Amidst all the talk about last Monday’s presidential debate and in the interest of improving my own skills, I thought I’d break down some of the things I thought Hillary Clinton did that won the debate for her.
Here are eight areas where I thought Clinton excelled in Monday night’s debate.
1. Focus on your main points
People tend to only remember 10 percent of what they hear. So you want to be sure to keep coming back to your main points and repeating them in different ways.
We want the focus to be on the economy. Even though Trump spoke more during the debate, Clinton was much better focused when it came to repeating her points about jobs and the economy.
She also managed to demonstrate how Trump’s plan amounted to more “trickle-down economics”:
Again, people tend to only remember 10 percent of what they hear. An easy formula to help you get across your main points is: tell them, tell them again, and then tell them that you told them.
2. Know what the opposition is going to say
Clinton did a much better job of preparing for what her opponent was going to say. She knew she was going to face attacks on:
- NAFTA
- Jobs and the economy
- Being “the establishment”
- ISIS
- President Obama
- DNC hacks
- Email
One of the best exchanges of the evening was how she prepared for the attacks on the economy:
CLINTON: Well, let’s stop for a second and remember where we were eight years ago. We had the worst financial crisis, the Great Recession, the worst since the 1930s. That was in large part because of tax policies that slashed taxes on the wealthy, failed to invest in the middle class, took their eyes off of Wall Street, and created a perfect storm.
In fact, Donald was one of the people who rooted for the housing crisis. He said, back in 2006, “Gee, I hope it does collapse, because then I can go in and buy some and make some money.” Well, it did collapse.
TRUMP: That’s called business, by the way.
She said here’s what happened, here’s why, and then she pointed out how Trump rooted for the housing collapse.
Trump took the bait in one of the most memorable condescending interruptions of the night (“That’s called business, by the way”) and demonstrated his apathy for people who’d lost their homes—their loss is his gain.
3. Win the independents
You are not going to win the far right. Especially not at this point in the election season. This bears repeating: You are not going to win the far right. Hillary was not going to win the far right.
Why is this important?
If you’re wasting your time trying to win over someone from the far right, there are probably better places to focus your time.
Clinton focused on the independents. How did she do this?
She took the moral high ground and held it. She spoke about her beliefs instead of getting into the policy detail weeds.
Nine million people — nine million people lost their jobs. Five million people lost their homes. And $13 trillion in family wealth was wiped out.
Now, we have come back from that abyss. And it has not been easy. So we’re now on the precipice of having a potentially much better economy, but the last thing we need to do is to go back to the policies that failed us in the first place.
In Clinton’s case, I think the independents who are most important to her are women. I think Clinton won women easily in this debate.
Why? Because everything Trump did, including his constant interruptions, fit the narrative that Republicans bully women. As Vox writes, it’s the textbook example of “how a male politician can alienate female voters.”
If you missed all the Trump-terruptions, here’s a short clip.
To her credit, Clinton didn’t try to shout Donald Trump down. She patiently made her points and she baited him into overreacting again and again.
4. Explain why you believe what you believe, or did what you did
I was curious how Clinton would respond to questions about NAFTA. Here’s how she responded:
When I was in the Senate, I had a number of trade deals that came before me, and I held them all to the same test. Will they create jobs in America? Will they raise incomes in America? And are they good for our national security? Some of them I voted for. The biggest one, a multinational one known as CAFTA, I voted against. And because I hold the same standards as I look at all of these trade deals.
But let’s not assume that trade is the only challenge we have in the economy. I think it is a part of it, and I’ve said what I’m going to do. I’m going to have a special prosecutor. We’re going to enforce the trade deals we have, and we’re going to hold people accountable.
When I was secretary of state, we actually increased American exports globally 30 percent. We increased them to China 50 percent. So I know how to really work to get new jobs and to get exports that helped to create more new jobs.
She did not back down and she explained why she did what she did. Here’s her criteria:
- Will trade deals create jobs in America?
- Will they raise incomes in America?
- Are they good for our national security?
Whether you agree with her or not, you understand what she is considering and why she would vote for or against a trade deal. Including how she voted against CAFTA added credibility.
