Dear Friends -
Watching the Republican Convention last week, I kept thinking about 1968. Gabriel Sherman, in his biography of Roger Ailes, describes it this way:
[The TV producers] broadcast clips of Nixon, standing in an open-air limousine, arms thrust victoriously in the air, making his trademark V. For the audience at home, the jubilant scene would contrast starkly with that of a week earlier, when Democrats had brought insurrection to the streets. When Richard Nixon came to town, there was a parade.
This is the contrast Trump wants. His primary message is racism. While Biden wants to make this election about Trump’s incompetent handling of the pandemic, Trump is using the protests and the violence to double down and force Biden away from the pandemic. Racism in America is flexing its muscle in the current political dynamic. We’re 62 days from the election, and yes: it is indeed getting so much crazier. Too crazy, and it’s not even Labor Day.
You may have thought the GOP convention was disturbing, but that’s because you weren’t the target audience. We are not choosing leaders, we’re choosing world views -- world views that are so different as to be almost entirely unrelatable. Voters have pretty much made up their minds (96% of them in fact). Trump cannot seem to alienate his core constituency; he’s got a hard floor. To win, he needs to ensure high turnout with his base, and do what he can to suppress Democratic turnout. The GOP convention was well-produced and designed in a large part to make portions of the GOP base feel better about voting for Trump. I expected a disaster, and yet again Trump dramatically outperformed my admittedly low expectations: expertly ending his stultifying speech (well past pundit prime time), cueing the opera and fireworks like only a true WWF star with Godfather dreams could do.
Speaking of suppressing Democratic turnout: it’s not just about the post office, it’s about making Biden as unpalatable as possible. Consider this prime piece of doublespeak: “If they want to make this election between who’s saving America and who’s swindling America, bring it on.” This is a time-honored Republican tradition, stretching back from the Swift Boat attacks through today: take your opponent’s greatest strength, and turn it into your primary point of attack. This tactic has the advantage of not only neutering your opponent’s best selling point, but it also helps inoculate you from the same attack -- “bounces off of me and sticks to you”.
Trump mentioned Biden 41 times during his acceptance speech; Biden didn’t mention Trump at all. It’s dangerous to be too empathetic -- Biden must go on the attack. How is it possible that the only mention of Trump's impeachment is at the Republican Convention -- as evidence of the “baseless persecution” of the President? Sure, Michelle and Barack and even (inexplicably) Jon Meachem had grave warnings about the “Future of the Republic…” but it was all so intellectual, without the narrative punch and carnival-barker air of The Trump Show.
That’s one thing Trump has always understood: politics has to be fun, and he knows how to provide an ugly sort of fun -- or as I called it in 2015, “spectacle”. This week we learned that Trump wanted his presidential inauguration to “look like North Korea” -- and yes, that’s a direct quote from the President of the United States. But he understands the narrative value of television and Twitter as a medium - and he’s out to leverage it to his maximum advantage. The GOP quite literally learned this from Roger Ailes, who took his experience producing entertainment television to Nixon’s campaign and then nearly every other GOP campaign before finally founding Fox News as the privatized propaganda wing of the Republican Party itself.
Democrats desperately need stronger stories, and I’m nervous about Biden’s ability to provide them. Instead, the Democrats left a lot of red meat on the cutting room floor: Russia and Ukraine, Corruption, true Nepotism, and more. It’s one thing to fail to tell the story, it’s another to see the Republicans seize upon those very storylines. They will turn the Democrats into the corrupt ones who collude -- “but, Hunter in Ukraine!” could very well be the “but, her emails!” of 2020 -- and Biden isn’t ready to do a thing about it. Don’t forget what Steven Bannon expertly did in 2016, making the Clinton Foundation seem more corrupt than Trump’s -- despite all the evidence to the contrary. (Great book on the subject here.)
Fiction sold perfectly in 2016, and they’re doing it again. They will do it every time Democrats ignore the fight (taking the high road, as it were). The old rule of thumb in politics was that to dispute an attack was to give it voice -- which is sometimes true. This was the dilemma John Kerry faced over the Swift Boat attacks. But in a fractured media landscape -- from social media to cable news bubbles -- uncontested narratives consume everything in their path. Without constant, persistent, hard push-back, Trump will rewrite and occupy the American imagination with his stories about Biden’s corruption and malfeasance. Remember: “If they want to make this election between who’s saving America and who’s swindling America, bring it on.” As chaos foments on the streets and COVID-19 cases continue to hit records, every speaker who referenced the pandemic (and few of them did) spoke in the past tense and as though only Trump could restore order, as if by writing the script they could make it so.
This is a tight election. Even if Biden ends up 4% in the national polls, thanks to the electoral college that means the race is effectively tied. If you compare swing state polls from this same time frame in 2016, Trump’s performance is stronger than four years ago. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to defy expectations and some sectors of the economy are firing on all cylinders (notably home construction). Don’t forget that Americans making less than $50K a year overwhelmingly preferred Hillary Clinton in 2016; it was white people in every other income bracket who went overwhelmingly for Trump.
Get ready for a street fight to the finish line: this is going to be brutal.
In 2016, Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a total of about 100,000 votes -- and several states were very close: Trump lost New Hampshire by 1,700 votes; lost Minnesota by a point and a half; lost Nevada by 2 points, Maine by 3 points. The era of election landslides has passed.
If you rearrange the letters in “Republican National Convention” it also spells “Con Vulnerable Nation Into Panic.” Even for me, it all gets to be a bit much. To escape the madness, I’ve been reading an incredible book about fungi as well as a book about the greatest risks facing humanity. The latter is not for the faint of heart; I’ve summarized it briefly here for those who are interested. Included in the book is a discussion of the risks of an asteroid hitting the planet, which reminds me: Chuck Schumer recently replied to a post on Twitter about an asteroid approaching the earth with the message “Vote Early”. Who knew the Senate minority leader had such a sense of humor? On the asteroid front -- don’t worry: Jupiter will protect us.
Lots of love, nicco
Today’s email was assembled after much discussion with Gabriel London, to whom I owe an intellectual debt, and more: he’s a fine coconspirator and an excellent editor.
PS. To take my own advice about serialized storytelling, a few updates from prior emails:
Your weekly reminder: don’t believe the polls: Most pollsters use “likely voters” to weight their polling… but that means guessing who is going to vote. And in pandemic, hyper-partisan America, all bets are off -- as demonstrated by the massive number of “swing states” where both campaigns are playing.
Did I mention the racism? Popular Information does a deep-dive into the vocal Neo-Nazis who have maxed out their political contributions to Trump’s re-election; meanwhile Facebook encourages Holocaust denialism while the Republican National Committee approved a resolution at the convention "refuting the legitimacy of the Southern Poverty Law Center to identify hate groups," saying the group "puts conservative groups or voices at risk of attack".
You haven’t heard the last of QAnon: during a Fox News interview, Chris Wallace asked White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about it, and Meadows dodged the question -- feeding the conspiracy theory. It will keep growing…
Postal Service Shenanigans: In newly-filed paperwork, the US Postal Service Board Chairman Robert Duncan is listed as Director of the Senate Leadership Fund, a $130 million super PAC backing Sen. Mitch McConnell’s priorities. Meanwhile battleground states aren’t legally allowed to start preparing ballots for counting before election day, even if they’ve received them.