This blog continues the discussion we began with Epic Journey: The 2008 Elections and American Politics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).The next book in this series is The Comeback: the 2024 Elections and American Politics (Bloomsbury, 2025).
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Showing posts with label Lincoln Project. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lincoln Project. Show all posts
Our most recent book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and Trump's disregard for law. According to a federal indictment, he jeopardized national security by illegally retaining government documents, and then obstructed efforts to get them back.
The rats are everywhere, Donald. And you have no one to blame but yourself. Think hard and long about who you can trust - chances are they've already turned on you. pic.twitter.com/mT50r6AHjm
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 16, 2023
Former President Donald Trump is touting polls showing increased support for him as the Republican Party's 2024 presidential candidate, saying his numbers are rising amid continued negative attention on a national scale during the "witch hunt" January 6 congressional hearings. On Truth Social, Trump referenced a tweet published July 2 that shows results from two separate polls of potential 2024 GOP candidates. One poll conducted on May 18 showed Trump with a 41 percent to 12 percent lead over potential GOP candidate, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in a hypothetical matchup. "With all the lies and the greatest Witch Hunt in U.S. History...my number went up," Trump said in his Friday Truth Social post. "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"
Lesley Stahl: Have you given up your careers? Steve Schmidt: None of us will ever work in Republican politics again. We-- we joke that like some of the explorers who came to the new world, they were incentivized by the captain when he burned the ships that there was-- (LAUGH) there was no return (LAUGH) going back.
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Lesley Stahl: Who are you aiming for? What kind of a voter? Rick Wilson: So those independent-leaning men, those college-educated Republicans, the suburban Republican women. We understand where these voters are, we understand who they are and how they think. And Lesley, it's a game of small numbers. I mean, Donald Trump won this election by 77,000 votes in three states. Lesley Stahl: You basically have endorsed Joe Biden. Reed Galen: We have. We have endorsed Joe Biden. Yes.
Reed Galen: We have a standing buy on Fox News in Washington, D.C. with Fox and Friends, Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, every night. Lesley Stahl: Is that because he watches? Reed Galen: Yes. Because we know he's in the residence with his super TiVo watching.Lesley Stahl: Why is provoking him a good strategy? Rick Wilson: Every time Donald Trump loses his mind and throws things at the wall because a Lincoln Project ad is up, that takes the whole campaign off track. There's one thing you never get back in a campaign. That's a lost day. Lesley Stahl: Are you concerned that you're stooping to the president's level of being mean? Rick Wilson: I hope so. (LAUGH) There's always a reflexive sort of-- do-gooder instinct to say, "Oh, I hate negative ads." People do hate negative ads, but negative ads work.
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Mike Madrid: The real dividing line in the Republican Party is between college-educated and non-college-educated voters. And what we're seeing is, when Donald Trump starts to push messages like law and order, or defends, you know, the Confederate flags and Confederate monuments, he does seem to be able to coalesce a small number of non-college-educated workers in the Rust Belt states. But at the same time, he's pushing white, college-educated workers in the Sun Belt states out of his column.
It's a reverse twist on the old Southern strategy where Republicans used racist appeals to attract white voters in the South. And they're trying to capitalize on it.
Mike Madrid: What we see in the South is more and more people in high-tech industries saying, "This is a politics that I reject."
Republican Voters Against Trump, which was founded by longtime conservative and self-described “Never Trumper” Sarah Longwell, has concentrated almost entirely on sharing testimonials from traditional Republicans who voted for Trump in 2016 but are planning — sometimes reluctantly — to support Biden in November.
The group also includes William Kristol, a conservative commentator; Tim Miller, a Republican operative who worked on Jeb Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign; and Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist.
Longwell said she spent most of the three years after Trump’s election trying to understand what happened and conducting focus groups with voters who supported Trump in 2016 but now rate his performance in office as “somewhat bad” or “very bad.” As her group began testing ads, they quickly realized that slick commercials were often less persuasive than raw testimonials from fellow Republicans with similar doubts about the current president.
“I personally think that the Republican brand is probably destroyed,” [George] Conway told me. “It’s destroyed by it having become essentially a personality cult.” He said that he formally left the party, changing his voter registration to unaffiliated, some two years ago, and he doesn’t envision being able to return anytime soon.
,,,
That’s what’s so fascinating about their quest. They’re not fighting to come in from the wilderness. The wilderness is a given. They’re just fighting to get rid of this one sun-hogging, diseased redwood — or orangewood, as the case may be.
I asked Conway, “So you’ll be a man without a party for the rest of your days?”
“Probably,” he said. “It makes me tremendously sad.”
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Through some of their anti-Trump organizations, funded by donors, some of them have arranged employment no longer available to them in conventional Republican circles. In The Atlantic recently, Andrew Ferguson fairly called out individual Never Trumpers for inconsistency, hypocrisy and opportunism, and raised questions about the degree to which a few of the people with the Lincoln Project are profiting from it.
But the most important syllable in Never Trumper is Trump, and Never Trumpers are essentially sowing the seeds of their own diminished relevance by working to get rid of him.
That’s why, when I look at them, I see patriotism, though John Weaver — who, along with Conway, helped to found the Lincoln Project — emphasized a different idea when we spoke. He stressed atonement.
Trump’s election made him revisit how he and other Republican strategists had paved the way for Trump. For instance, Weaver worked for the man who was the first U.S. senator to endorse Trump for president.
“Jeff Sessions wouldn’t have gotten to the Senate had I not overseen his race in 1996,” Weaver told me. “Now I look back at that and say, ‘What kind of goddamn penance do I have to pay for that?’”
Trump’s campaign manager is a felon.
His deputy campaign manager is a felon.
His national security advisor is a felon.
His foreign policy advisor is a felon.
His personal lawyer is a felon.
His long time advisor is a felon.
“Republicans are hierarchical,” Weaver said. “So what’s not getting a lot of attention right now is the structure we are building — the permission ramp for Republicans so that they will have some comfort that they are not alone in doing the right thing.”
The fact that Republicans are hierarchical is an astute observation. But that’s not the only reason why building a permission ramp is important. As Andrew Levison wrote, conservatives have actually built a three-level ideological cocoon that these kinds of efforts could puncture. The first level is a national media structure headlined by Fox News. Behind that are local news sources such as Sinclair TV stations and talk radio. A permission ramp is more likely to affect the third level, which Levison describes as the most significant.
"It's not that Donald Trump just gives us material for the ads," said Sarah Longwell, strategic director of Republican Voters Against Trump. "It's about Donald Trump not being fit to be President, and everybody is seeing that now."
Longwell, a longtime Republican strategist who has been working to defeat Trump since before he was elected, has conducted focus groups with hundreds of Republicans who supported the President. Those conversations led her to believe that many voters are looking for a permission structure -- or, perhaps, in need of a little like-minded nudging -- to abandon Trump.
"In 2016, he got nominated, everybody sort of panicked and we all tried to beat him and obviously we failed," Longwell said. "One of the things we did at the time was a bunch of elites from the Reagan and Bush era signed letters, talking about why they didn't like Trump, but so much of the support for Trump was an anti-elitism play. So our focus in 2020 is really thinking about real people and real voices and how they're thinking about Donald Trump after seeing him be President for the last four years."
No patriotic American should brandish or proudly celebrate the iconography of a rebellion that resulted in tremendous devastation, the loss of more than 620,000 American lives, and the continued subjugation of Black America. pic.twitter.com/wc0VxVOrxA
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 1, 2020
