A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump
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The obvious opportunity for your next house party is the convention in Milwaukee in mid-July. Back as recently as 1968, conventions were consumed with backroom, brass-knuckle wheeling and dealing to select the candidate. There was lots of drama about what would happen and how. And who would do what to whom.
These days conventions are as close to a free throw as you get in politics. Not much breaking news. Really hard to screw up. Clint Eastwood and the empty chair at Romney’s convention in 2012 being a notable exception to that rule.
But this is also the great thing about watching one of these modern conventions with a bunch of people. The terrific parts carry their own water—this year, the Obamas’ speeches will be must-see TV, as will those from the nominee’s spouse, VP pick, and of course the star of the show, our next president.
And there can always be surprises. Remember, it was at John Kerry’s coronation in Boston in 2004 that most of the country caught its first glimpse of the powerful oratory of one Barack Obama, and this year one or more of our rebuilding farm team could likewise startle the nation from the podium in Milwaukee. And all the less compelling speakers and the boilerplate stuff? They give your guests a good opportunity to imbibe, nosh, and exchange wisecracks and get closer as a team.
With such a crowd, watching the convention should not be an angst ridden, looking-between-your-fingers-at-the-big screen-TV experience. It should be inspirational, motivational, and clarifying, and make you proud of our party and our nominee. Now, in the unlikely event the primary contest continues all the way to this convention, with the result up in the air, well, that will be a different TV show altogether, and a different house party, and reconciliation and unification will be harder, more urgent, and with far less time to pull off.
And hosting a crowd to watch Trump’s shitshow of a convention? It certainly won’t be inspiring, but it will be searingly motivational and clarifying. The America they all talk about in Charlotte will be foreign to you and me. If it doesn’t fire you up to do everything within your power to wipe Trump off the face of the political earth, I’m not sure anything can. It’s a good moment to make sure everyone in attendance is signed up to volunteer and financially contribute if they can. Pass around the laptop and ask those that aren’t to get with the program.
Next on the house party calendars around the country could be the debates. Your candidate’s strong performance when you’re watching with a crowd can provide a real shot in the arm for everyone. It’s not much different from the joy of watching your favorite sports team win an important game surrounded by your friends and family.
And when it’s not going so well in the debate hall, it can induce a lot of concern, panic, yelling at the screen, and even fatalistic reaction. It’s a good reason why you should not watch alone or even with just your nuclear family. There is strength in numbers and, if necessary, comfort as well. It definitely was in the first reelection debate with Mitt Romney in 2012. This was the evening when President Obama seemed marooned somewhere between boredom with the whole thing—detached and distracted—and just plain irritated. We who had prepped him for the debate had clearly done a piss-poor job as well.
The pundits’ reviews were universally bad. Many suggested we had thrown out the window not just our modest but steady lead over Romney but the entire election. Voters’ reviews were no more kind.
Many of you watched those debates with your fellow Obama supporters and volunteers. I spent that night—all night, if I recall—with my colleagues in a crowded conference room in our hotel in the suburbs of Denver, trying to diagnose what had gone wrong, how to fix it, and most pressingly important, how to get off the mat only eight hours later. Basically, how to say a bunch of the stuff we should have said in the debate, without it seeming not a total mea culpa. Though for the most part it was.
The president had events in Colorado and Wisconsin the next day before heading back to the White House, and we actually had a decent and pretty feisty day after: Obama, with gusto and relish, prosecuted Romney for lying through his teeth about his record and plans. Still, the coverage of these pretty good events was understandably still being viewed through the prism of the debate: “Where was this Obama last night? That Obama was petulant, professorial, and missing opportunities.”
What are the five stages of grief in presidential politics? Shock, defiance, regret, gallows humor, and finally optimism that we would get our mojo back. That last one was a bit forced and hopeful at three a.m., but it turned out to be true. In the following days, it was incredibly helpful to me and my colleagues to process the debacle with one another. I can’t imagine you, the committed Obama supporter, turning on your TV and watching that debate alone, or even with spouse or kids. You’re thinking, “This seems really bad—but maybe it’s not as bad I think.” Then the commentary starts pouring in, and it universally judges the performance as even worse than you thought. Was Andrew Sullivan right? Had Obama thrown away the presidency in those ninety fateful minutes? Just about everyone agreed that he might have. And in the middle of all this negativity you’re alone or close to it, maybe texting a friend or two for comfort? Sounds miserable. Much better to be with a group. You could vent. “Why was Obama so bad? “I’ve never seen him like that!” “Why did he keep looking down and looking annoyed when Romney was talking?” “Plouffe and Axelrod don’t know what the hell they are doing.”
All warranted. Then you could turn to your friends and guests, discuss the ramifications, calmly and rationally, and hopefully work through things with the others. “Well, he had a huge lead after Romney’s 47 percent gaffe. He can afford to lose a point or two.” “There was no way he was going to win as big as the polls were saying. Tonight probably just accelerates Romney’s comeback, which was going to happen anyway.” “As long as he shows up in the next two like we know he can, it’ll be OK.” “Yeah, this is the first time he hasn’t delivered at a big moment. He’ll get the next two.” “Totally. There is no way he can be that bad two more times.”
