Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America From Trump--And Democrats From Themselves
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Copyright © 2020 by Rick Wilson
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Forum, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
CROWN FORUM with colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 9780593137581
Ebook ISBN 9780593137598
crownforum.com
Cover images: Bloomberg/Getty Images
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
A Note to Readers
Introduction
Why This Book?
Part 1: The Case Against Trump, or Four More Years in Hell
Four More Years in Hell
American Swamp
The Crazy Racist Uncle Act…Isn’t an Act
Cruelty as Statecraft
Trump’s Economic Bullshit Machine
Generalissimo Trump and Pillow Fortress America
All Rise: President McConnell’s Courts
The Environment
Imperial Trumps
Our National Soul
The Mission
Part 2: The Myths of 2020
It’s a National Election
The Policy Delusion
America Is So Woke
Kumbaya
You’ll Get Obama’s Minority Turnout
Muh Youth Vote
Part 3: Army of Darkness: Trump’s War Machine
The Trump 2020 War Machine
Never Underestimate Incumbency
Trump’s Messages and Strategies
No Heroes in the GOP
His Fucking Twitter Feed, Fakebook, and Fox Agitporn
The Mainstream Media
Deepfake Nation
You Have No Secrets
The Death of Truth
Part 4: How to Lose
Flying by the Seat of Your Pants
Playing the Campaign, Losing the Reality Show
Asking the Wrong Polling Questions
Magical Thinking
The Culture War: Where Democrats Go to Die
Reviving the Clintons
The Danger of Democratic Trumps
Taking the Infrastructure Week Bait
Externalities Are a Bitch
Part 5: How to Win
Only Fight the Electoral College Map
Speaking American
The First Rule of Trump Fight Club
Start Early
Start Advertising. Now.
No More Potemkin Campaigns
Make the Worst of Trump’s Base His Running Mate
Reaching Trump Voters, If You Must—and Sadly, You Must
Be the Party of Markets, Families, and Security
Third Parties and Spoilers
Investigate + Interrogate > Impeach
The Target List
Part 6: Epilogue
Election Night, November 3, 2020
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Also by Rick Wilson
About the Author
A NOTE TO READERS
When I wrote Everything Trump Touches Dies, I had no idea the slightly flippant title would become an iron law of American politics, but here we are. The reaction to ETTD was beyond my wildest expectations, and I am honored that folks have found it a source of encouragement and inspiration. Every day, the damage mounts and Trump’s curse adds to the political body count.
ETTD changed my life. In it I found a voice I didn’t know I had, and Running Against the Devil is the next step on a very unexpected journey.
Running Against the Devil isn’t simply a sequel; it’s also a warning to take the 2020 election with the deadly seriousness it merits. As we understand more clearly each day the dangers Trump poses for America’s future, everything legal should be on the table. (And if you do something illegal, don’t tell me. I’m in enough trouble already.) This book is a window into how I fought and won campaigns for decades, and if sometimes the tough love seems a little more tough than love, I hope you’ll understand that’s exactly why. This is the fight of our lives, and we can’t afford to fuck it up.
The creation of ETTD took place in late 2017 and early 2018, and then as now the belief that any book would be overcome by events drove me to write faster. If anything, the sense of rising danger from Donald Trump made the writing of Running Against the Devil even more urgent. Books take time, and by the time this is in the hands of readers, a thousand new crazy moments that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, or a month ago, mean that new information and new realities will intrude into even my best-laid plans. Stick with me, though. There’s a quiz at the end.
INTRODUCTION
ELECTION NIGHT, NOVEMBER 3, 2020
Imagine you’re a Democratic strategist, one of the top figures in the 2020 nominee’s campaign. It’s Election Night, and you feel something familiar in the air. It’s a feeling of confidence, of rising joy and anticipation. It’s been a long, tough campaign, but victory is in sight.
You’re going to win, and you know it. It’s a certainty. After four years of Trump, the Democrats are poised to claim a sweeping Electoral College and popular-vote victory.
Finally.
The last few weeks of October were a blissful whirl, with polling numbers looking strong across the board and your candidate joyfully working the crowds in swing states. She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing media profiles. Almost every newspaper in the country endorsed her in the final week. America, after so many centuries of right-wing injustice, finally appears to have achieved a state of beautiful progressive wokeness and is ready for its bold socialist future.
