Lessons from the 2020 fight against Trump’s war on truth

Danny Wild/USA TODAY via Reuters

Author’s note: the materials that follow were originally circulated by Investing in US to several dozen anti-Trump political activists in April 2020. At the time, COViD was beginning to ravage the country, and some establishment figures (of both parties) chose to believe that Trump’s re-election prospects were therefore doomed. This memo argued (a) that Trump would use misinformation to keep power despite his catastrophic handling of COViD; and (b) that those opposed to Trump could resist his Orwellian brand machine. Given recent renewed interest in Trump’s ecosystem of misinformation, we were asked to make the memorandum public. We do not include explicit references to Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Adam Serwer, Anne Applebaum, Tim Snyder, Daniel Ziblatt, Rachel Kleinfeld, or many others whose scholarly work drove our thinking at the time. This lapse was unintentional. What follows, with few redactions, is the memo from April 2020.

Pundits have repeatedly underestimated Donald Trump. As described by Ron Klain, they failed to understand that Trump is an exceptionally gifted demagogue. Authoritarian leaders such as Trump were chronicled before his time by authors such as Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, and the American version of the threat was spelled out by Sinclair Lewis in 1935 and Neil Postman in 1985. The idea that would be easy to defeat, because he is a psychotic thug with limited intellectual skills, ignores the intellectual flimsiness and often criminal backgrounds of Mussolini, Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Chávez, Castro, etc. No, they were not law professors like Obama, or statesmen like George H.W. Bush. Their expertise was in the skills of organized crime and fascism, and in controlling messages they were more than good enough to destroy their countries.

The core of this brand strategy is one that Trump has practiced for his entire life: projecting a facade of sexual, financial, racial, genetic, and political dominance. For instance, he pretended to be his own publicist and “leaked” fake stories about his own wealth and sexual adventures, even as his businesses were going bankrupt and his wives were nursing his children. He started life with over $400 million, fraudulently transferred from his father at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, and repeatedly drove his businesses into bankruptcy — but used bare-knuckle and deadbeat tactics to always ensure that others were left absorbing the losses. Although his business failures hurt the investors and customers who bet on Trump, for him each setback set the stage for a comeback. He is not even, really, a builder: he was once a developer, but for years most of his revenue has come from branding and celebrity. And politics was always in the mix: for decades, he earned media coverage by floating his ability to win a future presidential contest and restore an America where a man like him would put others in their place. Reports suggest he has earned $2.3 billion since announcing his run for President.

Trump’s tabloid strengths, and complete lack of moral boundaries, attracted opportunistic allies. Many were from entertainment, such as David Pecker, Mark Burnett, and Vince McMahon. But his story is more than just entertainment. His grandfather built the original Trump business by changing his name and country, and starting a brothel; his father built a real estate empire in Queens by consorting with the mob and the Ku Klux Klan; and Trump himself dodged crisis after crisis through money laundering, fraud, and by partnering with ruthless figures such as Roy Cohn. As a political candidate, Trump earned the transactional support of nihilist GOP donors such as Peter Thiel and Sheldon Adelson, and international strongmen such as Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud. As President, Trump leaned on the dead-eyed ambition of domestic allies such as Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell. In office, his cruelty and vindictiveness rapidly subjugated the entire federal Republican Party and much of the federal government into his personal fiefdom. Today, every federal official and program is expected to make statements and disburse resources in service to Trump’s branding needs. As a result, Trump has more loyalty from his base and party than any President in our lifetimes.

This relationship between Trump and his base confuses political pundits, who assume it hurts him politically by depriving him of swing voters in the middle. It is true that Trump cannot “triangulate” as Bill Clinton did. But students of demagoguery understand that Trump’s tens of millions of devoted followers give him a different play for the “middle.”

The assault on the truth

Trump’s base enables Trump to get away with what has been called “the big lie” (often attributed to Joseph Goebbels, but more accurately associated with George Orwell). After all, “millions of people believe me” — so who are the pencil-necked elites to disagree?