Whatever it takes. Then the discussion most likely moves to what’s next. “Well, the race is going to tighten up, so we all better do more volunteering than we were planning on.” “I doubt he’ll bomb again in the next debate, but we better get out there and do all we can to lock in support now.” “We better mix things up for the next one—I’ll host.” Superstition around debates is always appreciated. After we did indeed recover in the second debate, some of us took it to an extreme for the third and final debate, insisting on eating the same food that day and wearing the same clothes as we did for the second. Please feel free to employ your own superstitious behaviors as needed!
Wouldn’t that be much better to soften the blow than fretting alone? Working through everything with a group, maybe you would not have slept much better, perhaps a little, but you’d certainly have woken up with a bit more perspective and resolve.
Best of all for all your volunteers in the country? Be good in the debates! That’s a lot more fun and gratifying for the candidate, the campaign team, and all the volunteers watching around the country. In his six general election debates, Obama went 5–1. So despite our one wretched bomb, we provided some highlights and momentum in the other five. Those are great memories. It’s also just simply nice, after all the hard work you are putting in, to sit back for ninety minutes and watch the main event together with your fellow travelers and spend some time processing and socializing before and after. In any election, it’s important to be reminded together of the stakes and the differences between the candidates, to reaffirm why winning is so important, and to talk afterward about what else each of us can do to get our candidate across the finish line.
In 2020, we will be reminded just about every hour by our president’s offensive and dumb tweets. The three debates are opportunities to see the Orange Menace and our candidate side by side, a perfect comparison. They’ll be the perfect reminder of how close we are to electing a sane, good, smart
, and well-meaning president (not to mention all the issue and policy differences). For the supporters gathered around your little campfire, could it be more motivating, reassuring, and powerful?
Homely it may be, but once you put your creativity to hosting, the opportunities are endless. Live in a rural community that’s been gutted by Trump’s crazy tariff wars? Invite a few farmers or small business owners to go to the town square or local diner to talk about how Trump has screwed up their livelihood with taxes, or embargoes, or labor practices. Invite the local paper, local radio station, or the neighborhood blogger to cover the festivities. If they don’t make it, include them on the list of recipients receiving your own video. Or livestream it yourself on YouTube. Don’t wait for the nominee’s campaign people to organize an event like this—they may never get to it. Take it into your own hands.
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And don’t just gather your friends and neighbors; think about all those out of towners who’ve come to help out in your community. Those of you who live in a battleground state will have field organizers from the nominee’s campaign camping out (sometimes literally) in your community or close to it. Outside a battleground state, you might have campaign staff temporarily living nearby helping raise money or recruit volunteers. It would be great if you could invite these folks over for a late dinner, hang out a bit, maybe watch a sporting event or show together—and they’ll also have to listen to your ideas for the campaign and tips about the local scene. If they’re really good at their job, they’ll be as hungry to hear them as they are for the home-cooked meal
I’m sure I am biased, or at least affected, by the many years I spent as a campaign staffer in Delaware, Iowa, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Illinois (and traveling to every state but North Dakota and Alaska), where I learned that hosting one-on-one like this will make a huge difference in a staffer’s morale. Particularly in the beginning of my career, those of us in the Democratic trenches didn’t have money to eat out anywhere decent or any time to cook, much less go to the grocery store. Food was on the fly, a gas station burrito here, a 7-Eleven hot dog there, a doughnut and a Slim Jim getting us by.
We didn’t know many people in the communities we moved to. Our apartments probably didn’t have TV, and we certainly didn’t have laptops, and there was no Netflix to stream for a few minutes before falling asleep on a lumpy mattress and doing it all over again the next day. Maybe a beat-up paperback of Fear and Loathing on The Campaign Trail ’72 to keep you company. Wages have improved a bit over the last generation, but the life is still pretty spartan. Field organizers aren’t doing it for the money, but still it’s hard and lonely, and you can get really hungry.
Extending an invite to your local campaign staffer to break bread with your family, play with your kids, or watch something together may not seem like much, but to a broke, tired, unhealthy campaign staffer, your split-level ranch will seem like a luxury spa. Of course, they’ll feel and probably say they don’t have time. Cajole them until they assent to your generous invite.
Morale is important. Just make sure that you plan ahead for seconds and thirds at the table and excuse the pace at which your guests eat. Your meal will probably be the best and most food they’ve had in months. Make this banquet a weekly occurrence, and you may just be responsible for that staffer’s performance at an even higher level. You may make a lifelong friend. When I went to Iowa in frigid early January to celebrate and mark the ten-year anniversary of Obama’s caucus victory with much of the original Iowa campaign team, it warmed me up to hear many of the former organizers talking about the local precinct leaders and volunteers they still stayed in close touch with, even though for some of them this event was the first time they had set foot back in the state in ten years. When you go through a crucible together, the ties that bind are unique and long lasting.
