Hillary Clinton began the 2016 presidential race by castigating Trump as a byproduct of Republican extremism. However, this spring, she pivoted sharply to a different message, and her change in strategy could have enormous consequences up and down the ballot. Clinton’s new framing paints Trump not as just another Republican extremist, but as a truly unique and un-American threat, distinctly different from the GOP establishment.
This approach has risked partially legitimizing more mainstream Republicans and the party itself, a shift that prompted immediate concern among many Democrats, particularly those hoping to defeat downballot Republicans by tying them to someone as offensive and unpopular as Trump.
However, there is good reason behind Clinton’s apparent change in strategy. Hillary Clinton is running what is arguably the most data-driven campaign in history, and she does not make decisions about her campaign operations lightly. Indeed, her team conducts vigorous social science experiments on a wide array of tactics, whether it’s the effectiveness of TV ads or how various voter mobilization efforts might affect turnout.
What Clinton and other Democrats have found is disappointing, but informative: The message that Trump is the culmination of Republican extremism has simply proven to be an ineffective way to sway voters. Extensive field research has found this theme to be far less powerful than other more traditional attacks, such as hitting Republicans over their unpopular economic policies. Some messages focusing on Trump even hurt Democrats, according to this research. Consequently, we have seen many Democratic campaigns for Congress avoiding attacks over Trump in favor of more conventional messages against Republican incumbents.
Linking Republicans seems like a no-brainer, so why has this turned out to be the case? Is Trump truly separate and apart from the Republican Party? If not, why should Democrats seemingly let the GOP off the hook for nominating him? Let’s take a look.
First, regardless of what the most effective campaign tactics have turned out to be, it is indeed a fact that Trump truly is the product of a long history of Republican extremism. However, it isn’t the extremism of ideological movement conservatism like that of Sen. Barry Goldwater or even Sen. Ted Cruz. Instead it’s the legacy of appeals to racism that stretches all the way back to Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, when he first deployed his infamously invidious Southern Strategy.
After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, racist Southern whites, who for more than a century had been loyal members of the Democratic Party, began moving to the Republican Party. Candidates like Nixon realized they could appeal to racial resentment to gain the votes of many of these racist white one-time Democrats, and did so successfully.
But these appeals haven’t always been so naked. Racial resentment is a subtler and less overt form of racism than open white supremacy. Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who had a senior role in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign and managed George H.W. Bush’s successful 1988 race, once offered a very revealing quote about the GOP’s post-civil rights strategy:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N****r, n****r, n****r.” By 1968, you can’t say “n****r”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites .… “We want to cut this” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N****r, n****r.”
In short, many whites don’t think of themselves as racists, they don’t want to be associated with unrepentant racists, and if you asked them point blank whether minorities are inherently inferior, many will say no. However, their racism would be revealed if they’re asked a different type of question, such as, “Is anti-white discrimination by minorities as big of a problem as white discrimination against minorities?” or “Does the government do too much to help blacks get ahead?” Distressingly, surveys show that many whites answer questions like these in the affirmative.
For decades Republicans have used the more subtle appeals to racial resentment that Atwater alluded to in order to get working-class white voters to support their unpopular and elitist economic policy agenda. As Atwater noted, Republicans have framed government spending and the taxes that pay for it as something that disproportionately helps minorities. They thus insinuate that Democrats want to tax hard-working white folks and give their money to undeserving minorities without appearing overtly racist.
In this regard, Trump simply says openly what Republicans have long more subtly implied. And when Trump claims to care about African-Americans and acts like he is campaigning for their votes, what he is really doing is trying to signal to conservative whites that he is not an unreconstructed racist.
Look beyond the surface of his actual economic proposals and you will see more of the same orthodox Republican policies that overwhelmingly benefit the ultra-wealthy, such as eliminating the estate tax. Even Trump’s protectionist stance on trade only has loose ties to any notions of economic populism. He is a nationalist first and foremost—a white nationalist at that.
Scholars Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann have warned for years that increasing Republican extremism was pushing America to a crisis point. In 2012 they wrote:
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
This statement could just as easily describe Trump. His core ideology of white nationalism is so extreme that one might rightly call him a fascist. He refuses to compromise on key aspects of it, like the mass deportation of millions of unauthorized immigrants. He tells lies so habitually that the fire in his pants can practically be seen from space. He denies man-made climate change is real. And he undermines the political opposition’s legitimacy when he lies that the election will be rigged if he loses.
Trump, therefore, is not the cause, but rather the symptom of greater dysfunction within the Republican Party. As the party increasingly becomes the vehicle for white nationalist grievance politics, Trump-like candidates will continue to have a home there.