After the debates, it was clear your candidate, though occasionally rattled by Trump’s in-your-grill debating presence, had triumphed. She was smart, articulate, and progressive. She’s everything you’ve dreamed about since Obama. Trump has been flailing, angrily tweeting a dozen times a day, stoking the MAGA base at an endless series of campaign rallies, and sounding crazier by the minute. He’s punchy and tired, and looks worn-out.
You and your campaign colleagues have even started those elliptical conversations about what role you might play in a Democratic White House, mostly couched in the faux-modest “Oh, I just want to help the future president in any way I can…” tones of people who are already plotting for office space and picking out curtains.
A few of your older, wiser hands don’t seem to share the infectiously optimistic Election Night mood. They lack the same sunny optimism the candidate displayed as she sat in the holding suite after the last long day of campaigning ended. They keep staring nervously at the FiveThirtyEight map and running the same mental calculations over Electora
l College numbers they’ve done a thousand times. But hey, you feel really great about this.
The campaign’s social-media metrics were weird the last few days, though, and your data and analytics people were sending increasingly worrying messages about the massive inflows of ads from brand-new super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark-money groups. You convinced yourself these were just the final gasps of the Trumpian grifters making a last buck on the Donald, or perhaps his Russian friends trying an end run. The Trump campaign and the RNC (but I repeat myself) ad buys were scattershot, and on issues that seemed off-kilter.
As the night starts, the ballroom is packed to the gills with eager, happy people ready to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror of history. The media risers, crowded with the A-talent from every network, are jammed. The results are about to come in, and the army of reporters in the back of the ballroom is in a near frenzy.
You didn’t repeat the Hillary mistake of not visiting the states Trump and his Russian allies scored in 2016. Your candidate made the stops, though the crowds were never quite as large or raucous as you wanted. Your state organizers tell you they’ve got armies of volunteers knocking on doors, making calls, and driving turnout.
Hell, none of the final tracking polls showed Trump even close except in Michigan, home of Kid Rock and one of the most stark political divides between the city and suburbs anywhere in the nation. In Michigan, his numbers weren’t just surprising; they were downright terrifying, but your pollster assured you it was an outlier and that you’d still take Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin.
The exit polls were closer than you wanted but still looked good. As the first results were about to roll in, the AP, Washington Post, New York Times, Decision Desk, and Politico analysts started pinging you and the rest of the campaign’s senior staff.
“What’s going on in Michigan? Do you hear this stuff out of Florida?” Something is off the rails, and you don’t quite know what it is yet.
By 9:30, it’s not looking like you expected. Ohio is showing a razor-thin Trump lead. He’s winning Michigan handily. Florida is Florida, and although you had projected a four-point lead, by 10:00 P.M. the vote total shows Trump up by 65,000…and the Panhandle hasn’t even fully reported yet.
Florida’s enormous influx of Puerto Rican voters meant the Democrats were on track for a stunning victory there, right? Wait. Didn’t someone mention in a meeting that the Hispanic turnout operation in Florida was a bit smoke and mirrors?
You post high numbers in South Florida, but everywhere else in the Sunshine State, Trump is tearing you apart. When the Panhandle does report, everything outside of the blue enclave of Tallahassee is posting numbers in the low 60 percent range for Donald Fucking Trump. Your mind flickers to an angry set of emails and Slack messages a few weeks before about avoiding the issue of gun control in North Florida, but your candidate insisted not only on an assault weapons ban but a ban on semiautomatics as well. Metrics show that north of the I-4 corridor you’re losing everywhere except liberal Alachua and Leon counties by double digits.
“What the hell is happening in Wisconsin?” is your next question. With the Democratic gains in 2018, it seemed like a lock that Trump would go down in flames, especially after the disastrous scam of Foxconn left Wisconsin workers holding the bag for a failed deal with China. Wisconsin farmers had suffered terribly from Trump’s trade war. When you see that the race is essentially tied, you think, “What in the actual fuck is going on here?”
A few thousand votes turn the easy layup of Pennsylvania into a disastrous loss. Hell, even Minnesota is closer than you thought. You get destroyed in Ohio, with record rural turnout offsetting the cities.
In nearly every swing state, you’re losing everywhere outside the metros and the most affluent suburbs. Turnout is sky-high, which your models predicted would be great for your candidate, but even then you’re just missing the margins.
