A Citizen's Guide to Beating Donald Trump - Hardcover

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David Plouffe served as the campaign manager for Barack Obama's primary and general election victories in 2008. He was the architect of the strategy for both elections. Prior to running the Obama campaign, Plouffe served as a leading Democratic Party media consultant from 2001 to 2007, playing a key role in the election of US senators, governors, mayors, and House members across the country. He lives in Washington, DC.

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1: Offense/Defense

In any political campaign, the battle of the airwaves, which now includes the phones in our pockets as much as the TVs on the walls, requires playing both offense and defense. Offense requires sharing our candidate's ideas and plans and attesting to his or her character. This must be primarily a positive message, which is what some of us wish politics were about more of all the time. Defense requires calling out all the opposition's lies and attempts to sow division, exposing them for the utter bullshit they are. There's still a place for inspirational rhetoric, but this is what politics is, or seems to be, all about all too often. Especially now.

Last time around-2016-did you get out there and inform everyone you could find about Hillary Clinton's plans on taxes, community colleges, jobs and wages? Probably not, or very infrequently. I know I failed on that score. I spent all of my time and energy retweeting coverage of the latest Trump outrage. And while all this outrage certainly did motivate many of us, we did not help the candidate reach potential supporters with her economic message. And of course the press paid close to zero attention to that part of her platform, or any of it, because that's how the press rolls these days. The big three TV networks spent only thirty-two (thirty-two!) minutes on issue coverage in 2016. Press coverage of campaigns has become more Jerry Springer, less Walter Cronkite.

A good defensive campaign against lies and fabrications is necessary, and the discussion of how best to play defense follows, but we cannot let ourselves disappear down this toxic rabbit hole. We must take command of the conversation-play offense-by painting the contrast between the incumbent and our Democratic nominee, by emphasizing the positive case for our nominee, by motivating the individual voter to do just that-vote for something, not just against. I'd like to talk about the more pleasant task first.

In the Trump era, most voters are locked in, about sixty-five million of us-the number I cited in the introduction-are very unlikely to vote for the man. #NeverTrump. About sixty million are very unlikely to vote against him. The vast, vast majority of these Trump supporters have not wavered and never will, no matter the evidence, not even if their lives have been made demonstrably worse by his actions and policies.

Clinton famously denigrated half of these folks as "deplorables." Some clearly are. But that was a lot of eggs to put in that basket, and it was self-evident enough without having to step on a political landmine to underline it. Did the comment have any effect? I haven't seen any conclusive data, but it did turn into a rallying cry that likely increased GOP enthusiasm and activism.

My point is let's not worry about people we can't convince or who fall into the trap of thinking, "How can all these people vote against their own self-interest?" Seriously, get rid of that kind of thinking. People like to define their own self-interest, not be lectured to from an ivory tower about what it should be.

Let's focus on those who are gettable. In the impending election, there will be plenty of Americans who are going to vote-we'll address those who are at risk of not voting in a later chapter. And a portion of these "definitely voting" voters are not locked in, which to us has to mean that they may vote for the Democrat. They're real, not mythical. They don't look like unicorns. They are as ordinary as the neighbor next door, and we can win some of these good people.

In 2020, they'll likely fall into the following categories:

First-time voters

Historically this cohort skews heavily Democratic, but we absolutely cannot take them for granted. Some will be undecided.

Third-party voters

A higher percentage of Clinton's voters than Trump's who were flirting with a third-party vote never came home to her, based on exit polls and other postelection research. It could have been in part because while clearly these voters did not love Clinton, they loved Trump less, but they thought she was going to win so it was OK to cast a protest vote. The votes collected by the Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson and the Green Party's Jill Stein were not an insignificant factor in her loss and may have turned the election.

That math is straightforward: Trump's ceiling was 46 percent nationally and 47 to 48 percent in key battlegrounds. He won the critical state of Wisconsin with just 47.2 of the vote. The two main third parties accounted for almost 6 percent of all votes cast. It was the largest percentage for third parties since the Perot years. In 2020, Trump's ceiling may still be in the same range as in 2016-not 50 percent. All of the possible third-party voters won't vote Democratic, but we need to bring on board as many of them as we can to make his win number as high as possible, and therefore not attainable.

Obama/Trump voters

An unlikely sounding metamorphosis, I know, and when this species was discovered, I had a hard time believing the news-but these much-talked-about voters are alive and well, especially in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest. How had they preferred the young, skinny black guy with the Muslim-sounding middle name, voted for him twice, in fact, and then pulled a 180 and got down with the old racist with a gold-plated commode? I think the votes in '08 and '16 can be best explained as support for the most "changey" candidate, and the votes in '12 and '16 as support for the candidate believed to be the most authentic fighter for people like them. In '16, they were duped, obviously, and that's infuriating but also motivating: we can undupe at least some of them, maybe many.

People who voted for Trump in '16 but are open to an alternative

Some may be voters who had deep reservations about Trump but even deeper reservations about Hillary Clinton. Or they feel that everyone has so much baggage, the corruption has been going on forever, everyone does it, my vote doesn't make any difference anyway-any number of equivocations. Still others somehow convinced themselves that Trump would drop the clown act and be more "presidential" once he got to the White House. Some might even have serious substantive problems with one or more of Trump's key initiatives, especially the tax cuts for the rich or attacks on health care. And could some have succumbed to an unacknowledged misogyny? Not impossible. It saddens me to say this, and I could be wrong, but I think there is more resistance to a woman president then there is to any male from a minority group, or a male of any sexual orientation. Hillary put cracks in the glass ceiling, but it is stubbornly strong.

Voters who did not vote for Trump in '16 but are open to him this time around

Amazing but true. Sometimes these are referred to as Romney-Clinton voters, and yes, they do exist. Admittedly a small universe, this one, but there are no doubt Republican and Republican-leaning voters, many of them in suburban areas, with a higher than average income, who just couldn't pull the lever for Trump based on his appalling lack of character. They could become "transactional" voters, those who still think Trump is a personal Dumpster fire but for whom one litmus-test issue may be all that's required, and in 2020 the economy may be it for Trump. They like the tax cuts, how the economy is working for them, the rollback of many regulations. In other words, he'll have a chance to make his case to them this time. And so will we.

Much of the Democratic nominee's campaign will be spent obsessing over and communicating and measuring progress with these relatively small slivers of the electorate-in the core battleground states, just a few hundred thousand people; if the battleground map expands, a couple million. You and I...