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.

After years battling Bernie bros, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Out of money and counted out a month ago, Joe Biden went on a 10-day winning streak that put him up +18 in national polls and +150 in the delegate count.

Reviewing Biden’s March 10 victories in states from Michigan to Mississippi, The New York Times wrote that “It was a drubbing.” On the air that evening of March 10, Rachel Maddow asked her panel whether Bernie should stay in the race to give Biden’s campaign time to “court” Bernie voters “rather than having to fight them.” I felt a thrill when James Carville rejected the suggestion, saying that the voters had spoken. My Twitter feed lit up with virtual high fives.

But that emotional reaction was not smart by me, James Carville, or the folks I follow on Twitter. Joe Biden’s statesmanlike and warm outreach to Bernie and his movement over the past few days is the better move. It’s time for all of us in the tenuous center (me included) to turn the other cheek, push aside the temptation to fight back against his “bros,” and extend an olive branch to Team Sanders.

Why?

(1) When you’ve won, stop fighting.

Yes, only 53% of the first-round delegates have been awarded. Yes, Bernie can still win by getting 57% of the remaining delegates.

But it’s not going to happen. Under Democratic Party delegate allocation rules, you can’t win that many delegates without landslides. Bernie, however, is facing the wrong end of those landslides: he is way behind in reliable polls, and the best states for Bernie have already voted. Even if Bernie trounces Biden in the next debate on March 15, it won’t stop Biden from getting a huge tranche of delegates in the Florida, Ohio, and Illinois primaries on March 17. Even 538, which generally avoids speaking in certainties, puts Biden’s odds at 99% (much higher than they ever put Hillary Clinton in 2020).

So we don’t need to push back when Bernie bros smear Joe or his movement or us. It stinks, but they are not our adversary. Our adversary is Trump, and we should keep our fire trained on him. The Bernie bros (and nefarious bots) have lost their fight to keep the nomination away from Joe.

(2) It’s not 2016.

Unlike in 2016, there is a real chance that Bernie will endorse quickly and forcefully once his campaign is mathematically eliminated. Trump is no longer a hypothetical. Bernie is four years older. Bernie’s movement is more influential in the Democratic Party mainstream, and Bernie cares about the future of his young surrogates within the party. His movement and the frontrunner have not (yet) developed the mutual animosity that existed four years ago.

(3) Attacking Bernie’s movement is counterproductive.

Bernie’s movement is still just a bunch of people, with some crazies and a whole lot of normal. Many serious progressive groups and elected officials from the Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren camps are ready to fight hard for Joe Biden and for a win against Trump. If we play up Biden’s primary victories as a proxy for intra-party defeat of all of their favorite issues, this backs them into a corner of re-litigating the primary rather than focusing on the general election. In other words, when people in the tenuous center attack, we can empower the crazies and make Bernie feel he needs to fight. If we send messages of respect for how he’s changed the agenda, we give him an off ramp.

(4) Bernie and his movement can help defeat Trump.

Bernie has tremendous personal brand strength on central 2020 issues such as political corruption and economic fairness. He commands the trust and loyalty of millions of “alienated left” voters who might otherwise fail to vote. On issues such as pharmaceutical costs, Bernie can push the Democrats in a more “progressive” direction while also making the Biden coalition more formidable against Trump.

A few weeks ago, when it seemed Bernie was steaming towards sweeping Super Tuesday victories, I had to swallow hard and urge us all to prepare to help Bernie win the general election. Now, we face what should be an easier task: making peace with our allies in the fight against Trump.

Since the polls closed in Nevada this past weekend, activists and donors have worried that (a) Bernie is now our de facto nominee, and (b) this makes a Trump re-elect inevitable.

Believe me, I get it. Most of the other Democrats still running would be a safer bet to get to 270 and get Trump out of office. It’s been infuriating to watch Trump and his allies manipulate the Democratic primary to draw their preferred opponent. Also, I have personally experienced the rage of Bernie’s more distasteful bros, so I would have to swallow hard to get behind Bernie.

Nonetheless, a cold-eyed review of the data indicates that (a) it is still possible for a safer candidate to win the primary, and (b) while he may not be our best bet, Bernie is a viable general-election candidate. Thus, regardless of the ultimate primary result, the case remains that we must invest in anti-Trump electoral efforts over the next 253 days: Trump is an existential threat, and he can be beaten.

Here are 7 reasons Bernie’s surge doesn’t doom our chances of ousting Trump:

(1) Available polling data bodes well

Bernie beats Trump in head-to-head polls. Most of the vote is already locked in by negative partisanship, and doesn’t depend on the Democratic candidate. National head-to-head matchups currently show that Bernie beats Trump.

These early polls may have more predictive value than in prior years. In the past, head-to-head matchups were not reliable until late summer. But such polls may be more reliable than in the past, as voters are paying much more attention now than at this point in prior cycles.

Bernie has good name recognition and net favorability. Name recognition is a reliable indicator of a candidate’s future strength, because if voters think they know a candidate, they tend to stick to their initial impression. That’s good for Bernie, because tens of millions of Americans know who he is and like him, including voters who are not paying much attention.

Bernie may actually a Democratic unity candidate. Bernie appeals to the fickle far left, while moderate and conservative Democrats tend to unite behind the nominee and vote. Perhaps surprisingly, polls show that Bernie is well-liked among all rank-and-file Democrats. Bernie also has the party’s biggest base of small-dollar donors, making him the second best candidate (after Mike) in terms of having hard dollars to compete with Trump. Together, all this suggests that Sanders might be able to lead a unified, energized, and well-funded Democratic Party in the fall.

(2) Betting markets give Bernie a solid chance in the general

To be sure, betting markets are imperfect and swing wildly. But they are a useful check on our assumptions, and have a strong empirical track record of integrating diverse data sources such as 538, private polling, and expert judgments.

These markets give Bernie a 40–45% shot at beating Trump. The markets say Mike, Joe, or Amy would have roughly even odds in the 2020 general election, while Bernie and Liz have slightly lower odds at 40–45%, and Pete and Tom are the least electable at 30–40%.

That’s still a good bet. Going from 50–50 to 45–55 or 40–60 is obviously not great. We have all spent a lot of time and effort working to reduce Trump’s re-election odds by a point or two, so a 10–20% drop is a gut punch. That said, most of us would agree that a 40–45% chance of stopping a second Trump Administration is still worth massive support.

(3) Bernie has a strong narrative and brand

Bernie tells a good story. David Brooks of The New York Times, a conservative and thus no Bernie fan, writes that Bernie has built perhaps the most compelling narrative framework in the field. Another #NeverTrump conservative, Jonathan Last of The Bulwark, describes this narrative as follows:

Bernie is never going to settle into making ‘Trump So Bad’ arguments. His relentless focus is on the future, not the past. He’s a change candidate who will carry the initiative on a daily basis by proposing his own version of ‘the system is rigged against you and if you vote for me, I’ll punish the people you hate.’

Brooks and Last agree with the socialists of Jacobin magazine that this meta-narrative may have even more widespread appeal than Trump’s. As Last continues,

The difference is that when Trump makes this argument, he’s talking about half the country. And when Bernie makes it he’s talking about corporate America and the very rich.

This narrative frame provides coherence and stickiness to Bernie’s long history of kitchen-table advocacy regarding drug prices, economic insecurity, and inequality. It also mitigates the concern that Bernie will be seen as too radical: voters’ ideologies appear to be scattering away from the traditional left-right divide toward a framework of populism vs. elitism.

The question, of course, is how Bernie’s brand will hold up in the face of the GOP attack machine. Perhaps the biggest fear about Bernie is that he has not been nationally vetted by GOP attack ads, and thus the GOP will clobber his favorability once he becomes the nominee. This happened in 1988 when Bush trailed Dukakis by 17 points in July, only to win 53.4% of the popular vote & 426 electoral votes in November. It happened again in 2004, when the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry eliminated his ~5 point polling lead over the younger Bush. We know the GOP is gleeful about the attack ads they are preparing for Bernie, and we have heard reports that ads are already under development that mine his extensive baggage, such as:

• Testimonials from workers in Pennsylvania critiquing his proposed fracking ban;
• Spanish-language testimonials in Florida from families who have fled Latin American socialist regimes that Bernie has publicly defended;
• Ads targeting voters of color focused on Bernie’s past positions (such as his efforts to challenge President Obama in a primary in 2012);
• Ads targeting women based upon on his weird comments from the 1970s and 1980s regarding sexuality;
• General-audience commercials describing how Bernie’s policy ideas might implicate taxes, private health plans, the economy, and the border.

