  | Book Details Title: Running Against the Devil: A Plot to Save America from Trump–and Democrats from Themselves |
Book DescriptionReview “Rick Wilson is one of the best political strategists of our times. He knows the calculus of how to win better than a mathematician. This book is going to give some old-school Democrats a little heartburn. But if we want to win in 2020, Wilson’s analysis is a full stop. Period. Read and get to work.”—Donna Brazile, former interim chair, Democratic National Committee “‘Florida Man Chooses Country Over Party!’ It appears that the Democratic Party’s 2020 election briefing book has been written by a lifelong Republican strategist, and you’re looking at it.”—Brian Williams, MSNBC “No one understands the nature of Trumpism better than Rick Wilson. He also knows how the Democrats can blow this election. This may be a hard book for some of them to read, but it is a message they absolutely need to hear if they want to beat Donald Trump. In this passionate, witty, insightful, and often hilarious book, Wilson brings tough love and sharp elbows to his urgent warning about the difficulty of defeating a man with no bottom, no shame, and no limits.”—Charles Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind“Wilson brilliantly explains how Democrats could lose to Trump’s ‘racist and blisteringly stupid’ campaign message yet again unless they change course now. Drawing upon Wilson’s insights, Americans can take back their government and send the reality-TV host back to Mar-a-Lago once and for all.”—Joe Scarborough, MSNBC “Readers who enjoyed [Rick] Wilson’s first book, Everything Trump Touches Dies, will be pleased to know that he is in hilarious form. [The] manuscript is packed with the same punchy, straight-to-the-jugular humour that has made him a sought-after television guest and columnist in the Trump era. . . . It’s a step-by-step guidebook to defeating Donald Trump, written by ‘a Republican who knows how and why the Democrats often lose big elections they should win.’ And Wilson explains it all. Chapter by chapter, he debunks the myths, wishes, and pipe dreams which have led previous Democratic presidential nominees down the garden path to the runner-up’s position. . . . Any Democrat looking to beat Donald Trump—or really, any Democrat looking to beat any Republican—or anyone who enjoys reading and learning more about how politics really works would do well to crack the spine of Wilson’s sophomore effort.” —The Independent “Running Against the Devil is pugnacious and profane . . . blunt and funny . . . relentlessly irreverent and breathtakingly brutal.” —The Guardian “A caustically funny, outraged, and deadly serious analysis . . . Political consultant Wilson . . . intensifies his strident excoriation of Trump with a hard-hitting assessment of Democrats’ chances of winning the next presidential election—a victory that is crucial for saving the country.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Democrats . . . would do well to consider the book’s fundamental warning that winning in 2020 will require ‘put[ting] electoral realities ahead of progressive fantasies.’” —Publishers Weekly Read more About the Author Rick Wilson is a renowned Republican political strategist, writer, speaker, commentator, and ad-maker. He is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Everything Trump Touches Dies. His award-winning column with The Daily Beast is a must-read in the political community. Wilson also writes for The Washington Post, Politico, Rolling Stone, the New York Daily News, The Hill, The Bulwark, and The Spectator. He regularly brings his unique insights to CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. He’s a frequent guest on Real Time with Bill Maher. Wilson lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, four dogs, and a nameless cat. They have two grown children. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionElection Night, November 3, 2020Imagine you’re a Democratic strategist, one of the top figures in the 2020 nominee’s campaign. It’s Election Night, and you feel something familiar in the air. It’s a feeling of confidence, of rising joy and anticipation. It’s been a long, tough campaign, but victory is in sight. You’re going to win, and you know it. It’s a certainty. After four years of Trump, the Democrats are poised to claim a sweeping Electoral College and popular-vote victory. Finally. The last few weeks of October were a blissful whirl, with polling numbers looking strong across the board and your candidate joyfully working the crowds in swing states. She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing media profiles. Almost every newspaper in the country endorsed her in the final week. America, after so many centuries of right-wing injustice, finally appears to have achieved a state of beautiful progressive wokeness and is ready for its bold