As Susan Glasser, editor for Foreign Policy, wrote on August 3, 2018, “The White House assault on the truth is not an accident — it is intentional.”

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, described the strategy as follows:

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth…but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world…is being destroyed.

The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

From his first days in office, when he lied about his inauguration crowd and millions of illegal votes, President Trump has asserted falsehoods about topics large and small. With the support of his “state media” (e.g., Limbaugh, Hannity, Breitbart) and his enthusiastic base, Trump wages a massive daily assault on the shared norms of truth of the Enlightenment Era. Again and again, Trump asserts outrageous claims which are often not merely false, but actually the obvious opposite of the truth. Trump himself not only lies several times per day but also loudly and constantly repeats lies that have already been debunked — see, e.g., undocumented immigrants voting by the millions, his perfect phone call, the state of the US economy, etc.

Trump’s establishment adversaries, consulting their polls, generally conclude that each outrageous deceit will ultimately damage Trump. But his base and allies repeat and amplify and defend his lies, and through repetition those lies become part of the narrative framework that swing voters and journalists use to understand the world. Quantitative political scientists say that this “narrative framework” phenomenon cannot exist, because they cannot measure and prove it, but it worked for George H.W. Bush against Mike Dukakis in 1988, and it worked for his son against John Kerry in 2004. It is also well understood by an older tradition of scholars such as Arendt, who studied Hitler and Stalin. In their time, the “big lie” narrative framework was amplified by editorial cartoons and secret police, and normalized by credulous Western intellectuals seeking to appear sophisticated. Today, lies evolve rapidly and at scale on the dark web and fringe websites, with the most effective deceits spreading via talk radio and InfoWars and Breitbart and Fox News, and finally becoming “legitimate” when bad faith sophists such as Jeffrey Lord and Rick Santorum defend them on mainstream media stations. Trump himself, having established a norm of overt and obvious and daily lies, also uses his bully pulpit as a vehicle to amplify selected gems that emerge from his online community. Whenmainstream newspapers such as The New York Times describe the lies as “controversy” — and Trump’s comments on them as “raucous” or “confrontational” or even “misleading” — the disoriented public accepts the lies as part of how they understand the world.

The only question is whether the lies are mostly true or only partially true. Either each lie sets a new baseline (“Hillary is the most corrupt person ever to run for President”), or it’s proven false — proving the sophistication of Trump’s strategy (“he got the media to believe he was actually endorsing bleach”).

Once this happens, the truth no longer works. As the truth emerges, people instinctively reject it because it “sounds wrong” — in other words, it directly contradicts the “black is white” narrative that Trump and his allies have bludgeoned into our consciousness through repetition.

Trump’s sustained assault on the press is at the core of this strategy. Trump has openly told associates that he discredits journalists so that they cannot hold him accountable. Just as an abusive domestic partner shuts off their victim from the outside world, Trump seeks to control the information environment of his base. Trump and his allies know that once they destroy the idea of independent truth, other checks and balances fall by the wayside. If truth is based on tribalism and superstition, then those with power define reality.

Journalist Rory Carroll, who covered Hugo Chávez of Venezuela for six years before moving to the United States, wrote in the New Statesman in February 2017:

I am now struck daily by a sense of déjà vu. Trump is using the same playbook. … No matter what the boss does, or what is reported, it can all be framed as Trump v Media, and by extension Trump v Establishment. The longer he is in office the more useful this will be — he can be forever the insurgent, his heart in the right place, battling the elites. … Chávez, who died in 2013, ruined the economy and gutted institutions, but he won election after election and is still revered by millions. If Trump is even half as shrewd, he will win again in 2020.

These strategies work. Quinnipiac University reported on August 14, 2018, that a majority of Republicans believed that the news media were “the enemy of the people.” A poll on Aug 7, 2018, found that 43% of GOP voters want to give the President the power to shut down news outlets “engaged in bad behavior.” On July 4, 2017, Axios reported that roughly 90% of Republican voters trust President Trump to tell the truth more than they trust news media outlets including CNN, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CBS. In those same surveys, when asked an open-ended question about Trump’s tweets on Twitter, the most common word volunteered by GOP respondents was “truthful.”