2016, however, proved that attack ads and personal baggage do not doom a nominee. During the Republican primary of that cycle, many Democrats wanted to face Trump in the general election because they thought they could bury him with attack ads built upon his horrific personal history. We know now that didn’t work. By the time Trump became the nominee, his brand positioning was hard to alter: people took him “seriously but not literally,” shrugged off his personal baggage, and accepted the GOP’s false equivalence based on decades of attacks against Hillary. Jonathan Last argues that while Bernie is a risky nominee, he has a shot at surviving the coming barrage:

if voters didn’t care about Trump saying that George W. Bush committed treason or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or that when you’re a star you can do anything you want to women, then why do we think voters are going to care about Bernie loving the commies? … Bernie’s free-everything proposals are at least as impossible as the Mexico-funded wall. … Why do we assume that voters won’t be willing to take him seriously, and not literally, too?

Bernie’s brand is well positioned to inoculate him from the GOP’s attacks. As noted above, Bernie has high name recognition and strong net favorability, especially in the core areas where Trump attacks Democrats (corruption, elitism, and honesty). Trump and his allies may yet find that they boosted Bernie too much and for too long; they may be surprised at how hard it is to take down a brand once it is widely established among tens of millions of people. The parallel with 2016 is made even stronger by the fact that, just as Trump faced a weakened Hillary in 2016, Bernie in 2020 would be facing a historically unpopular and divisive incumbent.

(4) Bernie connects with working class white voters

Working class white voters are a critical demographic group in swing states such as WI, MI, PA, and IA. In 2016, this demographic skewed heavily for Trump, and made up roughly 2/3 of his voters in those states. They are also the focus of Trump’s 2020 turnout efforts, since hundreds of thousands of them did not vote in 2016. Democrats need to fight him for these voters.

Bernie has staked out positions that resonate with this part of the electorate. Bernie has a long history of attacking the Democratic Party for failing to engage working class white voters. He has publicly pushed back on criticisms of Trump voters for racism. Many white working class voters also share Bernie’s open hostility to the Democratic Party “establishment” and its alleged favoritism to internationalism and corporate interests. Helpfully for this purpose, Bernie has a tepid record on gun control, a key wedge issue the GOP uses to win these voters. Bernie’s appeal to these voters is confirmed by his performance in Vermont, where he outperforms Democratic presidential candidates by 10–15% due to his votes from this demographic group.

Additionally, Bernie’s economic lens may blunt Trump’s race-baiting. Trump’s rhetorical strategy, bolstered by talk radio and Fox News, is to inflame the politics of white grievance. Bernie responds, roughly, by saying “don’t listen to the racism: that’s just plutocratic elites using race to divide us and keep us all down.” This approach has been empirically tested: the group Demos used surveys and election results in 2017 and 2018 to test whether explicit class-based rebuttals reduce the efficacy of race-baiting among low-income white voters. Turns out, Bernie’s class-based approach works in reducing the salience of racist appeals.

(5) Bernie is popular with young voters

Young voters are the X factor for 2020. They represent about 31% of the eligible electorate, and they hate Republicans by ~35 points. Their presidential-year turnout rates tend to be 15 or more points lower than for other age groups — suggesting that if their turnout matched that of other age groups, Democrats would improve their margins by about 5 points. The prospects for turnout gains among young people seem better than ever, as youth activism on guns and climate issues led to youth turnout doubling in 2018 as compared with 2014.

To be sure, Bernie’s campaign overstates this opportunity when they claim he will personally trigger a mass mobilization:

• Youth turnout is low for many reasons unrelated to candidates.
• The 2018 midterms showed that moderate candidates also do well with younger voters — suggesting that a candidate like Mike (strong on climate and guns, able to fund expensive GOTV efforts) might do just as well or better than Bernie in turning out young voters.
• Also, the presidency is decided in the Electoral College, and presidential-year turnout is already quite high in battleground states such as WI, MI, MN, FL, and NC, reducing the room to grow in those battlegrounds.

Even so, it matters that young people love Bernie. They love his simple message, his debating style, and his decades-long consistency on his core issues. They really love his student loan policies. They don’t mind socialism.

For these reasons, our investments in youth turnout efforts — such as voter registration; college engagement; culture and celebration initiatives; and peer-to-peer digital relational — may have an extra tailwind if Bernie is the nominee, perhaps offsetting Bernie’s weaknesses with moderate and center-right voters.

(6) Bernie can win the electoral college without hurting down-ballot Democrats

The biggest reason a moderate nominee would be better than Bernie in a general election is the electoral college. Critical battleground states may be tough for Bernie due to his positions on fracking (PA), Latin American socialism (FL), and big government (IA, NC, and AZ). In addition to the electoral college challenge, down-ballot Democrats and Republicans expect Bernie to change the Democrats’ national brand — he is unpopular in the reddish districts critical to keeping the House, for instance — so Bernie as the nominee could harm the party’s prospects for flipping the Senate, keeping the House, or winning state-level races.

Make no mistake, all of these concerns are legitimate. Prominent #NeverTrump conservative Charlie Sykes points to parallels with 1972, when Democrats got blown out against an unpopular incumbent because they nominated an exciting but extremist nominee. Jonathan Chait compares Bernie to Jeremy Corbyn, who just helped the unpopular and Trumpy Boris Johnson win a massive landslide in Britain.

In practice, however, these fears may prove just as unfounded as similar predictions about Trump in 2016. Many of the pundits who today predict a Bernie train wreck were predicting in 2016 that Trump would not just lose the White House, but also cost the GOP the Senate, the House, and state-level races. So, that was wrong. Not only did Trump decisively win the electoral college, but the GOP actually gained two governorships, and kept both chambers of Congress by only losing 2 net Senate seats and 6 net House seats.

The strengths that Bernie brings nationally — his brand, his narrative frames, his appeal to non-college whites and young voters — also apply to his prospects in critical swing states. Over the past two weeks, I have interviewed key party leaders and independent Democratic operatives in all of Bernie’s toughest battleground states. While the consensus remains that Mike, Joe, Amy, and Liz would be safer, there’s a solid path for Bernie to win the electoral college.

This case starts here: Bernie is as good or better than any other Democrat at getting 258 electoral votes, 12 shy of what he needs to win the White House.

• Bernie starts with 232 electors by holding all of Clinton’s states. Trump’s strategy for flipping the closest Clinton states (NH, MN, & NV) relies upon race-baiting among those states’ substantial working-class white populations. As noted above, Bernie is uniquely well positioned to resist this tactic.
• Bernie is favored to flip MI, getting to 248. The Cook Partisan Voting Index (CPVI) rates MI as D+1. Trump won Michigan and its 16 electoral votes in 2016 by only 0.23%, in part due to low turnout among core Democratic constituencies. In 2018, Democrats won the race for Governor by 10 points; for Secretary of State by 9; for U.S. Senate seat by 6; the popular majority for the state’s House by 5; for Attorney General by 3; and the popular majority for the state’s Senate by 2. Michigan now leans blue in consensus electoral forecasts. In the latest head-to-heads released on 2/20/20 from Quinnipiac, Bernie beats Trump by 5, same as Mike and better than Joe (+4), Liz (+2), or Pete and Amy (+1); YouGov has Bernie up 7, better than Pete (+6), Joe (+4), or Liz and Amy (+3).
• Bernie is as well positioned as any Democrat to take WI, getting to 258. Strategists in both parties see Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, as critical for Democratic chances to win back the White House. The head-to-head polls give Bernie the best shot of any Democrat at beating Trump in the state: polling released on 2/20/20 by YouGov shows Bernie beating Trump by 2 (same as Joe, Liz and Pete, and 1 point better than Amy); more R-leaning polling from Quinnipiac shows Bernie and Joe losing to Trump by 7, better than Pete and Mike (-8), Liz (-10), or Amy (-11). So, why might Bernie do especially well in Wisconsin? For one thing, 60% of the state population is white non-college, and Trump’s statewide net approval with that demographic group is +10, 3 points worse than his +13 net approval with that demographic group nationwide. For another, Wisconsin has solid youth voting potential with over 350,000 enrolled students in the state’s colleges and universities. Finally, Bernie has maintained his loyal following of supporters from the 2016 Wisconsin primary. With a well-funded operation and talented state party leadership,

Concerns about Bernie’s electability center on getting the next tranche of delegates. To win 270, Bernie has to flip 12 more electoral votes (or 22 if he fails to win Wisconsin), and all of the paths he faces to get those votes are tougher for him than for other potential nominees.