That Trump follows in a long line of Republican extremism makes the failure of many Democratic efforts to link him to the GOP all the more dispiriting. Voters should be swayed by notions that Trump is a unique threat to our democratic institutions and that supposedly mainstream Republicans have enabled him every step along the way.
But DNC staffers, Democrats running downballot campaigns, and many left-leaning opinion writers are understandably highly skeptical that treating Trump differently from the rest of the Republican Party is the right strategy for the Democratic ticket. However, Clinton simply would not be doing this if her data told her otherwise, and analytics are the beating heart of the her campaign. Democrats have no choice but to use their finite resources on the strategies proven to work, not just the strategies we think ought to work.
As journalist Sasha Issenberg wrote in his seminal book about campaign tactics The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, Obama assembled an analytics department unrivaled in the history of campaigning at that point. Their superior handle on data allowed them to engage in vastly more precise targeting than Mitt Romney’s team was capable of. One senior figure in that operation was Elan Kriegel, who now heads the analytics team for Clinton. As Politico’s Shane Goldmacher recently reported, Kriegel’s data informs every major Clinton campaign decision and for good reason:
Four years ago, Kriegel similarly won the trust of Obama’s top brass as the battleground states analytics director in The Cave, the much-heralded Obama 2012 data war room. “We didn’t make a single decision about battleground state strategy without first talking to Elan about his numbers,” said Jeremy Bird, then Obama’s national field director and now a Clinton consultant.
“And he was never wrong,” Bird added. “That’s pretty remarkable.”
But it’s not just the Clinton campaign who’s examined this question. Dana Milbank recently explored a broad experiment conducted by House Majority PAC, the main Democratic super PAC focused on House races. HMP polled 25 congressional districts and found Trump was the most potent line of attack in only three or four of them. That isn’t to say attacks using Trump are completely futile, but they simply aren’t as powerful a message as other topics.
Subsequently, HMP commissioned the Analyst Institute to conduct a randomized field experiment by sending direct mail to more than 100,000 voters with various messages. It turned out that tying Republicans to Trump increased Democratic support by 2.7 percent, but messages that didn’t link the Republican to Trump helped Democrats by twice as much: 5.2 points. That experiment even found that using Trump to attack downballot Republicans could potentially hurt Clinton, whose standing fell 3.5 percent when such messages were used.
The curcial takeaway may well be this: Although Democrats might wish to tarnish downballot Republicans by associating them with Trump, the opposite could be happening. That is to say, tying other Republicans to Trump might make Trump seem more mainstream in the eyes of Republican-leaning voters.
Furthermore, Trump simply isn’t a liability in many districts Democrats are targeting because he is poised to carry them. Maine’s rural 2nd District, for example, has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1992, but it was also third-party candidate Ross Perot’s best district nationally in both his 1992 and 1996 campaigns. In fact, he actually came in second behind Bill Clinton.
Non-college educated white voters make up the overwhelming majority of the electorate there. That demographic has trended strongly Republican in 2016 polls compared to 2012, and even a recent poll from Democratic candidate Emily Cain gave Trump a 44-40 lead. Cain has resisted linking freshman Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin to Trump, instead employing more traditional Democratic attacks like arguing Poliquin is too cozy with Wall Street.
Trump just seems too unique to many Republican voters, such that tying him to the party simply lacks credibility. If that’s the case, Democrats could nonetheless still gain significantly downballot thanks to Trump. The Republican nominee famously eschews the type of meticulous data operation Clinton so heavily relies on, and he has failed to invest anywhere near as much into building a turnout operation, instead counting on free media coverage and TV ads to propel his candidacy.
Come Election Day, Republicans could struggle to get their voters to the polls, particularly since those with lower levels of educational attainment whom Trump professes to love are the least likely to vote. As much as downballot Republicans will try to make up for this deficiency by building their own ground game, it’s almost always far easier to motivate infrequent voters with a presidential campaign than via lower-tier races, where the stakes aren’t as immediately well-understood.
There are relatively few modern examples of what happens when one party nominates a perceived extremist. According to Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, Lyndon Johnson used a strategy in 1964 similar to Clinton’s today. He treated conservative insurgent Barry Goldwater as a particularly unique threat, not a product of Republican orthodoxy, yet Democrats nonetheless reaped huge gains downballot. However, Richard Nixon faced a lonesome landslide in 1972 over liberal stalwart George McGovern, and Democrats actually gained two Senate seats that year.
Only time will tell whether or not Clinton and Democrats are making a colossal blunder. However, it would simply be mistaken to think they have chosen this strategy without a wealth of evidence to support it.
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