I don’t think it’s a great idea for Democrats to take advice from Republican strategists, but it’s still interesting to see what they think about the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Tim Alberta gathered several of them in a “smoke-filled Zoom” and picked their brains about everything from turnout theories to who Biden should pick as a running mate. A few interesting themes emerged, some of which are worthy of consideration.
The group, which included 2016 campaign managers “Danny Diaz (Jeb Bush), Beth Hansen (John Kasich), Jeff Roe (Ted Cruz) and Terry Sullivan (Marco Rubio),” tended to agree that most of the motivation the left needs to vote is provided by Donald Trump. With the exception of Ms. Hanson, they all saw Biden’s current relative invisibility as an advantage for him. Partially, this was simply because Biden cannot commit gaffes if no one is listening, but it’s mainly because Trump desperately wants to make this a choice election rather than a simple referendum on his performance in office. He can’t do that if Biden is hidden below the water line. Hanson focused in all her remarks much more on motivating the base, and she thinks Biden is unable to do this from his isolation chamber in Wilmington.
Jeff Roe defined what he saw as Biden’s two main options:
He’s got a decision to make. There’s two schools of thought in presidential politics. I openly subscribe to one of them. You either believe that you win with the middle or you believe that you motivate your base. And when you’re running against an incumbent president, almost always they have a defined electorate, so they motivate their base.
The Democratic primary voters sent a pretty clear message that they believe the way to win this election is not to pander to them but to gather in the middle. But that doesn’t mean that Biden can safely ignore the task of energizing the left. Roe calls this “the difference between a Stacey Abrams or an Amy Klobuchar” as a running mate. “The middle is not where the votes are. It’s the base—and Biden doesn’t have them.”
The general feeling among these Republican strategists is tilted in favor running base elections, but Roe is the most emphatic:
And it is shown time and time again that intensity, when we nominate middle-of-the-road candidates and when they nominate middle-of-the-road candidates, they do terrible. Bob Dole was our worst candidates in a generation, and John Kerry was the worst candidate for them. You can’t do a centrist move in this day and age…
Hanson tends to agree but she’s more interested in walking a fine line.
I would say it goes a little bit beyond base. What it gets him—and you said this just a second ago, Jeff—it gets you enough of the base without freaking people out. And that’s the balance. I would argue that he can’t pick somebody that it’s just going to be so clear it’s not a good fit for who he is. I mean, he does have a reputation of [chuckles] 150 years in politics, and people know who he is, and they know that he is a pragmatic, middle of the road, blue collar, centrist, populist kind of a leader. And so, picking somebody that’s just asynchronous for that, I think will not help him.
Balancing the competing interests of staying on brand and creating some excitement, the group recommended Kamala Harris as his ideal running mate. Elizabeth Warren was ruled out both because they believed she’d scare off the middle and because she’d make it much harder for Biden to raise Super PAC money.
So, that’s the kind of prism they’re looking through for how Biden should position himself, but they also tend to look at the outcome as highly dependent on whether people are focused more on health or on the economy. Jeff Roe came up with the example of a contractor building a beautiful house which then burns down. That’s what Trump is going to argue on the economy. You can trust him to build you another beautiful house. But this won’t work at all if people are still more interested in a president who can contain a global health pandemic. Trump has already lost that argument. Sullivan is skeptical that he can win the economic argument either:
Your house burns to the ground, you’re not thinking rationally. Right now, I don’t know that voters are thinking through this in a logical, rational way, and so I think that they’re not necessarily going to go back to Trump because he presided over it. And the economy is still going to suck by the time we get to the election, even if he’s done amazing things, it’s still not going to be where it was two months ago. And that’s a problem for him.
It may be a problem, but we can sure that the economy will be struggling in November, and Trump has a better shot fighting on that ground than on his record on Covid-19.
Related to that, these Republican consultants are eager to see Biden move to the left. Even when playing Devil’s Advocate, they say he’s better off using identity than ideology to excite the base. They argue that one advantage of him being in non-campaign mode is that he doesn’t have to make big promises to the left. And, above all, they say that Trump is eager to seize on anything, however small, to argue that Biden is a communist just like Warren and Sanders.
The overall impression is a little confusing. They seem to think getting out the base is more important than winning the middle, but their idea of the middle seems to be restricted completely to tax-averse Romney-Clinton suburbanites. What about all those out of work Obama-Trump voters?