Nonetheless, he has a pool of 82 flippable electoral votes from which he can get to 270, and he has a realistic chance at all of them:

• 20 electoral votes in Pennsylvania (CPVI even): Bernie could lose Pennsylvania over his pledge to ban hydraulic fracturing (fracking), a controversial fossil-fuel industry that supports billions of dollars of economic activity and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the state. That said, as in 2016 with some of Trump’s crazier proposals, it’s possible that voters will take him “seriously but not literally” on his pledge to ban fracking — in other words, they may not believe that Bernie will actually eliminate their jobs by executive order. Eric Levitz, a Sanders supporter, writes that Bernie could triangulate on the timeline for his fracking ban. Bernie has already signaled, in a 2019 interview with Colorado Public Radio, that the ban would not be implemented “overnight.” In practice, since most fracking takes place on private land, a ban could only be implemented by an act of Congress, where Bernie would not have anything close to the necessary votes. Additionally, Bernie’s pro-environmental stance, while not great for white working class voters, might help him attract support from environmentally-minded suburban swing voters. In the Quinnipiac head-to-head polls released 2/20/20, Bernie leads Trump in the state by 4, worse than Joe (+8), Amy (+7), and Mike (+6), but better than Pete (+4) or Liz (+3); in the YouGov polls from the same day, Bernie wins the state by 2, a point or two better than any other Democrat in the field.
• 29 electoral votes in Florida (CVPI R+2): Florida is tough for Democrats. The GOP controls the governor’s mansion, both chambers of the state legislature, both U.S. Senate seats, and a majority of the delegation to the U.S. House. Bernie could make the state worse for Democrats over his public support for Latin American socialism, because the state has millions of voters whose families fled the Cuban, Venezuelan, Bolivian, and Nicaraguan regimes that Bernie has praised. That said, Bernie has a slight lead over Trump in head-to-head polling in the state, and his in-state supporters note that Bernie does not have to do much to overcome the GOP’s razor-thin popular-vote margins (Trump won in 2016 by ~1%; the Republican Governor won in 2018 by ~0.4%, and the Republican Senator from the state won in 2018 by ~0.1%). While Bernie starts the state in a hole with Cuban and similarly-minded voters, he does have a plausible play for the LatinX electorate by engaging younger and native-born citizens, while explaining that his prior defenses of Latin American socialist regimes did not extend to those nations’ authoritarian policies. Bernie may also benefit, as any other Democrat would, from Amendment 4, which restored the right to vote among formerly incarcerated citizens in the state, and which was recently bolstered by court ruling. If voting rights advocates continue to win their fights to implement the ruling in 2020, credible estimates suggests that Democrats stand to gain a net of 30–50 thousand marginal partisan votes — which would be enough for Democrats to win if they otherwise keep the state as close as it was in the 2018 statewide races.
• 15 electoral votes in North Carolina (CVPI R+3): Trump won this state by fewer than 200,000 votes, so it’s one of the Democrats’ top targets for 2020. The state is really tough for Bernie, however: it’s a conservative-leaning state where Republicans will thrash him for his plan to raise taxes to create a Medicare for All plan that will be available to undocumented immigrants. In recent history, North Carolina’s Democratic wins (for governor in 2016 and in the popular vote for state legislature in 2018) came only due to centrist candidates who distanced themselves from the party’s left flank. Also, Democrats can only win North Carolina with strong African American turnout, which the GOP will try to depress with attack ads regarding Bernie’s historical positions on race. For all of these reasons, North Carolina’s Democratic operatives prefer almost any candidate over Bernie. In private conversations, however, they argue that Bernie can win the state with the same strengths be brings in other locations: working class white voters, new young voters, and voters of color. Their case is somewhat bolstered by recent head-to-head polling in the state, which has Bernie beating Trump by 5 — a smaller margin than if Mike is the nominee, but not terrible as a starting position.
• 6 electoral votes in Iowa (CPVI R+3): Iowa is a reach for most Democrats. In 2016, Trump beat Clinton by ~10% and ~150 thousand votes. In 2018, the GOP retained the governor’s mansion and also re-elected the openly white nationalist Congressman Steve King. Even so, there are indications that Bernie’s economic populism would give him a shot at flipping the heavily white and rural state. In 2012, Barack Obama won Iowa by 8 points by attacking Mitt Romney as an economic elitist. In 2018, Democrats flipped 2 of the state’s 4 congressional districts, and Democratic challenger Abby Finkenauer won the state’s northeastern congressional district with ads about gritty working class toughness. Trump’s net approval in Iowa is underwater by 6 points, in part due to unhappiness with his trade war and his 2017 tax bill. Bernie, for his part, retains an operation that helped him tie for first in the Democratic primaries in both 2016 and 2020.
• 11 electoral votes in Arizona (CPVI R+5): If turnout patterns are normal, Arizona should not be viable for Bernie. It is the most Republican-leaning swing state, with an electorate dominated by older and more conservative white voters, often from military families. Democrats trying to win in Arizona tend to look like super-moderate Senator Kyrsten Sinema. GOP commercials about Red Bernie would put him in an immediate hole, made deeper by attack ads about Bernie siding with Iran during the 1980 hostage crisis. The reason for hope, however, is that Arizona is the only swing state with low turnout, driven by exceptionally low turnout among LatinX voters throughout the state and especially in Maricopa County (Phoenix) and Pima County (Tuscon). These voters are not the same LatinX voters as in Florida: their heritage is overwhelmingly Mexican American, they do not have personal reasons to hate socialism, and they do have personal reasons to hate Trump due to his pardon of Joe Arpaio. These factors, plus excitement for Bernie among LatinX voters in neighboring Nevada, has local organizers in Arizona arguing that Bernie could bring to the polls as many as 200,000 net new LatinX voters, who might vote 75–25 against Trump. In a state Trump won by ~90 thousand votes in 2016, that might be enough to put Bernie over the top.
• 1 electoral vote in Maine’s second congressional district (CPVI R+2): It doesn’t get much attention, but two states (ME and NE) allocate their electoral votes in part by congressional district. ME-02 is a rural district that went for Obama in 2012 by 9 points, for Trump in 2016 by 10 points, and for a Democrat for Congress in the 2018 midterms by the thinnest of margins. The district is prime Bernie country: it is 72% rural, 95% white, and shares a border with Vermont where Bernie has been politically popular since the 1980s. If Bernie starts with 258, loses all the other swing states, and wins AZ on the strength of a turnout surge — all of which are plausible scenarios — ME-02 would put him into the White House with exactly 270 electoral votes.

But what about down-ballot? With down-ballot races, the reason for calm is that the Democratic Party is not Trump’s GOP. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are free to distance themselves from the top of the ticket, and in moderate districts they are already distancing themselves from Bernie. It remains to be seen whether this will work, but it is plausible that a Bernie nomination would be a gift to a candidate such as Mark Kelly, who is running for Senate in Arizona. Kelly, who is well-funded and has a strong personal brand, will position himself as a bulwark against either a Trump or a Sanders president. He thus stands to gain swing voters that Bernie cannot, while benefitting from a youth turnout surge that Bernie might deliver.

