The Four Campaigns of 2016
As we head into the weekend, I’ve got a take on this overall election process for anyone that’s interested:
It’s probably always been true, but I think this year in particular it’s going to be important to call out and recognize that there isn’t just one campaign happening here, with a bunch of different people competing on similar terms. I’m going to suggest that there are at least four completely different campaigns happening at the same time, with very different goals and strategies, and that all of the candidates between both parties are competing in some or all of these at once.
The first campaign is the intellectual campaign — this is the campaign that appeals to people’s understanding of the mechanisms of government. The presidency is a job, and it has certain prescribed functions it performs, and those functions are explicitly outlined by the constitution and enforced by a deep bureaucracy of judges and courts and legal professionals. This candidate is running on specific suggestions for how they would use the machinery of the presidency if they were given control of it. This is the campaign that everyone thinks the election is meant to be about, but that actually proves least essential to the majority of voters. Rand Paul ran a strictly intellectual campaign this year, and was dismissed for it.
The second campaign is the emotional campaign — this is the campaign that says, “Get your nose out of the book, nerd! Look at the big picture! Stop thinking about the wonky limits of the machine, and look at how much that machine is hurting people right now, or is not doing everything it can to help people who are being badly hurt. Everything is changing too fast, and we’re scared all the time, and whoever takes over the machine next needs to either fix it for good or destroy it altogether!” Trump and Sanders have both tapped into this campaign this year, almost by accident it seems, and are riding it as far as it will go.
The third campaign is the power-broker campaign — this is the one we don’t like to talk openly about, and that we like to shame candidates for participating in, but that is probably just as essential and inevitable as the first two. There are always going to be people around with a lot of power, and those people are going to have opinions about what the president should do and tools for influencing those outcomes. Whether they acquire that power through wealth, like rich donors or lobbyists, or through collective organizing, like unions and business associations, it doesn’t matter — they exist. Whoever’s running for president needs to deal with these people. They need to pick battles and make compromises and demonstrate that they can navigate and survive in sharky waters, because presidents mostly deal with sharks. Clinton is secretly running an incredible power-broker campaign, and doesn’t seem to understand why people keep criticizing her for it.
The fourth campaign is the one that has changed most in the last decade, and that might be contributing the most to the frothiness of recent elections: the media campaign. For any of the first three campaigns to get their message out, they need the media to carry that message. But the chaotic hive that is the modern media industry has figured out that there are certain ways they need to tell stories if they want people to pay attention to those stories, and everything the candidates do or say is going to be run through that filter. This gives the media its own campaign goals, to tell the most provocative story about the most compelling protagonists. The Internet has made the media campaign incredibly complex, giving legs to legitimate outsiders like Ron Paul, and buoying candidates like Barack Obama into unparalleled heights of super-stardom.
Through this lens, the scariness of Trump becomes more apparent. He’s lucked into an emotional campaign in a time of civil uneasiness, and as it so happens has also spent his life dominating the power broker game. The fact he has no intellectual campaign whatsoever is trumped (forgive me) by his complete mastery of the media campaign. He’s now betting that the intellectual campaign can be soldered on afterwards.
Bernie has also kind of lucked into a powerful emotional campaign, and is turning out to be a reasonable messenger for it. As a long-term senator he could probably run a strong intellectual campaign as well, but he’s not focusing on that — he really seems to be doubling down on the emotional one, which gives him more of a media campaign. Hence the big promises with little in the way of policy suggestions for how to back them up (so far). He has almost no power broker game.
Clinton’s power broker campaign is, again, incredible, and she’s been building it for the last twenty-five years. It’s the reason she didn’t think she’d have to deal with Bernie or anyone else in the primaries, and the reason she sometimes seems so confident that the presidency is hers to lose. Her emotional campaign has always been weak, and has gotten weaker. Her intellectual campaign is not notably different from what we’ve had in the recent past, and her media campaign has soured almost from the outset. If the power broker game is enough, she’ll win. And it might be. But she’s actually, I think, a very weak candidate across all four, and I believe most people intuit that.
The mess of Republicans behind Trump don’t know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, it seems. They’re clearly bouncing between strategists from all four campaign types, varying their own tactics wildly across whichever campaign the last person scored points on. The power broker campaign is not being managed this year as consistently as it normally is, leaving shoe-ins like Bush scratching their head at why they’re suddenly losing all four campaigns at once. Bush and Clinton have much in common this way. Kasich is a little more emotional and a little less power-brokery, Rubio is gaining traction with power-brokers and some intellectual campaigners, but lost almost all of the credibility of his emotional campaign during his recent debate performance.
Ted Cruz is a weirdo, and he scares me. I don’t actually understand what he’s doing, because nobody seems to like him. I think that maybe he’s trying to be a one-man power-broker, leveraging a coalition of emotional and intellectual factions to usurp the media campaign from Donald Trump? I don’t know, exactly, and apologies if you like him. He just strikes me as a warrior priest, and I don’t want to have to add “Religious Campaign” to this list. Religious campaign-oriented systems tend to overshadow the other four pretty quickly.
So, with all that in mind, I think we’re looking at a Sanders/Clinton vs. Trump/Kasich show-down in November, with Biden/Warren and Bloomberg/Beyoncé running independent bids.