A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump

by David Plouffe

  Now let’s say the other unsure voter conversation follows about the same script, though maybe you need to help her check if she reregistered after a job move. And you need to talk her through her disappointment after Clinton lost in 2016. That loss produced a lot of discouraged attitudes, and for some a sense that they don’t recognize the country anymore, which means Trump will win again. You get her to a good place. She’s voting.

  The last two of the eight voters who do answer the door that Saturday afternoon are 100 percent sure they are voting, new information that you will capture and feed into the campaign’s data blender. But you learn an even more important piece of information: both of these individuals are leaning toward a third-party candidate. The first thinks both major parties are corrupt, and she wants to send a message. The second’s favorite candidate in the primaries lost, and now he can’t get excited by our candidate—he disdains Trump, would never vote for him, but he’s not excited by the Democrat.

  It’s your moment again! In both cases. Listen carefully to what these two critical Pennsylvania voters are saying, then use your heart and your head to determine the best approach. The one common denominator is they’re not voting for Donald Trump. You may share some of your own concerns about our nominee as you learn more about their concerns. Such sharing leads to a more genuine and therefore effective conversation. Your core message to each of them: You don’t like Trump, and there’s only one way to get rid of him. Vote for the opposing major party candidate. Simple as that.

  Let’s say you have some success with voter number one. She says she’ll think hard about swallowing her distaste for both major parties and vote for our nominee. The second voter remains steadfast in his refusal to vote for the Democratic candidate despite participating in the Democratic primary.

  Both of these really important data points will now ascend into the cloud, and the campaign will deploy resources—advertising on the internet or through the mail and perhaps one or more person-to-person contacts with another volunteer, hoping to lock in voter number one and see if anything else can be done to unlock voter number two.

  At the end of your shift, you can look back and count two voters who were disinclined to vote but now report they will. One leaning third-party voter may well be back in our column. Three voters in the whole big state of Pennsylvania in this whole big country of ours. How can that be worth the trip to Philadelphia from Syracuse?

  Back to some simple math. Let’s say on that Saturday 5,000 other canvassing volunteers in Pennsylvania recorded similar outcomes—an average of three voters in which our campaign could be more confident. That’s 15,000 total. And the same results are reported on Sunday. We’re at 30,000 for a weekend. And there are five weekends in October leading into 2020. That’s a total of 150,000 voters we now feel more confident will be casting ballots to award Pennsylvania’s must-win 18 electoral votes to our nominee.

  Now, not all of these voters will follow through, and some were likely going to vote the right way anyway. But that universe of 150,000 voters is more than three times the margin Clinton lost Pennsylvania by in 2016. So yes, your trip from Syracuse was worth it. It was most definitely worth it.

  If you believe fervently in beating Trump, and you have the time and means to travel to a battleground state, shame on you if you don’t. That’s a strong statement but a true one. You need to get fully into the fight.

  On the other hand, you don’t have to leave Syracuse to have a meaningful impact on the outcome of the election in the core battlegrounds.

  Phone banking and texting into the same cohorts of voters in Philadelphia can result in acquiring the same data and intelligence, but locking in supporters of our nominee, that happens at the front doors.

  Now, I’ll be honest. There’s no substitute for a person-to-person contact. I’d choose that over phone or text anytime. But it’s certainly an important additive ingredient, and for sure there are voters who won’t answer the door (or it’s hard to get into their building). Digital contact, or even old-fashioned snail mail, is the only way to reach them.

  You can help with the long-distance contacts from nonbattleground states in two ways.

  Directly or in coordination with the DNC, our nominee will probably rent office space throughout the country for this very purpose: providing supporters who want to make a difference in the battlegrounds directly a place to gather to do so. The big cities will definitely have designated banks. Just Google “Nominee phone banking Seattle” or “Nominee campaign office Los Angeles” or go to our nominee’s website, which should have an easy-to-navigate page for finding the local office nearest you. Farther afield, even a small local campaign office or the local headquarters of the Democratic Party will likely be set up with a phone bank. If that system is organized properly, you should be able to work with the same fresh lists of target names, based on real-time data, that are used for door-to-door canvassing.

  The second option is to make the calls from your home using a list from the campaign, or attend or host a phone-banking get-together, with everyone on hand dialing into the same state, having a shared experience and a shared impact. Host one yourself. You know I think that’s a great idea.

  Don’t get discouraged by hang-ups! Yes, you are telemarketing, but for a worthy cause, remember. You’ll experience the same low-contact percentage of those canvassing on the streets—you’ll find people not answering, whether cell or landline; not wanting to talk, saying they are busy; or being downright rude—but you will get through to some voters, and in every shift you work you will connect with a few people, and there will be enough others like you reaching out to target voters, day after day, month after month to yield a massive, positive, cumulative impact.