(7) The primary is not over — a stronger candidate may yet emerge

I didn’t start with this point, solely because the most urgent priority is for Trump’s opponents to unite around the eventual Democratic nominee. We can’t desert Bernie as the Labor establishment did to McGovern in 1972, and thus turn fears about electability into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But the reality is that Bernie currently has only 31 committed delegates. That’s 1,960 fewer than he needs to claim a majority of delegates on the first ballot. In other words, we haven’t really started the primary — the narratives are still nascent. Momentum can change fast: look at how Bernie’s odds of winning the primary changed from the day before Iowa to the day after. People may take a fresh look at Bernie now that he is the front-runner, and they may decide that Mike or Liz or Joe gives them a safer path to 270. The 538 model still gives >50% odds that Bernie fails to get an absolute majority, and ~30% odds that he fails to even get a plurality. The betting markets still say that candidates not named Bernie have a 40–50% chance of being the nominee: as of this writing, Mike is at about 1-in-5; Joe at about 1-in-8; and Pete is at about 1-in-15 (the markets don’t like Liz or Amy’s chances). South Carolina, in 4 days, is the first state to vote that is actually a good state for Joe. Mike isn’t even competing yet for delegates: his first ballot test is not until Super Tuesday, in 8 days.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

If you buy the above, then the following conclusions become clear:

(A) Bernie can win the general. Our strategies still make sense if Bernie is the nominee. We might adjust slightly as better data become available, but at a high level we still need to do the same things, in the same states, with the same strategies — and if we do those things, our odds of beating Trump remain credible.

(B) A moderate would be better, but Bernie is our most likely nominee. If you’re inclined to play in the primary, there is still time and value in supporting Mike or Joe because they improve our chances of winning by something like 10–20 points. But, since Bernie is our most likely nominee by far, it is imperative to support others in ways that don’t hurt Bernie’s viability in the general election (in other words, please do not run negative ads about Bernie in the battleground states).

Beating Trump is an existential imperative, and we can still do so even with Bernie as our nominee. So let’s use the next 253 days to keep fighting.

PS: If you’re worried about Bernie as President, read this by Paul Krugman and this by Matt Yglesias — in practice, Bernie will govern a moderate who will restore America after the disastrous corruption, nepotism, and authoritarianism of the Trump years.

America’s greatness flows from our Constitutional guarantees of liberty and democracy under the rule of law. Through two centuries of tumult, America has inspired dreamers from all over the world. They invented new technologies and businesses, and built movements for suffrage, tolerance, and civil rights. For decades, no nation has rivaled our scientific institutions; our media and cultural exports; our economy; our military power; or our influence. With America as the world’s leading power, worldwide gains in literacy, lifespan, and the human condition reached stunning new heights year after year.

All of that was put at risk in 2016, when Donald Trump took over the Republican Party and assumed complete control over the federal government. As Ronald Reagan said: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” Trump and his movement, borrowing heavily from other authoritarian criminals such as Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin, promised to hollow out America’s principles in favor of his own personal enrichment. This President and his allies are actively undermining the legitimacy of our free press, our courts, our elections, and our scientific institutions.

The idea behind Investing in US was to bring entrepreneurs and investors to join the resistance in fighting for the American dream. After all, we are children of that dream. We know from experience how individual liberty and the rule of law can build a prosperous future. Every day, we see what Americans from different backgrounds can achieve when we work together. Investing in US deploys capital in support of platforms that empower individual Americans and thereby inoculate our politics and our economy against corruption, white nationalism, and mass deceit.

The good news about the portfolio so far

Since our founding shortly after the November 2016 elections, we have raised and deployed tens of millions of dollars to dozens of diverse groups.

To name just a few, our grantees have included nonpartisan civic engagement groups such as Woke Vote, Hispanic Federation, and Vote.org; for-profit technology companies such as Higher Ground Labs and its portfolio, as well as Crowdpac; candidate recruiting and support groups such as The Arena, Run for Something, New Politics, and the People’s House Project; litigation efforts such as the anti-Nazi group Integrity First for America; media companies such as ACRONYM and PushBlack; resistance organizations such as New Media Ventures and groups in their portfolio such as Indivisible; and partisan groups such as Forward Majority. These grantees, and our many others, have diverse visions and strategies, but they all have strong, dynamic leaders with ambitious plans for how to bolster American democracy, civic participation, the rule of law, and shared prosperity.

Investing in a diverse civic portfolio is not an orderly endeavor. As risk and growth investors, we seek to empower our portfolio, not control it. Once we finish our diligence and make investments, we expect funded groups to act on their own. We sometimes face criticisms when our portfolio organizations work unpredictably or at cross purposes with each other, but we embrace this disorder because we believe the benefit is distinctive impact. Each of our recipient organizations brings distinctive talent and energy, and our capital has been a part of their journeys.

In my view, the results throughout 2017 and 2018 have demonstrated the value of this approach. A wave of new leaders emerged in response to 2016, and those leaders needed capital. From parties at polling stations, to online tools to improve turnout, to tough-minded litigation, to more accurate polling, our portfolio was part of a movement that helped American civil society thrive during two years of unified control by the party of Trump.

Crucially, the 2018 midterm elections restored our congressional system of checks and balances by handing the House Speaker’s gavel to the opposition party. Investing in US was only a small part of that work, of course, as millions of Americans worked fiercely to win those tough elections. But regardless of who shares the credit, the result is that we have our constitutional democracy back — at least for the moment — so we can take a step back, review our approach, and make course corrections as needed.

Course corrections in response to valid criticisms

Throughout our nearly two years in operation, we have faced ongoing criticisms of our approach. Detractors have suggested that we need to spend more on “tried and true” and less on innovation; more on coordination and less on disruption; more on Republican Party resistance or more on Democratic Party operations; more on some grantees and less on others; etc. We always consider those criticisms, of course, but they have not altered our basic strategic choices.

On the other hand, one source of criticism requires constant monitoring: namely, the concern that our tactics might cause us to become like those we are fighting. As a country, we need to have a serious discussion about what American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein has called the asymmetric polarization of our politics — the fact that federal Republicans and their authoritarian allies have systematically and asymmetrically engaged in dirty tricks and brutal hardball to seize and hold power. Our goal at Investing in US is to fight back against those tactics, but as author Greg Sargent has written, we have to find ways to do so without becoming what we oppose.

In that context, I feel it is appropriate to be clear on a few points in light of recent media reports alleging that some of our portfolio organizations may have engaged in inappropriate tactics.

First, I welcome the scrutiny. Anyone raising and deploying resources at this scale, especially to influence the political direction of our country, deserves close scrutiny by the media and civil society. America is stronger when our free press and our constitutional system bring sunlight to political discourse. As Bruce Bartlett has written, truth is the best defense against Trump.

Second, if Investing in US capital was deployed inappropriately, the blame for any transgressions falls squarely on me. No portfolio is perfect, and I bear the moral responsibility for any mistakes made or harms committed. My investors, partners, and portfolio companies all make their own judgments, of course, but they must be able to rely upon my direction.

Third, some tactics are beyond the pale. To be sure, we are willing to invest in politics, which can be tough. Indeed, we put millions of dollars into advertising fiercely critical of bad leaders. Some of the tactics used to elect Trump in 2016 are frankly tactics that Democrats and their allies should be copying, such as effective micro-targeting of messages to right-of-center audiences. Some tactics, such as social media political advertising, are illegal for foreign entities but appropriate for U.S. citizens. That said, the whole point of our investment portfolio is to fight against the misinformation and group stereotypes so common among authoritarians here and abroad. For that reason, none of the portfolio we recommended should have engaged in group disparagement or scale misinformation. Such tactics may win a battle but lose the war, by giving up on the American ideal that we seek. We wholeheartedly renounce those tactics and would view it as a violation of our ideals if our resources were used in such ways.

The path forward

We are now extensively reviewing our investing processes and portfolio as we transition into the 2019–2020 period. As we do that, we will seriously review the media allegations that have been published, as we add rigor to our investment diligence and potentially additional oversight to our portfolio organizations. We will review the reports and results from all of our portfolio organizations, as well as new groups seeking funds, and pay special attention to allegations of impropriety regarding misinformation or the use of gender or other stereotypes. We will further codify our investment principles to ensure that our resources are never used, even inadvertently, in ways that violate our core values. While we do not think it is scalable or effective to micromanage the organizations in the portfolio, we do expect them to reflect our core values.

