Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump--and Democrats from Themselves

by Rick Wilson

Senator Kamala Harris ran a campaign that’s kept her in the top tier of Democratic candidates,

Having her as president or VP would—probably—have an effect on black turnout similar to Obama’s in 2008.

African Americans have given the Democrats their votes with stunning regularity and consistency for decades. The only differences come with turnout

Donald Trump’s support with African Americans is…what’s the word? Oh, yes: abysmal. Racism will do that.

With the rising tide of racial violence inspired by Donald Trump’s rhetoric, and the large presence of covert and overt racists in his base of support, I’d argue that the path to activating African American voters leads through Charlottesville.

idea that Trump is bending the arc of history in the wrong direction is more compelling than a reparations plan.

26 percent overall favor reparations.15 Perhaps surprisingly, only 58 percent of African Americans favor them.

political superheroes in the black community: Barack and Michelle Obama. Both of them have sky-high popularity

whatever it takes for the Obamas to come out and hit the road for the last six months of the 2020 campaign.

Memorize this rule: Old people vote. Repeat it until it sinks in. The youth vote is a moving target, a political unicorn

Yes, youth participation was up in 2018, and meaningfully so. The percentage of millennials who voted in 2014 was nearly doubled in 2018. Want to know why? Because the oldest millennials (for our purposes, people born between 1980 and 2000) are closing in on forty, the age when voter participation tends to kick up.

Democrats still overplay the idea that the youths can be turned out

Obama proved nothing. He goosed the youth vote with eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds by 2 percent to 17.1 percent, but here’s the hard reality: If not a single young voter pulled the lever, he still would have won the 270 votes in the Electoral College he needed

pulled out the under-thirty demos, the map flipped in only two states: North Carolina and Indiana.

peak youth turnout in the last thirty years was in 1988, when teen heartthrobs and sex symbols Mike Dukakis and George H. W. Bush were on the ballot. That year, turnout for eighteen- to thirty-year-olds was 18.1 percent.

You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people.

focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states.

don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent.

problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote.

There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote.

a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter.

Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free”

massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties.

not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation

“The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.”

It doesn’t matter if he’s trying to lose. The hard political reality is that the machine under him is doing everything they can to prevent it,

Do not mistake his clownishness and stupidity for a campaign that’s incompetent. The consulting people around him are not dumb, and they’re going to have unlimited resources.

in 2020 the entire apparatus of the GOP will form a shield around him.

Guys and girls in my former business can and will transform any lack of Democratic discipline into attacks that cut you off at the knees. You might think it’s absurd to transform the Green New Deal into “They want to take away your hamburgers and airplanes,” but middle Americans famously don’t read policy but do watch television ads. And guess what? It’s now an article of faith in the Midwest and South that the Green New Deal is there to ban meat and motorcars.

Democrats start with a massive disadvantage. Donald Trump is the most effective, powerful, and amoral user of earned media in the history of American campaigning.

60 million followers—including a few million bots controlled by foreign intelligence

Pitching long-lead, deep-think stories about your candidate is a fool’s errand.

Trump’s power resides in earned media propelled by social media. Twitter is his singular megaphone, and he understands the way the mainstream media is drawn to it

need to call bullshit on Trump’s lies and crazy talk and then immediately reframe Trump’s message as part of an indictment on him.

Donald Trump’s game is the base and the base only, which, though it limits his ability to seek and persuade new voters, also liberates him from much of the hard work of politics.

His base thrives on the transgressive, offensive, ignorant, and linguistically incoherent sewer outflow of his Twitter feed.

the outrage from anyone outside the cult only makes the bond more powerful.

no Democratic candidate has anything close. And of course, he gives no fucks. He will lie. He will mislead. He will incite fear, hatred, and violence. He will burn down norms and sanity. He is an unconstrained political force. It’s his best weapon, and he’s going to use it.

digital is the campaign.

In 2016, Russia, Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica, and, in their punch-drunk way, the Trump campaign hammered in messages to Trump-friendly audiences using Facebook and other targeting data. The RNC had their own data operation and, once they got on board with Trump, turned it on for him. 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.

Most of the campaign will be invisible to people outside their very narrow target set. The messages will be tuned and timed to keep his base aroused and fevered, and to try to normalize and tribalize his behavior for softer Republicans.

Paid television ads are still a killer app in politics because—and

old people watch television and old people vote. Trump was outspent on TV and cable in 2016 because he thought he would lose

But 2020 will be different. The campaign will spend, and spend big, on television in the targeted states.

Prepare yourselves for claims from Trump on the economy that fly in the face of the reality on the ground, that elide the weak spots, pain, distress, and inequality in America, and that feature Trump claiming credit for everything good and right from sea to shining sea. His sole pillar of strength—though undeserved—is the strength of the economy, and this will be the core of his paid advertising.

Not anymore. Pandemic. Millons unemployed.

Because Trump’s team knows this is a referendum on him, they’ll shore up this economic message as often as they can, seeking to reframe the election as their own referendum of prosperity versus godless socialism.

The Democratic nominee will be cast as a dangerous socialist, an open-borders traitor, a coastal elite liberal snob, a killer of babies, and a taker of healthcare.

Liberal activists have a repeated pattern we’ve often exploited: Their desire for national ideological conformity is boundless. That’s why there are virtually no pro-life Democrats;

Twitter has made this problem worse, but for a generation my old team rolled up Democratic seats with ads that hammered that cultural divide. “San Francisco Democrats” was poison for a lot of formerly Democratic voters in the South and Midwest.

Trump’s negative ads are going to drive Democrats not just to defend but to hyperbolically defend late-term abortion, a full ban on guns, single-payer government-run healthcare, higher taxes, and all the cultural signifiers of the elite coastal cities in which the Democratic political and media machines reside. 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. The only way to respond to a negative ad is to hammer home with a different negative ad of your own. You can never explain or correct; you must simply nuke them back with more.