Tens of millions of American voters have been primed to believe anything Trump tells them, regardless of what journalists report. As a result, once Trump has laid down a lie with sufficient force, and gotten his base and media allies to amplify it, and the mainstream media to debate about it as a possibility, that lie exists as part of the assumed truth among voters in the middle.

To see how this works against Biden, consider Trump’s greatest weakness: his overt corruption. Under the old rules, prior to Trumpism, Trump would have been sunk by any of dozens of stories about his family’s personal profiteering at the expense of American taxpayers. So why has he survived?

Because Trump is the anti-corruption candidate. He told us so, repeatedly! Trump is fixated on draining the swamp. It was his slogan! He skewered Crooked Hillary, promising to Lock Her Up. The swamp creatures — the Deep State, the Fake News, the liberal elites — are conspiring to smear him with false corruption allegations to protect their own, much worse corruption.

This is why Trump and his allies were so insistent on getting the New York FBI to complain about Clinton, so Comey would release his October 28 letter, and The New York Times would cover it breathlessly to “prove” that it doesn’t have an anti-liberal bias.

Fast forward to 2019, this is why Trump and his allies were so intent on getting Ukraine’s leaders to announce an “investigation” of Biden and his corruption, to the point of getting Trump impeached; why Senators such as Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson continues to “investigate” and still plans to call witnesses to launder the false Burisma story; why The Federalist and National Review continue to breathlessly cover Senator Johnson’s investigation; etc.

When the truth emerges — e.g., Biden’s actions in Ukraine were actually against his son’s interests as a Burisma director, because Biden was leading a bipartisan and international coalition to install a more honest prosecutor who might hold Burisma accountable — that truth fails to penetrate, because it “feels wrong” to a populace that has been conditioned through repetition to believe the exact opposite. So open-ended focus groups continue to report a growing concern about Joe Biden’s corruption — even as Biden is one of the least corrupt or self-dealing politicians in national life, and Trump is one of the worst.

Four ways America can resist Trump’s narrative onslaught

Strategy #1: adapt to COViD faster than Trump does

Start with what’s working: the March 2020 response to COVID was an unambiguous success story. An all-star team of independent groups simply refused to tolerate Trump’s lies about his early coronavirus response. After Biden led the charge to hold Trump accountable for his COVID failures in an interview on March 9 and a speech on March 12, he was swiftly backed by independent Democratic groups and #NeverTrump Republicans. On March 17, ACRONYM, the Center for American Progress, and the GOP-aligned Lincoln Project launched major campaigns to hold Trump accountable for his coronavirus failures; American Bridge and Republicans for the Rule of Law went up on March 20; Priorities USA on March 22; and Unite the Country on March 25. Over a six week period, tens of millions of dollars were spent on creatively sourced, extensively tested, highly effective digital and TV ads that eviscerated Trump’s falsehoods. This, in turn, bolstered the press corps, which resisted Trump’s propaganda. The portion of Americans who believed that Trump acted decisively on COVID plummeted by roughly 20 points.

This refusal to let Trump rewrite the history of his actions in February put Trump in a bind. The Democratic primary has delivered him a rival who he cannot credibly attack as radical or socialist. The coronavirus means Trump is not campaigning on a booming economy but rather on his COVID response. Attention to COVID has reduced the oxygen available to the misinformation hellfire he is trying to rain down on Biden. Trump cannot hold the rallies that he needs emotionally, and for message-testing and voter enthusiasm. His White House briefings may have backfired; even his sycophants struggle to defend experimentation with bleach injections, or letting Jared Kushner declare victory.

Now, we must prepare for Trump’s next moves. Fortunately, he is predictable: he leans on a standard demagoguery playbook, layered on top of the infrastructure the GOP has built over decades. We can expect xenophobic attacks on China, redoubled attacks on the media and elites, and ever more frantic misinformation about Biden.

This implies that the next COViD messaging priority is to get ready for the China misinformation.