We remain laser focused on our high-level goals: inspiring massive voter turnout; protecting accurate and nonpartisan news organizations; supporting the rule of law; and defeating white nationalist fascism.

Patriotic Americans should view the 2018 midterms as a victory.

Why?

First and most importantly, Democrats won the House. America and the world needed the House of Representatives to provide a check on the federal abuse of power by Donald Trump and his party. By a massive national popular vote margin of roughly 4 million votes, America elected a Democratic majority to restore the constitution and the rule of law. Without the craven federal GOP to cover for Trump’s deep corruption and abuse, the Trump Administration will be exposed to public scrutiny in the two years leading up to the critical 2020 presidential race.

Second, the GOP’s tactics were horrific even by their recent standards. The Party of Trump threw everything that they had at stealing this election. They blew a trillion dollar hole in the federal budget at the top of President Obama’s recovery, creating a sugar high of economic activity to preserve their majorities. They attacked Democratic challengers with robocalls full of racism and lies, and deliberately suppressed the vote. They politicized the U.S. military by sending it to “defend” against a caravan of desperately poor and unarmed migrants that was still weeks away from the border. They openly embraced a deeply racist and dishonest closing commercial. If Republicans had won the House with those tactics, how much worse would things have gotten in 2019 and 2020? Federal voter suppression, military stunts, and even more overt assaults on the press would have been not just possible but likely. American democracy might not have survived the blow.

Third, heading into 2020, Democrats have some new assets. Since 2016, millions of entrepreneurial and enthusiastic citizens have poured their hearts into defeating Trumpism. If their efforts had been thwarted, the demoralization would have been palpable and devastating. Instead, those groups are now battle hardened. They will pore over the results to learn lessons about how to extend their wins. After the 2018 midterm results, the #Resistance will be bolstered rather than spent.

Fourth, Democrats now have a host of outstanding and authentic young leaders. Responsible, tough, and forward-looking patriots will redefine the Democrats’ brand heading into the presidential cycle. All Americans can be proud of leaders such as Sharice Davids in Kansas, Lauren Underwood in Illinois, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, Abby Finkenauer in Iowa, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, and many others.

To be sure, 2018 was not the decisive national repudiation of Trumpism that many wanted. But no one familiar with the global history of ethnofascism should have expected an easy fight. Race-based tribalism has been a potent political force for as long as humans have existed. The 2016 election showed us that modern America was not immune, as the Party of Trump and Putin won all three branches of government in 2016. But they had a clear shot at repeating that trick in 2018, and they failed.

Yes, there were heartbreaks. Yes, voter suppression worked. Yes, truly awful politicians won races against truly inspiring people, as in the Texas Senate and the Florida Governor races. Yes, nasty members of the U.S. House won their re-elections, such as Steve King of Iowa and Devin Nunes of California. Yes, fear-mongering generated turnout among pro-Trump white men without college degrees. Yes, Republicans picked up Senate seats. Yes, that will make it easier for them to stack the courts and the executive branch with extremists.

Against all of those heartbreaks, however, Democrats broke the fever of Trumpism in key battlegrounds across the industrial heartland, easily winning Senate races in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, while picking up governor’s races in Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Illinois. Kris Kobach lost. Kendra Horn won an upset victory in Oklahoma’s fifth congressional district. Democrats flipped hundreds of state legislative seats. In many chambers, that was decisive — for instance, the Democrats broke GOP supermajorities in North Carolina, where the GOP had been trying to anti-democratically lock in their power. On balance, those wins might just cancel out the gains the GOP made in the federal Senate.

We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we got what we needed. American democracy is still alive and kicking.

Onward.

In this dark hour for democracy, silver linings will come. Donald Trump will bring so many changes that some of them will be good.

I’ll go further. Good people should even take jobs with the Trump Administration. They can mitigate the risks of Trumpism while maintaining their integrity — provided they have undated resignation letters ready at a moment’s notice.

No one, however, should root for Trump to succeed. Trump mainlined countless poisonous racial lies into national discourse, elevating them to the level of perceived truth among his millions of followers. Trump’s campaign, at its core, was built around a strategy of mobilizing white nationalism. Thus, as Jamelle Bouie explained, any success for Trump “legitimizes and gives fuel to white tribalism as a political strategy.”

It seems insane that we still haven’t learned that prosperity and morality cannot co-exist with a leadership based on racist authoritarian lies. Unless Trump is somehow able to undo his toxic mendacity, nothing else he accomplishes can make his presidency a net positive.

Could Trump actually reverse the damage he has done?

Many Americans, including many who opposed Trump, offer calm arguments for “giving Trump a chance” or even rooting for his success. They look back to history, to Americans who changed their minds for the better about Reagan, about Bush, about Clinton, about W. Bush, and about Obama.

The possibility has a storybook quality. Could Trump redeem the manner in which he acquired his enormous platform and influence — his rallies, his Twitter feed, and his surrogates — by using them to shape America for the better? Could it be like A Christmas Carol, or Heaven Can Wait? If Trump wished to do so, his efforts might include:

• Retract and apologize for his claim that Indiana-born federal judge Gonzalo Curiel could not be a fair judge because of his race
• Retract and apologize for lying about the facts about race-based and religious-based violence, such as that immigrants commit higher levels of crime than native-born Americans, or that most Americans face any serious risk of death from Islamic fundamentalists
• Retract his claim that “thousands” of American Muslims celebrated on rooftops at the terror attacks of 9/11
• Disavow the neo-Nazi sources that he retweeted dozens of times during the campaign to propagate lies, and retract the claims he retweeted
• Condemn Nazis and white supremacists with greater vigor than if he were reading a teleprompter on fiscal policy — perhaps instead using the same or even greater vigor than, say, he criticizes late-night comedy television

Other items that would help might include retracting his full-page ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five; firing Michael Flynn; firing Steve Bannon; disavowing Alex Jones; and adding some religious and ethnic diversity to his Administration.

Except we all know that is not going to happen

Even the simple act of writing this list of redemptive Trump actions underscores how out of character it would be. On the contrary, he has doubled down on every lie, reasserting falsehoods about Muslims, about Mexicans, and about other groups. He’s gone even further, creating an Orwellian web of hatred and deceit, by referring to his lies as honesty, as hard-nosed truths, as willingness to reject political correctness. At every opportunity, he pushes the poison of racial and religious lies deeper into our nation’s heart. Trump’s America is grounded in anger, lies, and resentment against anyone who is not a white Christian man.

Most Americans prefer a different idea of America: an America of the ideals captured in the Constitution; a land that welcomes the progress we’ve made in health, longevity, prosperity, and especially tolerance; a land of immigrants; a city on a hill. Sorry, but rooting for Trump is not rooting for America. Rooting for Trump to succeed is rooting against that America.

So don’t root for him. Resist.

Do Not Root For Trump was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yes, we know. On November 8, Republicans won the presidency, Congress, and thus the courts. Hillary Clinton has conceded. Barack Obama has started the handover. On January 20, Donald Trump will take the oath of office.

So does the popular vote even matter?

Well, yes. As it turns out, the popular vote matters a lot to America’s future, and especially to those personally and directly threatened by Trump’s campaign.

Trump’s campaign directly attacked many citizens

White nationalism sat at the core of Trump’s campaign, which also traded heavily in sexism, bullying, and religious intolerance. Trump’s campaign thus directly attacked many Americans of color, women, religious minorities, LGBT Americans, and disabled Americans. For these Americans and their allies, this election was not just a transfer of federal power; it was a referendum about America’s identity and direction. The popular vote sets the context for the bully pulpit and for the behavior of individual Americans toward each other in the coming years.

The personal threat from white nationalism

Informed citizens know how extensively Donald Trump’s campaign relied on white nationalism. On Election Day, for example, conservative columnist Neil Stevens wrote for the Republican outlet RedState:

You know what his movement is really like. So you own his racism, if you vote for him. You’re endorsing it as acceptable.