  On the phone, you will have many of the same conversations you would have had at the front door. You will need to listen, most of all, but don’t miss any opportunity to commune with these voters, try to gently persuade, impart important information about the voting process in the voters’ state and precinct, whether this be early voting details in Florida, same-day voter registration in Wisconsin, or polling location details in Pennsylvania.

  The campaign should also have some nonphone ways to help out in the battleground states. You may be given the option to write postcards to certain segments of voters, maybe new registrants in Detroit, congratulating them on becoming a first-time voter and assuring them how important their vote is to your family in Greenville, South Carolina.

  You could be writing notes to voters in Miami who the campaign is convinced would support our nominee if only they’ll actually turn out. You could write a very personal message about what this election means to you and your family, why you think their one vote in Florida could make all the difference. Florida should be the easiest venue for making this argument convincingly. I hate to sound like a broken record (if you remember vinyl) but if just 539 more Floridians had voted for Al Gore in Florida in 2000 . . .

  I hope the campaign also adopts a program to allow supporters throughout the country to send notes to the precinct captains and neighborhood team leaders in battleground states, thanking them for their leadership on their behalf. Love a volunteer leader today!

  A note from you in Boise, Idaho, to a volunteer leader in Elko, Nevada, saying you just wanted to thank them for all they are doing, you admire their commitment so much, all of the campaign’s supporters throughout the country are rooting for them to succeed and win their area and their state for the Democrat. Such a note can get them to push through this tough day and give them motivation to have a better one tomorrow. It’s hard work and they are doing it on behalf of all of us. They’re the true heroes in the battleground states in this supremely important election.

  6

  MONEY

  If money is such a big deal in politics, why does it merit the smallest chapter in this book? Because my main point throughout is the supreme power of volunteers in a modern American
presidential campaign. I want you to volunteer. This is how we’ll win in 2020. Believe it or not, your time is more valuable to the campaign than your money.

  Also, there are so many ways to lay out the big picture of volunteering to pique your interest and then show you all the ways you can join up. I hope you try many of them. Meanwhile, there’s only one way to contribute money. Contribute money. Boring, though of course vitally necessary.

  Finally, volunteering will be an amazingly fulfilling experience—and always challenging too because you are dealing with human beings, and human beings, well, they have issues. Getting the most out of any collection of men and women, building a culture of trust and honesty, and valuing empathy and selflessness? Extremely gratifying. Writing a check? Not as much, let’s admit it.

  Many people have asked me if their money is really needed, if their one-millionth of a billion-dollar nut will make a difference given the tsunami of money, billions and billions of dollars, now inundating the American electorate.

  Well, think about your family. Is your financial contribution to the budget important? Yes. Incredibly so. Is it as important as your love? No. There’s a rough analogy here, I think: yes, your one-millionth of a teaspoon counts; no, it’s not as important as your time.

  If you are thinking about making a sacrifice in order to make a contribution—perhaps forgoing a trip with an aging parent or putting off a car or appliance repair—please don’t. Should we tragically lose in 2020, or win by too close for comfort, there will be a lot of reasons, but money will not be at the top of the list. There are enough financially secure people in this country to properly fund our campaign and make any financial sacrifice from you unnecessary. Prioritize your volunteer work, not your bank account. Devote as much time to the campaign as possible, helping us register, persuade, and turn out voters, while also recruiting other volunteers to do the same—and while always fitting this sacrifice around your family life and your work.

  Of course it’s easy for me to give priority to the volunteering because I know that the one campaign activity in the past most of you reading this book probably have in common is that you have already donated dollars to Democratic candidates, up and down the ballot. For those of you who did so in 2008 and 2012 to help elect and reelect Barack Obama, thank you, thank you, thank you. Your generosity helped us hire the staff, reach the voters, and communicate the message that secured two presidential victories. Many if not most of you have donated to one or more of the Democratic primary candidates in this election cycle, and you’ll contribute to the winner pretty soon. My emphasis of the value of your time does not diminish the value of your money. If you can afford to give, we can’t afford for you not to.

  Why do you donate so generously? It’s not for bragging rights, that’s for sure. I do urge you to post news of a donation to your social media, explain your reasons, maybe spur others to follow suit. But the main reason we contribute is to send a message. Perhaps you were motivated by an answer to a tough question in a YouTube clip or in one of the gazillion debates. When we see and hear a candidate who speaks to us, the easiest way to register our approval is to whip out the phone and make an online donation. It feels good to put some teeth behind a positive reaction.

  You may react in the same way to certain issues, controversies, and in this of all years, the latest outrage from the incumbent. During the “Muslim ban” travesty at the start of Trump’s term, many Americans marched and went to airport protests, but the way most of us could register our horror at what was unfolding was to log on to the ACLU site and make a donation. Likewise, when Trump’s accomplices instituted their vindictive policy of separating children from parents at the Texas border.

