plus noncompetitive states.
I love this question. It’s one of my favorites, and the answer is one of my favorites too. Short version: we’re all in this together. The nominee builds and inspires a talented and motivated staff; the staff in turn recruits, inspires, and believes in strong local volunteer leaders; staff and volunteer leaders welcome, train, listen to, and believe in volunteers—you; and you motivate, give strength to, and make the impossible seem possible for the candidate. This virtuous circle crosses state lines, and I’ll show you how it happens.
And of course, doing all you can to help Democrats win up and down the ballot where you live, no matter where you live, could not be more important. Our new president will need as many allies as possible to help dig us out from the hole Trump has put America in.
This is a practical and, I hope, comprehensive guide to everything you as a deeply concerned citizen can do to elect a new president in 2020, sometimes without even leaving your house, though it’s a big plus if you do get out and about. For those for whom this will be your first political rodeo—thanks and welcome aboard! You’re in for a wild ride. You’ll end up knowing better than me what works for you. My ideas will spark new ones of your own. And while this book is focused on the general election and defeating the sociopath currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a lot of what I want to teach and encourage you to try will work in any political race, from city council member to governor. And if you’re so motivated you’d be willing to pack up your bags and work full-time on the campaign? Our nominee will need designers, data scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and community organizers. Check out their job board and jump all the way in.
I’ll try my best to make you confident that neither your time nor treasure will be wasted. Boots-on-the-gro
und campaigning like this doesn’t require special knowledge or skills. It requires commitment and work. My goal here is to unlock this commitment and channel the work. I believe I know how to help potential volunteers get over their initial fears. Fears?! You bet. Knocking on that first door, having that first door slammed in your face: it’s happened to all of us who have been on the political front lines, from presidents to precinct volunteers.
But aside from the occasional rude person, interacting with voters and other volunteers is a blast. You’ll leave more energized than when you started.
* * *
—
The oft-invoked distinction between the air and the ground campaign—first employed with warfare, I suppose, then football—pertains to political campaigns as well. Airborne media messaging is a vital battleground, and it is not restricted to multi-million-dollar TV ad buys anymore. Think Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all the rest. The ground campaign—registration, walking through neighborhoods to get out the vote, and much more—is dear to my own heart. I guess that’s pretty clear. It’s so damned important for building the virtuous circle! I’ll begin my discussion with the air campaign in order to set up parameters for the discussion of the ground campaign that will actually win this election and send our commander in cheat back to the links.
So, are you ready?
Then let’s get to work.
1
OFFENSE/DEFENSE
In any political campaign, the battle of the airwaves, which now includes the phones in our pockets as much as the TVs on the walls, requires playing both offense and defense. Offense requires sharing our candidate’s ideas and plans and attesting to his or her character. This must be primarily a positive message, which is what some of us wish politics were about more of the time. Defense requires calling out all the opposition’s lies and attempts to sow division, exposing them for the utter bullshit they are. There’s still a place for inspirational rhetoric, but this is what politics is, or seems to be, all about all too often. Especially now.