After the election, columnist Zack Beauchamp reviewed the specific appeal of Trump to the so-called “alt-right,” who were Trump’s “earliest and most vocal backers.” The appeal of Trump to these white nationalists was that they saw him as “as the first presidential candidate in modern history open to their ideas about the need to protect the white race.” Specifically, he embraced rhetoric and policies that would reduce “the numbers and influence of African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews.”

So, yes, many Americans of color took it personally when Trump won.

Prominent Silicon Valley technologist Julie Zhuo, currently Vice President of Product Design at Facebook, spoke for many after the election when she wrote:

I woke up at 4am last night and threw up. I woke up this morning feeling groggy and leaden. … This election meant so much to so many people. It felt like the values of tolerance, equality, respect and competence lost out.

Lauren Williams, a veteran reporter and University of Virginia alumna, wrote of the “shame and embarrassment” she felt.

I had yet again overestimated America and my place in it. … I didn’t realize quite how much our country hates people like me. What is far, far worse than Trump’s bigotry is that so many Americans chose him as our next president, tacitly endorsing his beliefs with each pull of the voting lever.

For nonwhite Americans, Trump’s victory was not merely insult, but a threat of injury, as they saw a spike in hate crimes and appointments of white nationalists to federal leadership posts. As CBS News analyst Jamelle Bouie wrote, “Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration.”

The personal threat from religious intolerance

“American Jews Alarmed By Surge in Anti-Semitism,” reported a recent Fortune magazine story on the national meeting of the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights organization. The thousand-plus participants at the meeting, who had previously thought that anti-Semitism was a problem in Europe or on college campuses but not in mainstream America, were horrified by the surge in vandalism, attacks, and online harassment. As the story noted, the incidents “originated with the alt-right … a loose group … associated with far right efforts to preserve ‘white identity.’”

The anti-Semitism of the alt-right, however, was only one manifestation of the religious intolerance of the Trump campaign. To win over evangelical voters, the crass and thrice-married Trump had given policy carte blanche to religious extremists. The The New York Times, upon reading the party’s platform the summer, wrote that it “lays bare just how much the G.O.P. is driven by a regressive, extremist inner core.” The Times continued that

Mr. Trump’s anti-Muslim phobia [is] front and center … [Ideologues] triumphed in securing retrograde positions that include making no exceptions for rape or women’s health in cases of abortion; requiring the Bible to be taught in public high schools; … insisting that legislators use religion as a guide in lawmaking; appointing “family values” judges; barring female soldiers from combat … The platform also makes homophobia and the denial of basic civil rights to gays, lesbians and transgender people a centerpiece.

As a crass electoral play, Trump’s strategy worked. Although white evangelical voters did not view Trump as religious or even moral, they voted for him by a 65 point margin, delivering a large majority of Trump’s total votes in the general election (and indeed one fifth of the American electorate).

The same policies that excited white evangelicals, however, sounded like anti-American religious persecution to others. Muslims voted 74–13 for Clinton, and reacted with fear to Trump’s victory. Jews voted 71–24 for Clinton. Religiously unaffiliated voters, and other faiths, went for Clinton by more than 2 to 1. Openly LGBT voters, fearing a different type of religious persecution, went for Clinton 78–14, and also expressed fear for their futures at Trump’s win.

The personal threat from sexual assault and other bullying

Trump’s campaign also horrified those concerned about sexual assault and bullying. Such advocates believed that Trump should have been easily disqualified by his life history of treating women as objects, over a dozen accusations of sexual assault, a 2005 tape of Trump bragging about sexual assault, and his campaign’s bumper sticker sexual slurs against Clinton. From this perspective, the Trump campaign was a public celebration of the bullying sexism that almost all American women and girls face regularly in public, in work places, and in private settings. Trump’s victory, therefore, traumatized sexual assault survivors, who reported flashbacks and fear of future harassment due to his victory.

The fact that Trump won despite all that was devastating to many women. Time Magazine writer Darlena Cunha wrote:

I’d watched the country I love elect a man whose words suggest that he believes my daughters and I are objects to be grabbed and graded.

Salon columnist Mary Elizabeth Williams added:

I fought back tears as I sent [my daughters] off on the subway to school on Wednesday morning. … Scared knowing that the next random misogynist on the train who wants to grab them by the pussy has the stamp of approval from our new leader.

Of course, women are not the only victims of bullying. Trump publicly mocked deaf actress Marlee Matlin as retarded and performing an insulting imitation of disabled journalist Serge Kovaleski. Indeed, some have suggested that Trump’s successes result directly from his bullying tactics. The National Review wrote a column exploring how Trump’s business career relied upon bullying small businesses.

Many others also care about the popular vote

Our allies care about the duration of Trump’s mandate, since Trump attacked most of our alliances and extensively praised our mutual enemies. Our allies want to know whether and when America will resume its global leadership in fighting authoritarianism, fighting global crime, promoting science and the rule of law, and steadying the global economy.

Our children care. As one of Clinton’s ads noted, they are watching how America responds to someone with Trump’s behaviors and words. In mock votes, kids overwhelmingly chose Clinton. They and their parents are wondering about bullying, lying, anger, and lack of preparation as tactics to get ahead.

Trump himself cares, as he proved when he went on another falsehood-based rant to claim, without evidence, that he only lost the popular vote because of illegal votes. Trump’s loyalists also care, as they demonstrate with their furious tirades that anyone talking about the popular vote must be a #Libtard, #Crybaby, #SoreLoser, or a #Snowflake (or even a #SpecialSnowflake). With typical grace, Trumpkins urge such people to #GetOverIt because #YouLost. America, in their view, needs to shut up and welcome #YesYourPresident.

What the popular vote means for these Americans

Is America an inclusive nation of ideas, rather than a nation of white nationalism? Is America vibrant, optimistic, and open? Will America be a champion for open societies around the world, and an enemy to authoritarians and kleptocrats? Will American cities and neighborhoods stand up to bullying, to racism, to religious intolerance, and to assault?

By vote, the answer is yes.

Trumpism decisively loses America’s future

Trump’s 2016 victory was mediocre by historic standards. America has 219 million eligible voters. Of those, only one in four cast their votes for Trump. This is the lowest ratio since 1824. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton cruised to a popular vote victory of over 2 million votes.

The trends, however, are even more grim for Trumpism.

Since 1992, the Democratic Party has increasingly been the party of the open society, in favor of trade, markets, prosperity, diversity, and ideas. The Republican Party, starting with Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and accelerating from Pat Buchanan in 1992 through Trump today, has increasingly become the party of white nationalism and cultural resentment. During that time, Democrats won the presidential popular vote 6 out of 7 times, the longest such winning streak in American history.

The demographics of Trump and Clinton voters reflect this divide. White voters without college degrees voted for Trump by 39 points (67% to 28%). As noted above, white evangelical Christians voted for Trump by a 65 point margin (81% to 16%). Earlier polls suggested that white men without college degrees supported Trump by 59 points (76%–17%). Nonwhite Americans, by contrast, voted against Trump overwhelmingly: by 36 points among Asian Americans, by 36 points among Hispanics, and by 80 points among African Americans. Poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight found that college education was the strongest indicator of support for Clinton vs. Trump.

As America becomes more educated, more prosperous, and more diverse, everyone knows how this story ends. In early 2015, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Horsey predicted that 2016 would be the last cycle Republicans could win with their appeal to white voters. Reince Priebus himself, Trump’s future White House Chief of Staff, supervised a post-mortem of the GOP’s losses in 2012 that underscored the GOP would need to reach out to nonwhite voters to maintain its long-term viability. Trump’s campaign destroyed the viability of that plan.

So what happens next? As Republicans require ever-increasing turnout from their dwindling base, their naked appeals to white nationalism will alienate more and more of America. California provides a case study, from the time when Governor Pete Wilson backed the xenophobic initiative Prop 187 (which was later invalidated by the courts). As Peter Beinart described in The Atlantic, the Republican Party succeeded briefly with its “White Strategy” in California, but was soon consigned to permanent minority status as the state became more diverse.

The future is not just about demographics, but also about age

A party’s long-term viability depends upon its ability to appeal to young voters. As an American Enterprise Institute post noted, first Reagan and then Bush won young and new voters by massive margins. Those young enthusiasts became the engine of long-term Republican competitiveness. “The twentysomethings of the 1980s remain the most Republican cohort in the electorate to this day.”