  Most of us couldn’t travel down there to help the heroic groups on the ground. The best way for us to fight back was to give money to local advocacy groups like RAICES (the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services) and the Texas Civil Rights Project, who were doing all they could to stand up to our racist president’s policies and help those affected. It most definitely could be that a tweet our sociopathic president sent out was so over the top and filled with so many lies that it motivated you to send another twenty-five dollars to the candidate you think has the best chance of ending the tweeting, at least from those under the imprimatur of the presidency. In any event, it feels like the best way to fight back.

  And it is a great way to fight back. On these issues you probably can’t send too many messages. Contributions really can unlock a ripple effect. If you let people know that you clicked and gave, many more will then follow suit.

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  Maybe your contributions to presidential campaigns have been spontaneous expressions of support. If so, you’re an outlier. Most people don’t volunteer their money, so to speak. One of the big problems with raising cash in a campaign is that it’s so expensive. Maybe you supported another candidate in the primary but went straight to our nominee’s website the day she or he clinched the nomination, and then you gave a donation. That’s terrific—the candidate will need a donor base four or even five times as large as the one that sufficed for the primaries—but realistically most of this expansion will result from smart and persistent digital marketing that identifies, motivates, and secures financial support throughout the country.

  In the end, our candidate should receive about five million individual donations, totaling close to a billion dollars. Many of these donors will also become volunteers directly through the campaign, a twofer.

  There are still many donors who still respond best to mail solicitations (especially older donors). And such solicitations are not cheap. Fund-raising event costs, whether headlined by our candidate or a surrogate, add up. Dozens of events are held every week all around the country. Travel costs are a big-ticket item for our nominee, his or her spouse, and all the politicians, athletes, and celebrities whom we need on the ground in battleground states.

  Legal costs, compliance costs, office rent for all the local offices throughout the country, insurance, and so forth. Thousands of staffers will be required to organize the work of the hundreds of thousands of volunteers, especially in the battleground states. If they can’t afford them, the staff is spread too thin, our volunteer leaders are not properly supported, and the entire organization gets creaky, leaky, and less effective. The staffers are mostly young kids right out of college, and they’re not making much for the sixteen-to-eighteen-hour days they are working, seven days a week, but it adds up fast, and all of it adds up even faster. The campaign is a large, complicated enterprise. It’s a massive start-up.

  Then there’s the biggest of the big-ticket items: advertising and other forms of voter contact to reach all of our target cohorts. Television ads may run for five to six months in some major cities like Miami, Orlando, Philadelphia, and Phoenix, expensive markets. Radio ads. Mail pieces. Literature dropped at doors. I hope the largest segment of this category of spending will be for digital advertising on any and all platforms. The creation of all this content—film shoots, editing, video and print production—is very expensive. The market research and testing to determine the exact messages for these ads, and the targeting guidance behind the ad buys, is an almost-around-the-clock enterprise and on its own will cost millions.

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  The subject of the previous chapter—battleground states—and the subject of this chapter are synonymous, for all practical purposes. Follow the money and you’ll know which states are the battlegrounds. Or from the campaign’s perspective, determining the battlegrounds will determine where most of the money is invested. The campaign may throw some money at a few states just to test the waters; or to try to trick the opponent into matching an expenditure with its own expenditure.

  These are not the big decisions. The most crucial decision of any presidential campaign is the identification of the real battlegrounds, where the real money is
invested—the full-court press is composed of candidate time, surrogate time, staff, advertising, and the all-important registration and GOTV efforts. Those last two efforts are volunteer driven, but only the volunteers’ time is free. Supporting it is cost intensive.

  In short, the campaign has to ensure that the volunteers’ time is carefully invested. Waste it and the election is lost.

  A lot goes into the battleground decision. Let’s take a quick look inside that sausage factory, where the first stop is the clear-eyed and cold-blooded assessment of whether the candidate can win a particular state. Do the various registration and turnout models look promising? Even if there is a credible path forward to compete in a close election in, say, ten states, this good news doesn’t end the analysis. Can the candidate afford to win each of these states? Detailed budgets will be prepared throughout potential target states. Arizona will cost millions, North Carolina tens of millions, Florida upward of $50 million, and Texas, should it truly become a possibility, Lord knows how much the Lone Star State could cost, maybe $75 million, maybe more. A mistaken judgment on Texas could be fatal.

  Are these resources really and truly on hand? No fairy-tale dreaming allowed. Then do the math. Is the appetite for states to target larger than the wallet? In all likelihood, yes. Incredibly tough decisions follow, as the computer software and the campaign leadership’s instinct and judgment mix and match combinations of states and their costs. So many permutations. States like North Carolina and Arizona could have a strategic value above and beyond the cold hard numbers. If we contest them, we make the Trump campaign defend a wider swath of territory under the fear that their 26 combined electoral votes become as winnable for the Democrats as the blue wall’s Wisconsin and Michigan, also 26 votes, guaranteed battlegrounds in 2020.