socialist future. After the debates, it was clear your candidate, though occasionally rattled by Trump’s in-your-grill debating presence, had triumphed. She was smart, articulate, and progressive. She’s everything you’ve dreamed about since Obama. Trump has been flailing, angrily tweeting a dozen times a day, stoking the MAGA base at an endless series of campaign rallies, and sounding crazier by the minute. He’s punchy and tired, and looks worn-out.You and your campaign colleagues have even started those elliptical conversations about what role you might play in a Democratic White House, mostly couched in the faux-modest “Oh, I just want to help the future president in any way I can . . .” tones of people who are already plotting for office space and picking out curtains. A few of your older, wiser hands don’t seem to share the infectiously optimistic Election Night mood. They lack the same sunny optimism the candidate displayed as she sat in the holding suite after the last long day of campaigning ended. They keep staring nervously at the FiveThirtyEight map and running the same mental calculations over Electoral College numbers they’ve done a thousand times. But hey, you feel really great about this. The campaign’s social-media metrics were weird the last few days, though, and your data and analytics people were sending increasingly worrying messages about the massive inflows of ads from brand-new super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark-money groups. You convinced yourself these were just the final gasps of the Trumpian grifters making a last buck on the Donald, or perhaps his Russian friends trying an end run. The Trump campaign and the RNC (but I repeat myself) ad buys were scattershot, and on issues that seemed off-kilter. As the night starts, the ballroom is packed to the gills with eager, happy people ready to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror of history. The media risers, crowded with the A-talent from every network, are jammed. The results are about to come in, and the army of reporters in the back of the ballroom is in a near frenzy. You didn’t repeat the Hillary mistake of not visiting the states Trump and his Russian allies scored in 2016. Your candidate made the stops, though the crowds were never quite as large or raucous as you wanted. Your state organizers tell you they’ve got armies of volunteers knocking on doors, making calls, and driving turnout.Hell, none of the final tracking polls showed Trump even close except in Michigan, home of Kid Rock and one of the most stark political divides between the city and suburbs anywhere in the nation. In Michigan, his numbers weren’t just surprising; they were downright terrifying, but your pollster assured you it was an outlier and that you’d still take Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin.The exit polls were closer than you wanted but still looked good. As the first results were about to roll in, the AP, Washington Post, New York Times, Decision Desk, and Politico analysts started pinging you and the rest of the campaign’s senior staff. “What’s going on in Michigan? Do you hear this stuff out of Florida?” Something is off the rails, and you don’t quite know what it is yet. By 9:30, it’s not looking like you expected. Ohio is showing a razor-thin Trump lead. He’s winning Michigan handily. Florida is Florida, and although you had projected a four-point lead, by 10:00 p.m. the vote total shows Trump up by 65,000 . . . and the Panhandle hasn’t even fully reported yet. Florida’s enormous influx of Puerto Rican voters meant the Democrats were on track for a stunning victory there, right? Wait. Didn’t someone mention in a meeting that the Hispanic turnout operation in Florida was a bit smoke and mirrors? You post high numbers in South Florida, but everywhere else in the Sunshine State, Trump is tearing you apart. When the Panhandle does report, everything outside of the blue enclave of Tallahassee is posting numbers in the low 60 percent range for Donald Fucking Trump. Your mind flickers to an angry set of emails and Slack messages a few weeks before about avoiding the issue of gun control in North Florida, but your candidate insisted not only on an assault weapons ban but a ban on semiautomatics as well. Metrics show that north of the I-4 corridor you’re losing everywhere except liberal Alachua and Leon counties by double digits. “What the hell is happening in Wisconsin?” is your next question. With the Democratic gains in 2018, it seemed like a lock that Trump would go down in flames, especially after the disastrous scam of Foxconn left Wisconsin workers holding the bag for a failed deal with China. Wisconsin farmers had suffered terribly from Trump’s trade war. When you see that the race is essentially tied, you think, “What in the actual fuck is going on here?” A few thousand votes turn the easy layup of Pennsylvania into