By this long-term measure, the Republican Party is eating its seed corn. Today’s young voters find Republican intolerance appalling. The map to the left shows Electoral College votes allocated by voters younger than 40. Not only would younger voters have denied Trump the Rust Belt states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, they also would have delivered a sweep of the emerging South, including Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas (yes, Texas).

Anti-Trump America is strong enough to stand up to bullies

We have a template for responding to Trump’s racism. After Trump’s election, a student on campus at Baylor University in Texas was shouldered off the sidewalk and called a racial slur by someone who claimed to be “making America great again.” The next day, hundreds of people of all races walked with her in solidarity.

In other words, we are #StrongerTogether. One participant in “Pantsuit Nation,” the Facebook group with millions of members who admired and supported Hillary Clinton, wrote after the election:

This is not the end. And while we must take time to grieve, we must also look ahead. If you’re a person of color, if you’re gay or lesbian or queer or trans, if you’re an immigrant or disabled or a veteran or a victim of sexual abuse, or if you’re feeling marginalized or afraid, please know WE HAVE YOUR BACK. This group can be a powerful force of good in our country if we all pitch in. I’m not giving up.

Women, in particular, have the numbers and the power to stand up to bullying. Women supporting each other, and supporting other victims of bullying and assault, can be a powerful force against male bullies. We see this in both the human experience (controlled experiments show that collaboration and awareness can reduce assault), as well as evolutionary history (among other primates, for instance, females work together to protect each other from male bullying). Thus, it matters a lot that female voters rejected Trump by 24 points more than male voters, the largest gender gap in American history.

Clinton’s America is a great place to live

The states that voted for Clinton generate more tax revenues, take fewer federal subsidies, and have lower divorce rates.

The counties that voted for Clinton generate two thirds of America’s economy and almost all of its innovation.

The groups that overwhelmingly voted against Trump include business leaders, libertarians, Republican national security experts, scientists, economists, America’s newspapers, and Silicon Valley.

Make no mistake: the Republicans have a lot of power right now, and for at least the next two years. The popular vote, however, makes clear that Clinton’s America is more vibrant and faster growing than Trump’s America. Inclusion, tolerance, and diversity represent America’s majority, and our future.

1. Show solidarity with those on Trump’s enemies list. Comfort our nation’s immigrants, our disabled, our women, our citizens of color, and every other group that Trump attacked during his campaign.

2. Hope Trump is a great President for all of us, but do not forgive his horrific racism and sexism during the campaign, and do not forgive his supporters for voting for him despite that.

3. Thank Hillary for absorbing so much hatred, for being the first-ever major party female nominee. Thank her for winning the popular vote despite the trends against her, despite even rogue agents of the FBI and former KGB agents breaking the laws to sabotage her.

4. Mobilize civil society (including nonprofits such as the ACLU, but also business leaders and governors and civil servants) to try to mitigate Trump’s most dangerous policy instincts, especially in civil rights, national security, the environment, and the economy.

5. Prepare to take back the White House in 2020.

Originally published at www.huffingtonpost.com on November 11, 2016.

On Saturday, Donald Trump issued an “emergency” appeal seeking $100,000 for his campaign “to help get our ads on the air.”

This was odd for two reasons. First, according to his own early campaign ads, the central premise of Trump’s campaign was that he would self-fund. Second, in his disclosure forms, Trump claimed that his total net worth is ten billion dollars. In other words, Trump would have to spend precisely one one-thousandth of one percent of his net worth in order to cover the cost to air these “emergency” commercials. If Trump were telling the truth about his wealth, $100,000 for him would be about 2 or 3 dollars for an average American.

So, Trump has lied about his wealth. As Forbes recently wrote, “The Occam’s razor explanation is that he’s not worth $10 billion.” This is not a surprise to those who know Trump well. Just last year, Forbes described Trump’s claims of riches as “a whopper” of a lie. Indeed, many speculate that the reason Trump is so adamant about refusing to release his tax returns is that they may reveal he doesn’t have as much money has he’s claimed.

But what do these financial problems say about Trump as a candidate?

“In financial circles, it’s pretty well known that Trump is a deadbeat.”

First of all, the financial shortfalls of the Trump campaign serve as a reminder of Trump’s startlingly bad record as a businessman. As The Atlantic reported in 2011: “In financial circles, it’s pretty well known that Trump is a deadbeat.” Trump tries to obscure this fact by threatening defamation lawsuits against journalists who report on his actual business record, but as Trump loses these lawsuits at trial and on appeal, Trump’s answers during depositions reveal his actual track record.

When the lies are pulled away, Trump’s total returns are poor. As the National Journal has explained, Trump inherited great wealth from his father, starting in 1974 when his father gave him control of a company that was worth $200 million. Fact checkers have shown how Trump has repeatedly lied about inheritances and loans he obtained from his father over time. John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas, analyzed Trump’s holdings since 1976. Griffin concludes: “Trump has underperformed the real estate market by approximately $13.2 billion, or 57%.” In other words, compared with other businesspeople, especially those in the real estate business, Trump actually lost money over the course of his career. Trump would be a richer man if he had invested his inherited wealth in the stock market or real estate, rather than trying to become a businessperson.

In other words, compared with other businesspeople, especially those in the real estate business, Trump actually lost money over the course of his career.

Trump is more of a grifter than a business leader. While Trump squandered some of his inheritance, the damage was much greater for people who mistakenly did business with Trump. Trump is well known for stiffing small vendors, and indeed his refusal to honor business deals has put some mom-and-pop vendors out of business. Then, there are the business failures. Anyone who put time or money into Trump Mortgages (founded in 2006, just before the collapse in mortgage markets) would have been better off if Trump had stayed away from the world of business. Others who would have been better off include those who invested time or money into any of Trump’s many failures, such as Trump Tower Tampa; Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico; Trump Taj Mahal; Trump Magazine; Trump World Magazine; Trump Steaks; the Trump Shuttle; and Trump University. In several of these projects, Trump was sued. He settled out-of-court with investors regarding the Tampa and Baja projects. With Trump University, tuition-paying students allege that Trump used fraud to dupe them into becoming customers. None of this even counts the fact that Trump’s companies declared bankruptcy four times between 1991 and 2009.

Trump’s few successes as a developer were tied to organized crime. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, who has written a book about organized crime and gambling, has spent many years investigating the ties between Trump and the Mafia. In a lengthy story for Politico, Johnston “encountered multiple threads linking Trump to organized crime.” These threads included openly seeking mob support to compete against real estate developers who refused to do so. These links to organized crime have been only lightly reported to date, but the Politico story is well worth a close read (and recall, again, that Trump has aggressively used libel laws to prevent prior journalistic investigations of his money).

So has Trump earned any clean money? Outside of inheritance, contract breaches, bankruptcy protections, litigation threats, eminent domain, fraud, and maybe mob ties, has Trump made any money? Well, yes, he has made money in one line of business: misogynistic self-promotion. In 1992, Trump blamed Mike Tyson’s rape victim for her rape, when Tyson’s release would have boosted Trump’s boxing-related revenues. In 1994, Trump spoke with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and speculated as to whether his then-infant daughter would develop attractive breasts. From the late 1990s onward, Trump built his name as a “reality star” by repeatedly demeaning women on Howard Stern’s radio show, which he continued to do through 2013 on his television show The Apprentice. As one reporter summed it up, “Trump has made flippant misogyny as much a part of his trademark as his ostentatious lifestyle.” Apparently, this brand appealed to the 4.7 percent of eligible American voters who have thus far supported Trump, but sleaze marketing is not much of a blueprint from which to strengthen America’s record private sector run of job growth.

Trump’s Economic Policy Ideas Are Even Worse

So what are the policy ideas of this so-called “businessman” who may not even be breakeven without fraud and organized crime, and whose only “clean” money comes from reality television? Unsurprisingly, they would be a disaster for the American economy.