In normal political times, Trump would be incredibly vulnerable to charges of corruption and weakness in his dealings with the government of China. He and his family have corrupt and shady personal dealings with China and its intelligence communities, as The Bulwark recently explained. As George Will has suggested, this means that Biden would be a much better leader for America in terms of engaging with China.

In Trump times, this means that Trump and the GOP have been laying the groundwork to make China a killer weapon against Biden. First, Trump established himself as the most racist presidential candidate since Pat Buchanan, and used that to persuade America that he is therefore “tough on China.” Second, since he came down the escalator, he has relentlessly hammered the idea that Biden and the Democrats refuse to tell the truth or take tough actions because of their slavish devotion to “political correctness.” Indeed, when Democrats rise to defend Americans of East Asian descent from the attacks incited by Trump’s rhetoric, they feed his desire to change the conversation from COVID performance to a debate about racism. Third, the Trumpublicans were willing to risk impeachment to turn the machinery of the Justice Department and State Department into promulgating the falsehood that Biden and his family have corrupt overseas entanglements.

These falsehoods are now accepted as truth: voters have been conditioned to associate the issue of China with a preference for Trump over Biden.

This creates a lane for Trump to escape his massive failures on COVID. If the public believes that China’s deceit was the reason for Trump’s early failures to act, then the deaths and job losses become China’s fault, not Trump’s. And if the Democrats are the China party, then COVID becomes the Democrats’ fault by association. This strategic map is why the entire Trumpist ecosystem (from the superPACs to the radio hosts to every federal candidate and committee) has telegraphed that for the next six months, the answer to every question on COVID will be attacking China and attacking Democrats for their support for China.

As intended, this false Trump baseline also hinders the ability of Democrats to run truth-based attacks on Trump for his failures vis-a-vis China. Even ads that attack Trump on China tend to move polls towards Trump — because they remind voters to think about China, and the baseline reaction (China = Trump better than Biden) tends to overwhelm the intended message. Thus, when the public hears ANY ads that reference China, even ads that try to attack Trump, those ads can move voters toward Trump.

To fight back, we need a two-step process, such as using voters’ existing brand concerns about Trump (his instability, his narcissism) to explain why he will be weak on China in ways that matter, while Biden’s steady and fair approach will get us both our markets and also push back against any threats. Throughout all of this, we also need to utilize the work of Anat Shenker-Osorio to make sure that we sidestep, rather than reinforcing, the Trumpublican instinct toward xenophobia that exposes Americans of East Asian descent to attack.

Strategy #2: keep using the truth, it works

Trump’s hostility to the truth is grounded in a real threat: truth is poison to despots. As Arendt wrote in 1951, simple truth “is a greater menace to totalitarian domination than counter-propaganda.” Trump’s margin of electoral victory is too thin for him to withstand promulgation of actual facts.

And frankly, the anti-Trump ecosystem is doing a pretty good job of delivering truth. Trump’s victory in 2016 was razor thin and Democrats actually won the popular vote by over 2 points. Although Trump has been tremendously successful in consolidating financial power and messaging across the right, he lost ground in 2018 and has mostly stayed in the range of -10% net approval — just at the border of what would be necessary for Democrats to oust him given his electoral college advantages.

Many of those successes have nothing to do with Democrats. As many have noted, Trump is the world’s greatest Democratic Party organizer and unifier. As he has caused a surge in GOP support among rural white men without college degrees, he has also driven a historic cratering of GOP support among suburban, college-educated white women.

The Democratic response, however, also deserves some credit. Critical post-2016 innovations were embraced by stalwarts such as the AFL-CIO, the Democracy Alliance, HMP, SMP, and the DNC. In races throughout 2017, 2018, and 2019, Democrats’ vote share surged by keeping the focus on healthcare with authentic, effective commercials and testimonials. On the economy, Democratic messaging strategies about economic insecurity mitigated his advantages. Trump is stronger on xenophobia and the border, but he was not able to shift the agenda to those topics in 2018 despite massive efforts. Now, heading into November 2020, longstanding litigation efforts, focused in areas such as his tax returns and fraudulent ventures such as American Cable Networks, are poised to deliver new facts that the media will cover, making it still harder for Trump to change the subject. Teams of content generators, testers, and distributors are up and running and collaborating to turn these many inconvenient truths into talking points, visual images, memes, GIFs, and videos.

