When, as in a John LeCarre novel, an agent from the KGB comes to the West and offers all the goods, one must pause. Members of the CIA or MI6 must ask: "How can we know that we can trust this guy, that what he's the real thing and not a plant for sowing misinformation? Are we being played? Perhaps he's a mole. Why should we trust someone who's done us in so many times in the past?" Democrats should be asking these questions of Rick Wilson, a Republican operative since the 1980s who's been slaying Democrat candidates for almost three decades. "Why should we trust him, the dirty, stinkkin' Republican?"
Wilson realizes that he needs to prove his bona fides before anyone will heed his plea, and he has done so by publishing a previous book by the title Everything Trump Touches Dies: A Republican Strategist Gets Real About the Worst President Ever (2019 update) and by spending about the first 75 pages of the current book bad-mouthing (even foul-mouthing) Trump. His public recantation of Trump establishes his Never-Trumper credentials. He's proven--at least for the 2020 election--that he wants to see the Democrats vanquish Trump and his ilk. One may suspect that he won't retain this attitude if the Republican Party returns to a vision of center-right normalcy and fidelity to constitutional and democratic norms. But for now, Wilson and those steadfast few who've remained Never-Trumpers have earned their place in the fight against this nefarious foe of constitutional government, the rule of law, and democratic norms.
Indeed, I became impatient with his recitation of Trump's almost innumerable sins: tell me something I don't know. It's like a KGB agent spending his de-briefing explaining how bad life is inside the Soviet Union. We already know that, let's get to giving us your playbook. When Wilson gets down to giving us his tradecraft and analysis, the message he provides isn't so secret. In some sense, it's already in the open but Democrats don't want to believe it. Here's an executive summary:
1. The president is elected by the Electoral College and only the Electoral College. To say that Hillary Clinton or Al Gore won the popular vote is like commenting upon how big, bright, and shiny your runner-up trophy is. It means nothing. All power goes to the winner of the Electoral College.
2. A corollary of the first point: the election will be won or lost in 15 states that could go either red or blue. The Democrat nominee must kiss California and New York and all the loyal blue states good-bye at the convention and tell them "I'll be back right after the election." After the nomination up to Election Day, the nominee will need to focus--even obsess--on 15 states.
3. For the record, I list the states Wilson identifies as controlling the outcome of the 2020 election. I list them in their order of Electoral College magnitude. I include the 2016 winner and electoral votes:
- Florida (T-29)
- Pennsylvania (T-20)
- Ohio (T-18)
- Georgia (T-16)
- Michigan (T-16)
- North Carolina (T-15)
- Virginia (C-13)
- Arizona (T-11)
- Minnesota (C-10)
- Wisconsin (T-10)
- Colorado (C-9)
- Iowa (T-6)
- Nevada (C-6)
- Maine (C-4)
- NewHamphsire (C-4)
Of these 15 states, Trump carried nine of them in 2016 for a total of 141 electoral votes. Clinton received only 46 electoral votes from the in-play states. Wow. For the Democrats to beat Trump in 2020, they will need to drastically change this list and hang-on to their other states. But as Wilson notes, most Democrats will crawl over broken glass to vote against Trump, so there's little reason to believe that solid blue states will defect.
3. Democrats must focus on winning the Electoral College. (This mantra repeats throughout the book.)
4. This upcoming election will not be like Federer-Nadal tennis final with the contestants holding a deep respect for one another and the game of tennis while playing under carefully delineated rules governed by an umpire, line-judges, and infallible re-plays. Oh, no! It will be a knife-fight with Butch Cassidy rules--it's the only way Trump fights; it's the only method by which he can win. If the Democrat nominee doesn't come ready for a knife fight, he or she will be gutted before realizing what happened.
5. Like all presidential elections involving an incumbent, the election will be a referendum on the incumbent. The election will have one issue: Donald Trump. The best thing that the Democrat can do is run against Donald Trump: his corruption, his ineptitude, his ignorance, his cruelty, his lying. Details about issues may play for some in the primaries, not in the general election. No voter reads the party platform and decides how to vote based upon it. Most voters are only marginally informed and are motivated by feelings like trust and fear. Trump feeds on fear, Fox News feeds on fear. The Democrats must neutralize the fear factor by promoting a candidate who disarms fear and instills trust. Wilson sums-up his point:
This race has absolutely nothing to do with policy. This race is about Trump and a competing candidate’s personality and presentation, not about soon-forgotten policy papers and the administrivia of running a government. . . . Policy is a luxury good in this election because this race is against a man, not a party, a platform, or an ideology. Democrats are fighting a cult and a cult leader, until they realize that the referendum against Trump is about Trump, he has the winning hand.