a disastrous loss. Hell, even Minnesota is closer than you thought. You get destroyed in Ohio, with record rural turnout offsetting the cities.In nearly every swing state, you’re losing everywhere outside the metros and the most affluent suburbs. Turnout is sky-high, which your models predicted would be great for your candidate, but even then you’re just missing the margins. That’s why, come midnight, your candidate is in the suite, calling Donald Trump to concede the election. There are tears all around. You can hear Trump on the speakerphone, curt and smug. You dread seeing that first triumphant tweet from the once and future president. The next morning, you begin to put together the mosaic of data points in your head from the last few weeks. You start to see the messages and strategies Trump and his campaign used that seemed lurid and absurd at the time but now begin to make perfect sense. They weren’t trying to win big, or swing the nation toward a new ideological polarity, or find the next savior. They were animals, trapped in a win-or-die moment, and they resorted to tooth and claw. You realize as the Electoral College numbers rise for the Republican that your campaign mistook Trump’s sloppy, shambolic, hateful, stream-of-excrescence campaign for what was happening behind the scenes. There, for an army of professional Republican campaigners wedded to Trump out of desperate necessity, it was ride or die. Suddenly, your candidate’s detailed policy proposals, white papers, and granular knowledge of climate change, reparations for slavery, gun control, Electoral College reform, the Green New Deal, and healthcare reform weren’t assets. Your pride in having the most progressive candidate and campaign since FDR turns to ashes in your mouth. Maybe giving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders keynote addresses at the convention, where they could declare fraternal communist solidarity with the workers of the world, was a mistake. You understand too late that your race to the left to win the primary and secure the progressive ideological edge blinded you to the reality of largely center-right states on the Electoral College scoreboard. You handed Trump the weapon he used to cut off your head. Sure, Trump’s lowest-common-denominator message was cultish, racist, and blisteringly stupid, but it was simple, constant, and repeated . . . and you kept feeding him issues to use against you. Wall. MAGA. Judges. Socialism. Revenge. You thought your progressive message was universal and that the swing states have the same political polarity as California, New York, or Massachusetts. You believed you could shame Trump and Trump voters into listening to the better angels of their nature by talking about diversity, inclusion, and liberal values. In reality, you were giving the Trump campaign fodder for the weaponized grievance machine that put him in office in the first place.Boy (or your preferred gendered interjection), were you ever wrong. Read more Customers Review: Just read this in one fell swoop. I’ll try and be brief…DIsclaimers: I’m a RW fan from his TV appearances and enjoy his twitter page (although I’ve never created accounts on social media – for the most part it’s the only thing on social media I read with regularity) and find him to be honest, extremely funny, brilliant and unapologetic. These qualities are becoming quite rare these days and I certainly gravitate toward him, even though I acknowledge the GOP/Trump predicament we now are facing is at least somewhat a byproduct of his particular set of skills…RW’s writing is quite enjoyable. Witty, entertaining and unabashedly direct. Part of me wishes he were a sci-fi author.There’s no mystery what this book is about. ETTD was filled with plenty of finger pointing and detailed trash-talking that this book isn’t really saddled with; instead it is an essay in expanded form and repeatedly hammers on a few main pillars that deliver exactly what I wanted it to. RW doesn’t waste pages with exhausting filler and I appreciate the focus he maintains throughout his explanations of campaign-exploit practices.Anybody with an interest in granular-level campaign theory should absolutely read this (and ETTD) for themselves. However, my favorite concept was when RW stressed the importance of (paraphrasing) the tempo of Trump’s 2020 opponent (and their staff’s) consistent counter-punching. Just attacking DT’s attacks with multiple attacks every single time to not only smack the bully in the nose but establish some continuity in firing back at a soft target – which his opponents in the 2016 primary weren’t wont to do.I’ve left this review vague but my aim is to avoid spoilers…Overall an informative, easy read about both tactics and strategy with great intelligence and insight and a rapid cadence I truly appreciate. Highly recommended! | |
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