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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Rick Wilson
Read between
February 8 - February 15, 2020
This race must be a referendum on Trump, or the Democrats will lose.
You are already tired of hearing me say that, but it’s the truth and you need to internalize it.
It’s smart and cynical, and if you need to beat a man who practices pure, unadulterated opportunistic politics, you’d better be ready to practice pure, unadulterated opportunistic politics.
Don’t believe me? Have you been living in a cave? Have you taken a Marie Kondoesque vow of digital celibacy because too much news fails to spark joy?
Democrats don’t have to play by the GOP and Fox (but I repeat myself) rules.
For Democrats, the voters they need are right in front of their eyes: the large and growing cohort of Republican women who broke away from the GOP, and the white, Democratic men who broke for Trump in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida. Democrats who recoil at actually messaging to these old white dudes, writing them off as a lost cause or
viewing them as an intractable enemy, are miscategorizing these voters.
“Speak American.”
Over and over again in elections up and down the political scale, simple, robust messages on heavy rotation triumph over complex policy.
In a Walmart Nation, don’t run on boutique issues.
Or, as a campaign mentor once said to me, “Never underestimate the power of dumb.” Language matters. Presentation matters. Charisma matters. Policy? Not so much.
Cortez. In fact, the great victories of the Class of 2018 came from more moderate Democrats.
One trick I and many others have used to win races against the left is simply to treat the Democratic base as it is, not as the Democrats think it is. DSA members won’t believe this,
They represent just 8 percent of the American electorate, 22 percent of the Democratic voter base, but 39 percent of the social-media cohort. This is the most vocal, activist part of the base,
When will Democrats learn that Bernie is in a party of one: the Bernie Party? The nominee in this cycle will need to watch for Angry Old Commie Throws Hissy Fit, 2020 edition.
The reality isn’t as lofty. He’s a grumpy, mean old bastard who stomped off in 2016 after doing the
absolute minimum for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Bernie is Trump reelection insurance. If he’s the nominee, I say to my Democrat friends, get ready to lose forty-five states. If he’s not, prepare for Bernie to mutter a few words of mealy-mouthed support for the Democratic nominee and then keep on being Bernie.
“The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.”
Speaking of Cambridge Analytica, they’re back with a new name and still working for the Trump reelection effort via the RNC. Data Propria, CA’s new cover name, is the same suite of software tools and many of the same people, with all the same spooky tiebacks to Russian investors and coders. What could go wrong?2
Very few campaigns understand the first fundamental rule of responding to negative ads: Don’t repeat the charges. The second fundamental rule of negative attack ads? Never, ever let an attack go unanswered.
It’s grievance culture.
Trump has brilliantly exploited it, and 2020 will see the grievance, paranoia, and self-loathing of the GOP blossom into central themes. It’s profoundly pessimistic, and fundamentally un-American.
Everyone is coming to get you. The immigrants. Black Lives Matter. Antifa. The deep state. Silicon Valley. The godless homosexers. Academia. Women. Sloths. Atheists. Muslims. Jews. Zoroastrians. Who knows what else will be added to the catalog, but the Fox media programming will always give you a clu...
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First, the hero narrative.
Then, the fear narrative:
Without me, the economy will collapse. We’ll be taken advantage of by world powers in both trade and security.
Get to know their board members, folks.
Crazy Facebook pages pushing fake news to the Trump right are here to stay. If the Democratic campaign isn’t staffed, trained, and ready to push back on these stories instantaneously, expect a meaningful fraction of the American people to buy into characterizations of your candidate’s life, morals, finances, religious practices, and sexual appetites that are lurid, crazed, and utterly false.
The Democrat needs to use swift replies with a video or graphic component to increase the reach of every response. They need to be fast, funny, authentic, and cutting. Don’t hesitate to go to the vaults to hurl out Trump’s triggers and insecurities—his business failings, his taxes, his payoffs to porn stars, his terrible polls, his physical appearance, his friends in jail, his D-grade celebrity, and, of course, his tiny, tiny hands.
presence. For 2020, they have to build a smart, media-friendly team of surrogates who can get on television—the only place attacks are real for Trump—and follow his rule: Punch back twice as hard.
The key is to recruit, train, and inform surrogates early, and tune them to one key point: Always bridge back to making the race a referendum on Donald Trump. Skip the senior statesmen or people with their own ambitions and agendas; get quick-thinking, sharp surrogates with social-media amplification powers. Set them free to “commit news” every time they’re on camera.
The media wants war, fire, loud noises, alarums, and explosions. Democrats need press people who are aggressive as hell and don’t need much sleep.
It’s about the damage he’s doing to everyday Americans. It’s about his corruption, vulgarity, dishonesty, broken promises, and failed policies. Be angry. Be aggressive. Be American. Voters want to see some fight from the Democrats, a return of the happy-warrior ethos where you don’t duck a fight and you’re ready to take on bullies. Stop with the “deeply disappointed” tone—hoist the black flag and commence cutting throats.
They should be folks who understand the media in Florida or Michigan or Arizona or Pennsylvania. Spend the money; it’ll be worth it. Those operatives need to feed the state press corps in the target Electoral College states stories of real people who have been hurt by Trump’s policies—talk about agriculture in Iowa, trade disasters in Wisconsin, the Puerto Rican hurricane relief failure in Florida, and so on. The national press, with few exceptions, won’t chase or find
You want a story about that Iowa soybean farmer weeping because she supported Trump and now she’s losing her farm. You want one about that union worker in Michigan or Wisconsin who hated Hillary and held his nose while voting for Trump. Now the trade war has cost him his job.
The old rule of politics is “Hang a lantern on your problem.” If you set the narrative, you retake control of the story. Identify the problems, then wargame the hell out of your responses. Tell the lawyers in the room to fuck off; their caution will kill you when it comes to messaging.
Know your history, have a full inventory of your dirty laundry, and be ready to own it before the bad guys own you.
Donald Trump broke something fundamental in our politics: the value of facts and truth.
In 2020, Trump is counting on his ability to lie his way to a second term. He will do so shamelessly, constantly, and even proudly.
Hannah Arendt’s 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism,
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false…no longer exist.11
In the 2020 campaign, Democrats need to plan to combat the effect his lies have had on the media, and on Americans. Trump has conditioned them to a quick-cycle pattern of behavior:
Major news outlets have wrestled mightily with calling the president of the United States a liar. They are complicit in accepting his lies—often delivered personally, late at night from his own cellphone—and in amplifying them,
He’s not bothering with “John Barron” any longer; now, he’s a “senior White House official.”
Second, while fact-checking is both meritorious and necessary, it’s also almost completely ineffective for Trump voters. You can’t and won’t move them with facts.
No, folks. It’s not a style. It’s a pathology, and in 2020 the Democratic candidates need to prepare for a picture of America painted by this president, both the fake good and the fake bad.
He’ll lie about the scope and intent of the culture war, because Trump understands how deeply conditioned his base is by Fox, talk radio, and the grievance culture of the right. Trump’s framing will be apocalyptic: It’s me or sharia law. It’s me or the scourge of government death panels. It’s me or godless communism (and/or Muslim theocracy) in the dark future.
He’ll be working very hard to present a false but compelling case that choosing the Democrat means a quick slide in the markets, the destruction of John and Jane Suburbanite’s retirement fund, and a future not in a luxury condo in Del Boca Vista but one of living below a highway overpass, scrounging for roadkill.
No matter where the economy goes in the next year, he’ll argue that the tax bill—arguably the biggest legislative action of his presidency—helped most Americans. Democrats must make the case that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was not a bailout for America but a monster payday for a small number of hedge funds, banks, and tech billionaires.