That’s why, come midnight, your candidate is in the suite, calling Donald Trump to concede the election. There are tears all around. You can hear Trump on the speakerphone, curt and smug. You dread seeing that first triumphant tweet from the once and future president.
The next morning, you begin to put together the mosaic of data points in your head from the last few weeks. You start to see the messages and strategies Trump and his campaign used that seemed lurid and absurd at the time but now begin to make perfect sense.
They weren’t trying to win big, or swing the nation toward a new ideological polarity, or find the next savior. They were animals, trapped in a win-or-die moment, and they resorted to tooth and claw. You realize as the Electoral College numbers rise for the Republican that your campaign mistook Trump’s sloppy, shambolic, hateful, stream-of-excrescence campaign for what was happening behind the scenes. There, for an army of professional Republican campaigners wedded to Trump out of desperate necessity, it was ride or die.
Suddenly, your candidate’s detailed policy proposals, white papers, and granular knowledge of climate change, reparations for slavery, gun control, Electoral College reform, the Green New Deal, and healthcare reform weren’t assets. Your pride in having the most progressive candidate and campaign since FDR turns to ashes in your mouth. Maybe giving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders keynote addresses at the convention, where they could declare fraternal communist solidarity with the workers of the world, was a mistake.
You understand too late that your race to the left to win the primary and secure the progressive ideological edge blinded you to the reality of largely center-right states on the Electoral College scoreboard. You handed Trump the weapon he used to cut off your head. Sure, Trump’s lowest-common-denominator message was cultish, racist, and blisteringly stupid, but it was simple, constant, and repeated…and you kept feeding him issues to use against you.
Wall. MAGA. Judges. Socialism. Revenge.
You thought your progressive message was universal and that the swing states have the same political polarity as California, New York, or Massachusetts. You believed you could shame Trump and Trump voters into listening to the better angels of their nature by talking about diversity, inclusion, and liberal values. In reality, you were giving the Trump campaign fodder for the weaponized grievance machine that put him in office in the first place.
Boy (or your preferred gendered interjection), were you ever wrong.
The Republicans built a nearly invisible high-precision machine that hit the phones, emails, social-media feeds, and televisions of targeted cohorts of voters in swing states. They used issues and messages that seemed alien, discordant, or even silly. They distorted, twisted, and slandered your message, policies, and values, turning out the GOP’s base vote by using your own candidate’s progressive overreach and winning back just enough of that seemingly lost cohort of GOP women. Remarkably, they even kept the damage among Hispanics below the fatal level.
You lost to the worst president in history.
He didn’t beat you; his record, his hideous personal behavior, the reeking cloud of corruption, and his broken economic promises made him unelectable. His divisive, shitty, be-worst reign was a stain and an embarrassment. You lost because you made the election into a referendum on policy, not a referendum on Trump. You went into a reality-television contest not understanding the rules, and the master of the genre kicked your ass.
In the words of the poet, sage, and philosopher DJ Khaled, “You played yourself.”
Now that you’ve seen one future timeline for the 2020 election, let’s try one that doesn’t end with four more years of this umber clown wrecking everything we as Americans hold dear.
WHY THIS BOOK?
To paraphrase the political scientist Liam Neeson: “I have a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.” For thirty years, I took those skills and put them to work electing
Republicans. My clients didn’t always like the advice I gave them, but when they took it, we won races, managed hideous political and personal crises, and reshaped the political battlefield in states across the country.
I no longer use those skills to serve the party I once loved. That party is gone.
I’m not telling you this as part of a job application. I’m telling you this because Democrats are going to lose to Donald Trump in 2020 unless they understand what my former team is about to do.
In this book I’m going to treat Democrats like a client. The Democrats are terrible at the work of electoral politics and they need to hear this. After thirty years, I’ve learned that in politics and crisis management, there are two kinds of terrible clients.
The first kind of terrible client knows they have a problem but becomes enraged and defensive when you analyze it for them, break it down, and prescribe a cure. Their anger over being told what’s wrong and how to fix it is a natural but irritating bug of human nature. As a crisis manager, I’m almost always the bearer of bad news, tough love, and rigorous correctives.
These clients know they’ve screwed the political pooch. They know you’re right. They know that no matter how many times they roll the problem over and tickle its belly, the situation isn’t amenable to being ignored. But they hate you for the work of extracting them from the situation they created. The resentment they feel—even when you’re successful—is because you made them stare into their own moral voids, personal and professional failures, and most of all, cowardice.