For starters, Trump has made it clear that he intends to extend the philosophy of “Deadbeat Donald” to the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury. During a recent interview with CNBC, Trump literally suggested that the United States should threaten bankruptcy to gain leverage over holders of Treasury bonds. As analysts from the left, right, and center pointed out, this idea would trigger an immediate global economic crisis. This is because the world economy relies upon Treasury bonds as risk-free securities, to the benefit of global financial markets and the enormous benefit of the United States.

This is not the only economically catastrophic idea that Trump has proposed. Businessman Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s presidential nominee four years ago, explained recently that: “If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into a prolonged recession” by triggering a trade war with other nations. Trump’s budget plans are those of a charlatan. His famous wall with Mexico would cost tens of billions of dollars to build and maintain, and his plan to make Mexico pay for it is unworkable.

Americans have roughly five months to learn about the “Deadbeat Donald” aspect of Trump’s track record and policy ideas. If we do not learn that lesson by November 4th, unfortunately we will learn it the hard way shortly thereafter.

Barack Obama was my least favorite of the final three candidates in 2008. My family initially supported supported Hillary Clinton. As lifelong Democrats, we looked forward to a restoration of the smart centrism of the Clinton era.

Why Clinton? Well, it starts with America from 1992 to 2000, the administration of President Bill Clinton. Today, Americans talk about those years with the luxury of 20/20 hindsight. Naysayers of the left, right, and center criticize Bill Clinton for various mistakes, from the subject matter of Ken Starr’s investigations, to weaknesses in financial regulations, to problems with the 1994 crime bill. Few seem to recall the massive deficits, the crime wave, the partisanship, and the economic problems that preceded Clinton. Few recall the Republican Party’s near-universal, and universally false, opposition to Clinton’s first budget based upon predictions of economic collapse. Few recall how much attention Clinton paid to fiscal rectitude, free trade, government reform, and economically-oriented foreign policy. Few recall the concrete details of the Clinton economic boom, including rapid economic growth and a narrowing income gap.

For many in America, Hillary Clinton in 2008 seemed to be our best chance to return to that era. But Hillary lost the primary, so we didn’t have an opportunity to see whether she could recreate the economic and societal gains of her husband’s administration. The choice, instead, was between Barack Obama and John McCain.

McCain was not a bad choice. In the early weeks of the general election of 2000, he even held occasional poll leads. Since the 1990s, McCain’s lifetime of courage in Vietnam and in the Senate served as an inspiration to “good government” centrists. In 2000, after the New Hampshire primary, McCain became the first Republican to whom I’d ever donated money. But for Karl Rove’s tactic of spreading racist lies in the South Carolina primary, McCain might have won in 2000, and the subsequent years would have been very different. In November 2008, however, I decided to pull the lever for Obama, after watching Sarah Palin’s disturbing interview with Katie Couric. McCain was not young, and the chance of Palin as President a risk too great.

Why was I so skeptical of Obama? I am white and Jewish, so I sometimes wonder whether subconscious racial bias might have influenced me, but given the money I have contributed to other African American political candidates throughout the country, it seems to me something else was going on. By contrast with McCain and Clinton, the young Senator seemed too academic, too inexperienced. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his career history as an organizer, and his legions of young fans worried me. These were not the career steps of a typical pragmatist. Indeed, as a Senator, Obama had not demonstrated the backbone or leadership that either Clinton and McCain had demonstrated in challenging their own respective party orthodoxies.

Obama’s first-term stumbles in office, such as the healthcare rollout, seemed to justify the skeptics. Many of my private sector friends, who had funded and defended Obama in 2007 and 2008, started to worry. Obama’s approval ratings plummeted. The Democrats lost both chambers of Congress. Today, in 2016, the worst elements of the Republican Party seem ascendent in both Congress and the race for the White House. The economy, while far better than the one he inherited, has not come close to replicating the growth of the Clinton years. Obama’s inaugural address that America was about to “slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet” seemed like a punch line.

Those headlines, however, ignore two broader truths.

First, Obama learned on the job. His performance as president has gotten better and better. In 2012, he campaigned very differently than in 2008, focusing much more on the prose of governance vs. the poetry of his first run for office. He began using his executive orders more effectively. Historically, few of our nation’s presidents have been as effective in their seventh and eight years in office as Obama has been. Obama’s steady competence has also revealed itself by comparison with the second terms of Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and Nixon. As Bill Scher wrote recently, President Obama seems to have “broken the second term curse.” He has been active without overreaching, has avoided or managed potential scandals, and has improved his leverage with the legislature (for example, by negotiating with the Republican leadership to secure a budget deal).

The long-term results of Obama’s steady competence bring to mind the long-term successes of great sports teams such as the San Antonio Spurs over the past twenty years, or the Dallas Cowboys under Jimmy Johnson. These teams succeeded because they adapted to change without overreacting to short-term trends. In the corporate world, this kind of leadership is called vision. In earlier eras, America would have called it integrity.

Integrity seems to be a particularly important label in the context of the fights that Obama has picked in the twilight of his Presidency. As we noted in the Progressive Policy Institute blog, Obama in 2015 repeatedly stood up to powerful interest groups of the left, right, and center to do what was best for America. Those include:

• Standing up to left-wing college students who were trying to impose campus speech codes;
• Standing up to the fossil fuel industry by forging a climate deal among 196 nations;
• Standing up to education bureaucrats by appointing long-time reformer and educator John King as Secretary of Education;
• Standing up to xenophobes and nativists by welcoming Syrian refugees;
• Standing up to hawks including powerful interest groups in Washington DC by negotiating a diplomatic settlement regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions; and
• Standing up to big labor by ignoring their protectionist and backwards-looking attacks on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

American history provides few comparable combinations of long-term competence and profiles in courage. By these measures, Obama ranks behind only the most legendary American presidents — George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt — and compares favorably with greats such as Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson.

Obama shares a second characteristic with these legendary Presidents: he faced extraordinary challenges. When Obama took office, the stock market was collapsing, global terrorism was expanding, and anti-American leaders were gaining power in every part of the world. To be sure, these geopolitical and domestic challenges were not as great as those faced by Lincoln (the Civil War), Washington (the nation’s founding), or FDR (the Great Depression and World War II), but they were comparable to those facing Thomas Jefferson (domestic federalism and tensions with Britain) and Teddy Roosevelt (domestic monopolies and management of America’s growing world power).

Let’s be blunt, however: Obama faced a racist backlash that created domestic political challenges unlike those faced by any of his forebears.

In an odd sense, some of this racist backlash may have been inadvertent. For instance, the Koch brothers funded the Tea Party out of a desire to build a libertarian counterweight to the Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. This grassroots movement, however, coalesced around angry and disaffected white males, and Donald Trump took advantage of the Koch-backed movement to promote the “birther” conspiracy that Obama was a foreigner and (gasp) a Muslim from Africa rather than an American-born citizen. This white nationalist movement was appeased and subtly encouraged by establishment Republican figures who viewed it as electorally useful.

Even if they were not intentionally malicious, these actions by the Koch brothers and other mainstream Republican leaders were reckless in light of the growing racial hostility among anti-Obama white Americans. As documented by American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein:

One year into his presidency, ABC News catalogued an array of racially tinged and overtly racist statements or actions taken against Obama. They came from election and party officials and media figures, including Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. In the years since, the number of prominent figures using race as a wedge only grew. They include a New Hampshire police commissioner using the “N” word to refer to the president, a Montana federal district judge sending racist emails, and many others.

This level of race-based hostility complicated Obama’s already-difficult job. Scholarly research has confirmed that anti-black racism influenced Obama’s approval ratings. The organized core of anti-black racism made it difficult for Obama to work with Republican members of Congress even in areas of mutual interest.

Despite this, the numbers show that Obama oversaw a turnaround. Occupy Democrats, an admittedly partisan group, compiled the following statistics sheet:

When Obama won the Presidency, even his adversary John McCain acknowledged that America had done something important in electing an African American. As the satirical magazine The Onion captured with its headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job”, however, the work of getting elected was only the beginning of the story. America’s resilience and progress during Obama’s two terms in office, in the face of a racist backlash, has proven me and the other Obama skeptics wrong. When historians gather with the benefit of hindsight, Obama will emerge as one of the half-dozen greatest presidents of all time.