Strategy #3: engage social media for truth

Social media can be dangerous to truth, but it can also be a force for good. This lesson emerges from the 2017 special election in Alabama.

The media has covered widely how Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore by just over 20 thousand votes, 2% of all votes cast, one year after Trump defeated Clinton in that state by ~30 points. The media has also covered the high African American turnout, and relatively low turnout by Trump supporters, that were vital to this result.

A critical and less reported story, however, relates to white women: specifically, how married white women in places like Huntsville and Birmingham processed accusations of assault against Moore. Some editorialists tut-tutted the white women of Alabama, who voted 63–35 for Moore. While fair, this editorial cut misses two key points:

• First, white women changing their voting habits drove the Jones victory. White women made up 31% of the electorate in December 2017. In prior Alabama elections, they voted Republican by crushing margins (such as 84–16 for Romney in 2012). If white women had voted for Moore at the same rate as they voted for Romney and Trump, Doug Jones would have lost by more than 10 points. Instead, Jones improved on Obama’s and Clinton’s margin with this group by ~20 points. Among the roughly 400 thousand white women who voted in 2017, ~80 thousand flipped their votes from R to D, generating ~160 thousand incremental marginal votes for Jones out of 1.3 million cast.
• Roy Moore’s toxicity with this group was not a sure thing. True, Moore is an unhinged racist who dated teenagers when he was in his 30s, and did so in ways that would probably be ruled assault in a modern courtroom. The same is almost certainly true, however, of Donald Trump, whose mental illnesses and racism have been well documented, and who has openly bragged about walking in on undressed teenage girls at pageants, and about committing sexual assault. Additionally, in the run-up to the 2017 election, Trump and his ally Steve Bannon engaged in a full-throated assault on the individual credibility of Moore’s accusers. Large percentages of white women surveyed and interviewed prior to the election took the bait from Trump and Bannon, expressing skepticism about the accusers, their motivations, and the media outlets such as The Washington Post that brought them to light.

So what happened? To be sure, the unique circumstances of Moore’s candidacy and profile, as well as effective political commercials, made a difference. But, also, hundreds of thousands of married white Republican women from Birmingham, Huntsville, and elsewhere connected via social media to talk about the accusations against Moore. Embedded among conversations about pecan pies and Alabama football, these women had person-to-person conversations online with the kind of candor that takes place over backyard fences and grocery store aisles. They criticized The Washington Post. They questioned the timing and motives of the female accusers. They pounced when Beverly Young Nelson, who had accused Moore of attempted rape, admitted to forging an addition to Roy Moore’s signature in her high school yearbook. But … they also watched and shared videos about the nine different accusers, all born and raised in Alabama, who didn’t know each other before they made their allegations public. And enough of them decided that a vote for Moore was a bridge too far.

This lesson of Alabama 2017 is relevant for the upcoming presidential election in 2020. When truth is tribal, traditional media and advertising can’t reach voters. Determined that Democrats and journalists are hostile to them and their President, core Republican constituencies won’t even read the newspaper, let alone skim a glossy mailer or watch a digital advertisement. But people still listen to their friends and members of their communities. Careful evidence from statisticians shows that both for turnout and for persuasion, peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend communications massively outperform all other messengers and distribution strategies.

Right now, communities are forming online that might hear actual truth over the noise of the Trumpublican lie machine. The objective reality of Trump’s governance is antithetical to the aspirations and values of most citizens in these groups. But many of these groups — such as older white men, African American men, rural Americans, law enforcement, and military communities — have been actively targeted for information operations by Republican trolls and hostile foreign actors. If nuggets of truth move even a small portion of these communities, it can be decisive in the close election we face this year.