6. Democrats gained control of the House by winning over suburbanites, women, and disaffected Republicans. The Democrat nominee can't afford to alienate these groups. Also, there are Obama-Trump voters out there who can be won back. Farmers, businesses, and wage-earners have all taken economic hits with Trump's trade shenanigans, the stock market and overall favorable economy news notwithstanding. These folks, too, can be won back. But the Democrats need to figure out one big problem.
7. The Culture Wars. Democrats will have to set aside long-running habits, accentuated by some of late, toward ideological purity. The great temptation is to mirror the Republicans who have exiled (as all revolutionaries do) those who might challenge the most extreme ideological purity, who might taint the revolution by questioning the leadership or confusing the masses. Instead, the Democrats will need to find a way to defuse topics like abortion, immigration, guns, and other like emotional issues. What might this entail? Wilson makes some suggestions that don't seem unreasonable. Democrats must find a way to make anti-abortion, immigration, and "2nd Amendment" voters realize that Democrats won't take radical steps on these issues but will act in ways that are reasoned and sensible. (By the way, such positions of a moderate, reasoned nature will sell well with most folks who self-identify as Democrats.) Wilson suggests that Democrats will need to change some minds and that what sells in Berkeley, Boston, and Bronx-Queens won't sell so well in the heartland areas of the swing states. Dems are going to win in Berkeley, Boston, and Bronx-Queens (AOC's district) in any event. Wilson makes his point:
What do you think sells in western Pennsylvania? Mike Rowe, or some stern-faced, super-woke, commissar telling a white working-class guy he’s got to give up eating meat, driving a truck, and hunting? You may want him to, but how well do you think that sells? The guy who used to make $37 an hour in a union auto-parts manufacturer doesn’t give a flip flying f#@k about climate change, genderless bathroom mandates, or paper straws. He does care about getting and keeping a real job that can support his family and--stop me if you’ve heard this one before – his guns and religion. 276
I could go on at length about various other perspectives and recommendations, but this sampling should provide a sense of Wilson's offering. He writes in blunt words that are at times rough and scatological. One non-scatological example: "Trump loves digital advertising. He loves it like a fat kid loves cake." Certainly a vivid image, but perhaps not the best register of discourse in a book about a very serious topic. He describes his recommendations as "tough love," and one has to take it for what it's worth. But I certainly believe that Democrats ignore him at their peril.
And one final topic before signing off. Wilson doesn't say much about the Democrat field of candidates. He does describe Pete Buttigieg as " a man who is demonstrably smarter than most of the field," an assessment that I agree with. Of Elizebeth Warren, he writes:
For being a clunky and terrible candidate in a number of areas . . . Warren has gotten closer to a winning message, broaching the ideas that government doing socialist-adjacent things doesn't have to be socialist itself. It's smart politics. My conservative eyebrows are raised. As an ad guy and message strategist, I think she's closing in on something that resonated with Trump base the first time around--that the little guy without an army of lobbyists in Washington, D.C. gets f@#%ed and everyone else gets rich. I hate to admit it, but she's not even wrong.
This is a message window for the Democrats if they can just skip plying "The Internationale" at the convention.
But Wilson expends the most ink about any candidate (other than Trump) on Bernie Sanders. Because I'm planning on writing a blog to come about the Sanders phenomenon (he's not just a candidate, he's a phenomenon), I'll keep it short. Here's a part of what Wilson writes about Sanders:
In a year when Democrats had a stark, bright-line ideological contrast before them--sane, stable-to-a fault HRC vs Donald F@#$%^&* Trump--one group stood out in switching their party preferences radically: the Bernie bros. Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of Sanders voters switched their preferences on Election Day to Trump. These aren't principled progs; they’re arsonists.
Bernie is Trump re-election insurance.
If he's the nominee, I say to my Democrat friends, get ready to lose forty-five states.
Now the first thing to say about this quote is that the only gravity that binds Wilson and Sanders is the Dark Star, Donald Trump. In normal times they are light-years apart in their thinking about political economy and travel in entirely separate orbits. Thus, one can argue for all his tell-it-like-it-is-tough-love, Wilson's judgment is warped by his ideological animus toward Sanders. But because Wilson isn't the first, nor certainly the last, to raise these points, his words to give me pause. After all, what if he's correct? Well, that's a minefield to traverse in a later blog.