When they think about Trump defections, they tend to think of elderly people who are naturally going to be more concerned about their health than the economy. It’s more of a risk for them to vote in person, too, so getting them to the polls will be more difficult than usual in states that don’t have an automatic mail-in option. That’s a subject for a different piece, but low-information working class voters are classic swing voters who make their decisions based on the current economic condition. Trump won them over by arguing that free trade had been a bad deal and promising to blow things up and do things differently in the future. Record high unemployment is going to create swing in this group, but Biden has to capture it. A return to Obamaism might be a good sell in the suburbs, but less so in the sticks.
Overall, I think the flaw in these consultants advice is that they’re describing the kind of campaign that they might be able to support. But how many of them will actually vote for Biden in the fall? In this highly partisan age, it’s hard to win crossover votes from anyone who is politically engaged. The middle among high-information voters is very inelastic, which is why it’s not the middle that matters the most.
Yet, I think all of this is basically wrong. Biden isn’t the one who needs to be chasing voters. When you chase one group too hard, you lose another group. Biden is winning this election right now and he’ll continue to have the upper hand until he blows it. What he wants to do is be welcoming to everyone. He wants to have an argument for why he’s the safe choice. People want some equilibrium. So, Biden doesn’t need to excite his base but he also doesn’t need to stiff-arm the left to appeal to the middle. He has an opportunity to win back a lot of Obama-Trump voters, but he doesn’t need to pander to them or make allowances for their prejudices. He just needs to be steady and offer an unthreatening alternative to Trump, and he’s going to win over most of the swing in the electorate.
Where Biden should bring the heat is as an advocate for everyone who has been screwed over in the last four years and specifically by this pandemic. That’s where he should mine for excitement and enthusiasm.
What blows me away is that they discuss Trump like he’s a normal rational person instead of some unhinged ignoramus. Don’t they listen to him talk? He’s a blithering idiot. Why are people treating him as if he is normal? Have they all gone mad? Are they all that big of cowards?
Thats what narcissists are like, both Trump and Biden are narcissists, HRC clearly was too.
Read Joanna Ashmun’s site on narcissists and narcissism. (It may be on halcyon.com )
So Trump is an inside joke, an act. Trump is a reality show actor, remember? “You’re Fired” from the Apprentice, and so on.
The rich are preparing for the big churn so to speak and the joke is its Trump’s (or Bidens) job to fire America.
Some, many powerful actors, globally, see us as all too expensive to be working, when there are so many others willing to do the jobs for less.
People forget that business is all about profit. Most jobs can be done by guest workers for a fraction of what they cost now. that is what they have been planning, on a massive scale. This is happening even as billions of other jobs are being automated, so its guaranteed to satisfy nobody. thats why they should just call it off, its likely to lead to a war otherwise.
the countries that are sourcing these workers will never share the money they make with their people.
So going back decades they have been working on a plan to do all this. The original one was the General Agreement on Trade in Services. And it is still there basically the one ring of evil in politics now in the US.
Now also (our) Trade in Services Agreement. And several others.
All these deals are intended to “precariatize” large segments of society who now enjoy fairly high wages and status. Turning them into interchangeable parts in a wheel. Read up on Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Taylorism.
go back to the early 80s and the first written declaration of intent was signed September 20, 1986 in Punta Del Este, Uruguay. Starting the Uruguay Round. One needs to understand the first FTA, GATS and need to know a bit about its background and goals to understand the others.
media coverage? Virtually nil.
THE AFSC’s “Trade Matters” publication was covering this debate and covering it well, in the mid 2000s.You can still find those articles on archive.org . They are uniquely well framed and they take a progressive perspective. I strongly recomend reading them. Here is a random link, there are a bunch more. the AFSC is an arm of the Quakers.
Really great people. The best way to find them is the AFSC keyword tag on my site.
http://policyspace.xyz/@@search?SearchableText=AFSC
You can find a lot of articles in the archive.org archive of their site. The keyword search above is woefully incomplete and I have at least a dozen entire documents that I should add to my links section but simply have not had the time, so I recommend you pull up the “Trade Matters” site in archive.org as it existed in the mid 2000s and then just browse it.
You’ll see that a massive, global change is being planned which will change work and basically greatly increase guest workers in order to increase profits and decrease wages.
It is the main reason the GATT was changed into the WTO. GATT was just goods, WTO is goods and services. This is a huge thing because services effects everything, virtually everything. This is also why politics has become so corrupt. because its a big lie. A lie thats we’re still in control, we’re not. You’ll see.An actor in a very real sense.