5. Speak from your experience
Clinton leveraged her experience extremely well in the debate. Twice she started out answers with “When I was in the Senate …” and four times reminded people she was “secretary of state.”
One of my favorite answers of hers was when she spoke about using sanctions against Iran:
With respect to Iran, when I became secretary of state, Iran was weeks away from having enough nuclear material to form a bomb. They had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle under the Bush administration. They had built covert facilities. They had stocked them with centrifuges that were whirling away.
And we had sanctioned them. I voted for every sanction against Iran when I was in the Senate, but it wasn’t enough. So I spent a year-and-a-half putting together a coalition that included Russia and China to impose the toughest sanctions on Iran.
And we did drive them to the negotiating table. And my successor, John Kerry, and President Obama got a deal that put a lid on Iran’s nuclear program without firing a single shot. That’s diplomacy. That’s coalition-building. That’s working with other nations.
This great anecdote tells the story of how she spent a year-and-a-half putting together a coalition to sanction Iran and remove the threat of nuclear weapons without resorting to violence.
I spend a lot of time talking to conservatives and independents. Many of them are former military. Military people tend to believe other military people over civilians. I’ve never been in the military.
How do I approach these conversations?
The same way I approach any conversation. I speak from my own experiences as a project manager and as an educator. I talk about my experience with leadership. I talk about projects I’ve led and results I’ve achieved. I talk about challenges along the way and how they were overcome. I acknowledge when things haven’t gone as great as expected and I talk about how I’ve adapted. I talk about what I’ve learned through my experience.
I’ve always found that people tend to respect experience and I can have some pretty good conversations (though don’t think I don’t understand my white privilege helps).
Never underestimate your own experience though. Everyone has experience. When you talk from your own experience, it’s extremely powerful.
6. If someone is going to rant, let them
As the debate progressed, Clinton grew increasingly content to deliver a short attack, then sit back and watch the show.
As Bloomberg described it:
One such instance came toward the end of the debate, when Clinton critiqued “Donald’s rhetoric” about Muslim communities, sending Trump careening from the Middle East to NATO, then to Islamic State, the Iraq War, temperament, campaign advertising, and back to temperament again. He spoke for 1,041 words in all—about an eighth of his entire performance.
How did Cliven Bundy eventually lose? Someone handed him a mic.
7. Overcome the stereotypes
Whether it’s true or not, there is a number of stereotypes about liberals. One of the ones that I hear often is this version of “liberals:”
The basic idea for handling this is: Don’t be the stereotype. Show people that you are much more like them than not.
One of the easiest ways to handle this particular stereotype is to ask people questions. In the case above, I asked the woman who said she thought progressives were smug why she thought that. This was not what she was expecting. She was expecting me to get angry and tell her she was wrong—a trap that would have confirmed the so-called liberal “smugness.”
Another thing I do quite often is to start from a place of commonality with people. Too often, we start at the argument, especially with people we don’t know. Get to know people. It’s extremely rare that I find people I don’t have things in common with. The conservatives you know are not as much like the conservatives on TV as I think we sometimes think they are. In my experience, they tend to be more independent than we think. And independents tend to be even more open.
Where Clinton had to be careful in the debate was not coming off as too “victorious.” She couldn’t look too smart or she would be seen as what conservatives think of as “liberal elite.”
The way she did this was by acknowledging something that Trump had said. Not agreeing. But acknowledging. In this manner, it’s still a conversation and you let the other person know they’re being listened to.
Humor (not sarcastic humor, but sympathetic humor) is also a great way to bridge gaps.
8. Remember that you win people, not arguments
This is often a tough one for us liberals. It’s been one of my own personal long-term struggles, especially because I come from an academic background and I like to argue.
Remember that in politics, arguments often only lead to polarizing people against you. In other words, even if somehow you “win” or think you win, more often than not, you’ve created an enemy.
You win people when you have a relationship with people and they respect you and, if you can get to this stage, you’re more likely to have an ear.
I thought Clinton won people watching by being more respectful. She didn’t interrupt nearly as much as Trump did, and she looked like a leader. She didn’t have to tell us she was a leader. She didn’t have to market to us. She simply led, and demonstrated leadership.
David Akadjian is the author of The Little Book of Revolution: A Distributive Strategy for Democracy (ebook now available).