Our work can make a difference. By engaging with these communities, we can watch for bot and sock puppet campaigns; we can monitor for active misinformation; we can help build resilience against lies; and we can help improve authentic communications. Our tools range from straightforward (such as content packaging and distribution) to complex (such as efforts to identify at scale Russian mis-information operations).

Most importantly, our work can make a difference by laying foundations of messaging and cultural trust to reach out to groups over time. Evidence from many sources suggests that COVID is impacting different swing groups in different ways, in terms not only of health but also emotional well-being, social patterns, and economic security. Reaching those swing groups in that context requires trusted and authentic messengers as well as rich understanding of each group’s cultural norms.

• Unfortunately, most elites in the Democratic ecosystem have little personal or cultural familiarity with critical blocks of marginal voters, such as non-college white women who live in low population density areas and watch NASCAR; or young Mexican Americans in Arizona; or young Black moms in Detroit; etc.
• This lack of direct familiarity is exacerbated by data failures: Dems’ voter files range from horrible to worse in most of these communities, and our content generation, polling, and testing architectures underinvest in them. We do not have the benefit of the many, many millions that Trump has spent on Facebook to get massive data about all of these diverse segments and others. As a result, our research is over-weighted towards understanding, for instance, Obama-Trump voters — an important bloc, to be sure, but far from the only battlefront. This means that we fail to set in place narrative permission structures, so our poll results and test results which focus on a single-step process show no progress. As an analogy, we are playing pool without ever being mindful of where we need to put the cue ball after the current shot.
• We still have six months until the election, and we can use that time to set up the intermediate steps necessary to give us a chance with these communities. That includes creating intermediate permission structures — such as social norms among truckers to ask whether the economic malaise they’re feeling might not be the fault of Democrats, or permission to say voting is a norm and expectation in Mexican American communities in Maricopa Arizona. Another critical set of intermediate steps involves building trusted media channels with peer-to-peer elements; recruiting diverse local influencers who can speak with authority and authenticity on political topics; getting those local influencers to generate content, which we test and share; and then in the month before election day driving all of that content from those influencers through the pre-established channels.

Strategy #4: manage the heck out of our spending to improve marginal performance.

Even if we’re doing well, and promote truth on social media, and act strategically, we can still move the needle a lot more just with incremental performance improvements. Why? Because cash on hand grows on an exponential basis as election day approaches. Between now and November 3, Democrats will spend more than the entirety of what Democrats have spent on federal elections in the 3.5 years since Trump won in 2016 — probably in excess of $1 billion, and perhaps plural billions. With sums that large, marginal improvements can matter a lot — more than enough to make the difference in a close race.

Some of the lowest hanging fruit on marginal performance include:

1. Massive scale and diversity in content development. Trump’s campaign since its inception, and Democrats increasingly from 2017 onwards, have learned the importance of developing and testing extremely high volumes of diverse content efforts to see what works. We should minimize the resources going through the weeks-long content process of the past, of using focus groups, excessive polling, and centralized brainstorming with consultants and think tanks to develop big set-piece messages with big formal rollouts. We need hundreds of thousands of different pieces of content, from selfie videos to static memes to optimized GIFs, so we can learn what works best for each micro-targeted universe. Only then can we turn the very best performing frames into major late-cycle TV buys.
2. Relentless content testing. Democrats prior to the 2016 election spent far too much on polling and far too little on content testing. Since then, numerous smart testing outfits have emerged. These testing platforms are not perfect, but they already appear to have some robust relationships with actual election-day outcomes. And we have found that using them matters a lot. In the runup to the 2018 midterms, many different groups using different testing platforms found that roughly one out of four commercials developed by savvy, experienced message operatives caused a net backlash among critical voting groups.
3. Ecosystem collaboration (not coordination). From Facebook to YouTube, from Obama 2008 to MAGA 2016, a decentralized and user-generated system of content generation and distribution has absolutely routed old “broadcast” styles of narrative creation. As explained in the books The Starfish and the Spider and The Square and the Tower, decentralized networks are better under many conditions, as they are more effective, more opportunistic, more scalable, more responsive, and more resilient. Those same books also explain how networks can be made more effective under certain conditions and rules. In the case of the anti-Trump movement, we should be agnostic between getting net votes against Trump in a battleground state by motivating low-propensity young Latinas, encouraging a Berner not to Bust, creating a permission structure for a non-college white woman to vote differently than her husband, or grasstops influence strategies to shape the messages of a local pastor or journalist. But groups pursuing ANY of these anti-Trump strategies should share content, creative briefs, content calendars, and testing results with each other. Such sharing protocols can generate economies of scale, accelerate content development, and gain the persuasive and earned media benefits of repetition by having key narrative frames hammered from multiple angles.
4. Lean against structural inefficiencies. The market structure of political operations favors inefficiencies, as (a) people build business models around successful tactics in one cycle, and then resist transitioning away from those tactics in later cycles, and (b) marginal incentives encourage individual actors to attack rivals, build monopolies, and charge economic rents rather than defeating the real adversary (even if we assume good faith by the vast majority of players, these marginal incentives make the overall ecosystem much less effective by rewarding toxic behaviors). Like regulators in markets with inherent anti-competitive tendencies (such as telecoms and health insurance), we can lean against those inefficiencies by committing to limits on prices and fees; by adhering open source rules as set forth above; by setting a “zero-based” model of demanding self-reflection from any major player who had been involved in the 2016 losses; and by presumptively elevating strong performers with less access to insider networks from prior cycles.
5. Nudge our communications tactics based on updated evidence. The best evidence since 2017, including reviews of both Trump and the Democrats in 2016, suggests that Democrats should do more of some things and less of others. The evidence is not sufficiently clear to suggest hard and fast rules, but some biases may be in order. That includes skepticism of (a) direct, frontal assaults on Trump as a tactic to move voters; (b) complex models that claim high reliability; © glossy mail pieces; (d) turnout messaging focused on candidates or ideology or outcomes; (e) long-form commercials that use scary music or frightening visuals; (f) heavy spending on TV more than 4 weeks out from election day (although light spending for earned media may be useful); and (g) spending money in states such as VA or OH that are very unlikely to be tipping point states. On the flip side, we should be elevating (a) authentic personal testimonials, especially if distributed by peer-to-peer networks; (b) short form content including static graphic images, memes, and GIFs; © content that has a journalistic flavor, either to enhance credibility or to influence journalists and earned media coverage; (d) peer-to-peer engagement for turnout; (e) turnout messages focused on shared expectations and ease of action; and (f) persuasion messages focused on kitchen table issues.
6. Get specific about Joe Biden. Specific, positive content matters a great deal. To see why, consider how it works for Trump. Trump’s MAGA fan fiction and decades of fake branding as a business success creates a false baseline of strong, specific character defenses of Trump. Millions of Americans assert fervently that he is tough, a fighter, fearless, and a strong dealmaker. The fact that those qualities are the opposite of Trump’s actual character does not matter; Trump laid down those narrative benchmarks sufficiently that the truth does not break through, and even today many swing voters trust Trump as more likely to stand up to China and bring the economy back to strength after COVID. On the flip side, however, no one is creating and promulgating that kind of specific content about Joe Biden. Biden is a man who has spent decades in public life, earning a consistent reputation among all who have worked with him — from Bernie Sanders on the left to Lindsay Graham on the right — as a man of consistent high integrity, empathy, reliability, and more personal decency than almost anyone in national politics. Yet while Americans broadly sense this about Joe, his brand is not specific: people say they like him, but can’t articulate why. They can’t bring to mind any actual facts about his leadership on Violence Against Women, or climate, or global anti-corruption work, or spearheading the post-2008 recovery, or the Affordable Care Act, or his personal integrity such as never owning a stock in his life, or showing up without fanfare to the funerals of longtime supporters, or the thousands of other proof points of his character. We have six months to flesh out the specifics of a man most Americans still know only lightly.