How Trump has hijacked your mind and how you can stop him
Why your lack of discipline could result in a second term for President Trump
Hillary Clinton spent nearly twice as much on the 2016 election as Donald Trump. And like Al Gore before her, she won the most votes, but she didn’t win the presidency. The key questions for Democrats in the lead-up to 2020 are: How did Donald Trump succeed with far fewer resources in 2016? And how can we prevent him from successfully enacting the same gameplan in 2020? The answer involves regular people like yourself taking their roles seriously as part of the political process in the social media era.
Why money matters
To understand how we got here, we have to understand the role of money in elections at a more substantial level than the money=bad hunch that many Democrats carry with them. To many people, it’s not obvious that money is really so important for winning elections at all. The progressive group PCCC gives sample language to its endorsed candidates saying “For a campaign like mine, money isn’t what wins elections…” Fifty-four candidates won their House of Representatives seats in 2018 despite being outspent by their opponents. And, of course, Donald Trump had less money than Hillary Clinton. So what is money even good for?
All other things being equal (set aside the Electoral College for a second), the candidate with the most votes wins. And earning the most votes requires convincing people: either convincing nonvoters to show up and vote, or convincing voters to chose you over your opponent. To persuade anyone, you must communicate with them. That’s where money comes in.
It is possible to communicate with voters directly by knocking on their doors. That can work in, for instance, an Alderman’s race where the winner needs fewer than 1,000 votes. It can also work if you have a couple-dozen volunteers who are willing and able to work 20-hour weeks for 2 months canvassing for you in a State House race. But most candidates don’t have anywhere near the necessary labor available to reach enough voters without spending money.
When candidates fundraise, good campaigns aim to spend 70 to 80% of their budget on voter communication (paid canvassers, direct mail, digital ads, targeted cable buys, etc.) and the remaining 30% on overhead (campaign manager, fundraising costs, and so on). The end result is that the better fundraiser wins 91% of the time — they’re more-or-less guaranteed to be able to speak to more voters, more times.
How Trump is different
At the presidential level, these money rules get softer because candidates have a lot of room to communicate with voters through earned media — that is, news stories that they don’t pay for. So it’s still valuable to have a ton of money to pay canvassers and send targeted communications that contain the exact message you want to send. But getting a 2-minute segment on CNN means reaching a lot of voters without buying paid communications.
Unsurprisingly, the reality-TV star had a tried-and-true method for attracting earned media in 2016 and he succeeded at dictating news cycles to a degree that no previous candidate has done — and as president the trend continues. Check out this graph from Ash Ngu to see the results of Trump’s media mastery:
To accomplish this feat, Trump uses the same method he used to stay in the NYC tabloids for decades: be outrageous. He’s like Anthony Jesilnik without the punchlines — always grabbing your attention by saying the most shocking thing possible. Sometimes this manifests in policies like purposeful cruelty to migrants or other marginalized Americans, and in these cases we have a moral obligation to do everything we can to stop him. But most of the time, his shock-jock strategy manifests in constantly bullshitting us. And no, he’s not lying, because his goal is not to convince us of the falsehood. He’s bullshitting, because truth or lies are irrelevent to his goal of getting your attention all the time. And here you are reading an article about Donald Trump, so I’d say it’s working.
What you can do
As evidenced by the graph above, the New York Times and other news gatekeepers are doing a terrible job of stopping Trump’s strategy because they have a symbiotic incentive structure — just like the president, they benefit from publishing the most sensational stories that grab the most attention. But in the social media age, gatekeepers have less control than they once did. Just as important are the regular Americans like yourself who engage with political stories and share articles, memes and rants with each other.
When you share memes about how Donald claimed there were airports during the revolutionary war (or maybe the war of 1812?), you are contributing to his mind share. Worse than that, you are contributing to the Trump-endorsed narrative that the reason liberals don’t like him is that they don’t like the way he talks, that we think he’s stupid and we’re snobs about regular Americans like him. That, of course, is not why we’re gnashing our teeth about this president. And your meme-sharing is simply a way for you to find some kind of levity in the midst of broken promises, giveaways to the wealthy, kissing-up to dictators, and unnecessary death and cruelty. But it’s time to recognize our role in contributing to the Trump campaign strategy.
It’s time to take a step back and realize that a) 2020 Donald Trump has every resource he had in 2016, and b) he now has the incumbency advantage and almost certainly a fundraising advantage. So if we’re going to defeat him, each one of us has to do our part to turn the larger conversation away from a Trump-approved narrative of outrage and scandal and toward a narrative of broken promises and a failure to deliver value to the American people.
Start by resolving not to post about his bullshit.