4.5
We all know that at some point, Biden is going to have to wade into the stream. Until that time, Donald Trump is continuing to dig his own hole deeper and deeper every day. Republican strategists can opine all they want, but they have a candidate hanging around their necks that is the millstone of all millstones. It is simply impossible to point to anything he is doing that is going to persuade anyone who is persuadable that he is suddenly going to be something different. We all remember well all that talk about “the pivot”, and how once he settled into the job that he would morph into a President that could attract voters who might see something that made them comfortable with him. All I see are rationalizations and constant efforts to convince everyone that we are not seeing what our eyes are actually seeing, and not hearing what our ears are actually hearing. He has done nothing to burnish his resume as President. That makes it a very tough thing to spin. They are having to spin furiously just to keep their base satisfied, and minimize the loss of any of those 80,000 voters who put him into office through the quirky workings of the electoral college.
Sure, when Biden is in campaign mode, they are going to find things he says and does, and things in his long political history, to shove into ads to help them try to bring him down. But that will not negate or erase anything that has happened in the last 3 1/2 years. Trump is now a known commodity. And that is the biggest hurdle he has to overcome. And I think we all know that it is not within him to be anything other than what we have witnessed. He simply cannot campaign on “not changing the horse in midstream”, like what George Bush did as a “war president”, because pretty much all he has left in his wake has been destruction. It is hard to convince people that the landscape is prettier than it was before he came, because we can all look out our own windows and see the scorched earth all the way to the horizon. The only ones who look out their window and like what they see are those who would vote for him regardless of what reality actually is.
So what those strategists did is an interesting thought experiment for them, and it is also interesting for those of us who wonder what is going on inside the heads of people like them. But they know in their hearts how fucked they really are with Donald Trump. No matter how many layers of chocolate you put on that turd, when the voter bites into it they are still going to know they are tasting shit. No amount of spin is going to convince them otherwise.
Considering what you say about your neighbors I wonder why you think this.
It’s all coming down to the economy and on that score, how are you going to make it stick that maybe, maybe a little bit, he caused the virus. And OTOH you know he will spend all the money congress can give him to pump up the stock market. It has already rebounded pretty good. So I am not optimistic about this election. And every time I see Joe munching on an ice cream cone I wonder if he is up to,it.
This is the wild card
http://policyspace.xyz/@@search?SearchableText=ds503
-that may make the next Administration, whomever it is, a pariah forever in the eyes of many once middle class people, perhaps billions of people, all throughout the world. Especially the people of the US.
They are slick, but there is such a thing as being too slick, and I think thats about to happen. Time will tell.
Bernie Sanders would have disposed of this problem, and done it skillfully while maintaining the good graces of the ruling elites in many of the countries of the world, the ones who claim they are owed our jobs, incredibly so. People would be happy because two great weights (GATS and TRIPS) would be lifted from all of us at a time when that weight really needs to be lifted, he has made how he feels about the issues of modern day slavery and out of control drug pricing clear.
But both Biden and Trump have tried to conceal them. The lure of all that dirt cheap labor and insane profits for cheap drugs, even at the price of literally millions of lives, (see the film “Fire in the Blood” and open your eyes) is pretty strong.
If it plays out the way I suspect it will, it may really screw the people of this country in a way that goes way beyond how much anything ever has before. I hope I am wrong but I really see a train wreck coming. It doesnt matter which one wins. Its the same train.
But it DOES matter which one wins, because if Trump wins, the ability to dissent and push forward progressive reforms will be eroded (or destroyed) MUCH faster than if Biden wins (along with, especially, Senate Democratic candidates). With the latter, at least there will be more time and space to make the argument for real, structural change (with Bernie there to help in that fight).
Excuse my ignorance, but could you explain that wild card for those of us who’ve never heard of a “ds503”?
This.
Well hes got Larry Summers as an advisor so great start grandpa Joe.
Really? Summers has a great rep, but for me it’s all rep.
5
When your opponent is drowning, do nothing at worst, throw them an anchor at best. I think Biden and his team have this down. Trump is giving them ready made attack ad sound bites daily. No point in wading in when throwing anchors from the shore is a lot safer and more effective. Biden gets to say a few words on how he would do better while shining a light on Trump’s incompetence. And, this gives him time to get the left behind him, so we can all work together and on message come summer and fall.
I don’t know why but it really bothers me to see Joe always eating an ice cream. I mean it really bothers me.