Democrats refused to fall into Trump’s trap. Instead of responding to his absurdities and changing the subject from health care (which excites our voters) to immigration (which excites his voters), Democrats stayed on message and won.
In the run-up to the 2018 election, Democrats across the country had been running on a very specific and effective message—Republicans want to take away your health care and cut your Medicare to pay for a tax cut for corporations and billionaires.134 Trump, whose approach to politics is more instinctual than intellectual, sensed that this was a problem. He decided to change the subject. Out of nowhere he started tweeting about an “invasion” of MS-13 members and terrorists marching toward the southern border. Like all Trump lies, there was just enough of a kernel of truth buried deep in there to give Fox News and the rest of the propaganda operation permission to run with it. It was true that there were a large number of Central Americans fleeing violence who were coming to the United States seeking political asylum. The group was largely children and thousands of miles from the border when Trump began tweeting. To protect against this invasion (invented in his own demented racist cortex), Trump even sent US troops to the border.
Democrats refused to fall into Trump’s trap. Instead of responding to his absurdities and changing the subject from health care (which excites our voters) to immigration (which excites his voters), Democrats stayed on message and won.
This approach was a lesson learned from 2016.
In 2016, the Democrats chased Trump down nearly every rabbit hole and responded to his every tweet, outrage, and scandal. This machine-gun-spray message strategy meant that voters were exposed to a lot of information about Trump—but it was never woven into a coherent narrative. There was no message repetition to drive home the information. It was just ephemeral—one day Trump was racist, another day he was a misogynist, and on a third day he was a crooked businessman.