5
BATTLEGROUNDS
It’s a term you’ll hear me and everyone else remotely connected to any presidential campaign use over and over—battleground states. And if it already feels battle worn, it’s worn out for a reason. Blame it on the Founding Fathers and our Constitution.
To win the presidency, you have to win the vote in the electoral college. The popular vote (total votes cast throughout the nation) is interesting, but as we learned in 2016, it’s almost irrelevant in the presidential election. There are no more important considerations than mounting a campaign strong enough to win enough of individual states to get to 270 electoral college votes.
Because of this, in a presidential campaign, you can sometimes feel like you’re running super-sized governor’s races in a few states more than you are a national campaign. You know ahead of time that some states are rigidly red, and others are truest blue; you pretty much know whether you can count on them to vote your way when the electoral college meets. While you can’t ignore any of them, the real battle is fought in the rest, what we now call the purple states.
So what is the cleanest definition of a battleground state? A state whose electoral votes really are up for grabs in a particular election. In true landslide presidential elections—the last one was George H. W. Bush’s in 1988—the electoral college results are so lopsided that no states could be identified as the ones whose narrow margins of victory could have gone either way and made all the difference. The winner wins just about all of them.
There will not be an electoral landslide in 2020. The battlegrounds will be the difference, just as they were in 2016. We could think of them as the tipping points in this election. They could swing either way. They’re the states that happen to make our close divisions as a society manifest for all to see. Eke out a victory over your opponent in enough of them in 2020 and become president of the United States. Or remain as president for four more years. How they fall will decide so much of our country’s fate in the coming years and decades. It can’t get more important than this.
In 2020, there are five, maybe six for sure. That’s all. There could be more—say Texas and Georgia become targets for the Democrat, and New Hampshire and Nevada for Trump. But these won’t be the tipping-point states–their 270th electoral vote—but they would be cushions: their 300th or 330th electoral votes. Let’s say there are four to six states that won’t be tipping-point states, but one or both candidates will decide to contest.
The other thirty-eight to forty states are done deals for one candidate or the other. Some (Hawaii or Mississippi) will be blowouts—sixty to forty or even wider for one of the candidates. The popular vote breakdown in some other states (South Carolina or New Mexico) might look relatively sort of close—say, 55 to 45 percent—but the losing side has no actual chance of getting to a win number in that state. Close doesn’t count in the electoral college. You get zero electoral college votes for losing narrowly. And if you lost the college narrowly—well, as they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Only great pain comes from coming close.
I want you to have a little historical background with which to wow your friends at your next campaign house party. The battleground map in 2020 isn’t going to change much from 2016, but the electoral map has changed immensely over the decades. It’s not static. When you look at historical electoral college results maps on sites like 270towin.com, this reality is shockingly stark. One comparison says it all: in 1976—eleven elections ago—Republican president Gerald Ford (after taking over from the deposed Richard Nixon) comfortably won states like California, Vermont, and Washington, all bright blue states today. Democratic challenger (and winner) Jimmy Carter comfortably won West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, all rock-solid red states today. And you can take this to the bank: the battleground map in 2064—eleven elections from now—will barely resemble ours this year. States will transition from blue to purple (that is, battleground status) to red and then back to blue. A lot of this movement will be driven by demographics. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, running for Senate against Ted Cruz and comi
ng pretty close, showed that it’s just a question of when, not if, Texas becomes a battleground state. So that’s good news.
If you ponder more recent elections, the role and definition of battleground states comes into sharp focus. In 2000, Al Gore lost Florida by 538 votes, 538 votes that made the difference between a war and no war in Iraq, accelerating climate change versus fighting it. In 2004, George Bush had a healthy national popular vote lead, but Kerry came within 100,000 votes of winning the presidency.
The culprit was one state, Ohio, and Kerry’s campaign hit their number—they secured the total number of votes they thought it would take to win the Buckeye State, based on sound turnout estimates. What happened? Something we should fear this time as well—the Bush campaign pulled off one of the more miraculous feats in recent elections, building an organization in Ohio strong and deep enough to find, register, and turn out conservative voters in numbers few thought were possible. Kerry’s sure-bet figures did not keep up.
With the 2000 and 2004 outcomes freshly in mind, the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 were bound and determined not to allow it to come down to one state again. Because of Obama’s appeal and strength as a candidate, our passionate and motivated volunteers, and abundant financial resources, we decided to put new states in play, including some the Democrats had written off or not contested in a long time. We wanted a large number of states in play, playing more offense than defense, giving us a much higher (that is, safer) margin for error. We prepared for exceedingly close races that could come down to a vote or two per precinct, razor-thin margins of victory and defeat. We could lose many of the states we, if not many other people, considered battlegrounds and still win the presidency.