Kampanj: Därför vann Donald Trump presidentvalet!

STRATEGI | Hillary Clinton förlorade när hon flyttade fokus från ekonomin till att istället försöka få valet att handla om Donald Trumps moral och karaktär.

Detta är lite av en historisk ironi. James Carville, politiska rådgivare till Bill Clinton inför valet 1992, myntade begreppet ”It’s the economy, Stupid!” för att hans kampanjstab inte skulle lockas avvika från den fråga som man ansåg som absolut central för en valseger.

Om valanalysen är korrekt måste detta vara speciellt enerverande för både Bill, Hillary och demokraterna.

Michael Scherer skriver i Time:

For nearly 17 months on the campaign trail, Trump did what no American politician had attempted in a generation, with defiant flair. Instead of painting a bright vision for a unified future, he magnified the divisions of the present, inspiring new levels of anger and fear within his country. Whatever you think of the man, this much is undeniable: he uncovered an opportunity others didn’t believe existed, the last, greatest deal for a 21st century salesman. The national press, the late-night comics, the elected leaders, the donors, the corporate chiefs and a sitting President who prematurely dropped his mic—they all believed he was just taking the country for a ride.

Now it’s difficult to count all the ways Trump remade the game: the huckster came off more real than the scripted political pros. The cable-news addict made pollsters look like chumps. The fabulist out-shouted journalists fighting to separate fact from falsehood. The demagogue won more Latino and black votes than the 2012 Republican nominee.

Trump found a way to woo white evangelicals by historic margins, even winning those who attend religious services every week. Despite boasting on video of sexually assaulting women, he still found a way to win white females by 9 points. As a champion of federal entitlements for the poor, tariffs on China and health care “for everybody,” he dominated among self-described conservatives. In a country that seemed to be bending toward its demographic future, with many straining to finally step outside the darker cycles of history, he proved that tribal instincts never die, that in times of economic strife and breakneck social change, a charismatic leader could still find the enemy within and rally the masses to his side. In the weeks after his victory, hundreds of incidents of harassment, many using his name—against women, Muslims, immigrants and racial minorities—were reported across the country.

The starting point for his success, which can be measured with just tens of thousands of votes, was the most obvious recipe in politics. He identified the central issue motivating the American electorate and then convinced a plurality of the voters in the states that mattered that he was the best person to bring change. “The greatest jobs theft in the history of the world” was his cause, “I alone can fix it” his unlikely selling point, “great again” his rallying cry.

[…]

His was not a campaign about the effects of tariffs on the price of batteries or basketball shoes. He spoke only of winning and losing, us and them, the strong and the weak. Trump is a student of the tabloids, a master of television. He had moonlighted as a professional wrestler. He knew how to win the crowd. First he needed to define the bad guys. Then he needed to knock them over.

[…]

History will record that Clinton foresaw the economic forces that allowed Trump to win. What she and her team never fully understood was the depth of the populism Trump was peddling, the idea that the elites were arrayed against regular people, and that he, the great man, the strong man, the offensive man, the disruptive man, the entertaining man, could remake the physics of an election.

“You cannot underestimate the role of the backlash against political correctness—the us vs. the elite,” explains Kellyanne Conway, who worked as Trump’s final campaign manager. His previous campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, put it somewhat more delicately: “We always felt comfortable that when people were criticizing him for being so outspoken, the American voters were hearing him too.”

In June 2015, Clinton’s pollster Joel Benenson laid out the state of the country in a private memo to senior staff that was later released to the public by WikiLeaks. The picture of voters was much the same as the one he had described to Obama in 2008 and 2012. “When they look to the future, they see growing obstacles, but nobody having their back,” Benenson wrote. “They can’t keep up; they work hard but can’t move ahead.” The top priority he listed for voters was “protecting American jobs here at home.”

That message anchored the launch of Clinton’s campaign, and it was woven through her three debate performances. But in the closing weeks, she shifted to something else. No presidential candidate in American history had done or said so many outlandish and offensive things as Trump. […] “His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous,” Clinton argued.

[…]

For a Clinton campaign aiming to re-create Obama’s winning coalitions, all of this proved too large a target to pass up. Clinton had proved to be a subpar campaigner, so with the FBI restarting and reclosing a criminal investigation into her email habits, her closing message focused on a moral argument about Trump’s character. “Our core values are being tested in this election,” she said in Philadelphia, the night before the election. “We know enough about my opponent. We know who he is. The real question for us is what kind of country we want to be.”

The strategy worked, in a way. Clinton got about 2.5 million more votes than Trump, and on Election Day, more than 6 in 10 voters told exit pollsters that Trump lacked the temperament for the job of President. But the strategy also placed Clinton too far away from the central issue in the nation: the steady decline of the American standard of living. She lost the places that mattered most. “There’s a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you,” Conway helpfully explained after it was over.

Stanley Greenberg, the opinion-research guru for Bill Clinton in 1992, put out a poll around Election Day and found clear evidence that Clinton’s decision to divert her message from the economy in the final weeks cost her the decisive vote in the Rust Belt. “The data does not support the idea that the white working class was inevitably lost,” Greenberg wrote, “until the Clinton campaign stopped talking about economic change and asked people to vote for unity, temperament and experience, and to continue on President Obama’s progress.” Interestingly, Greenberg said turnout among young, minority and unmarried female voters also decreased when the economic message Obama had used fell away.

Tidskriftsomslag: Time, december 19, 2016.

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Analys: Vad som skulle fixat segern för Vote Remain!

STRATEGI | Det är nästan omöjligt att inte då och då ägna sig åt sällskapsspelet ”Tänk om…” när det gäller politik och valrörelser.

Om förlorarna bara hade gjort a, b, c så skulle valresultatet blivit helt annorlunda.

Men ofta är dessa kontrafaktiska resonemang näst intill meningslösa. En som dock lyckats ganska bra när det gäller folkomröstningen i Storbritannien är Tim Shipman.

Shipman är politisk redaktör på The Sunday Times och författare till All Out War: How Brexit Sank Britain’s Political Class.

I The Spectator har han listat sju händelser och strategiska vägval som skulle kunnat ge Vote Remain segern och därmed garanterat premiärminister David Camerons fortsatt regeringsinnehav.

1 ”A proper ‘deal’ with Brussels.”

2 ”A Yes/No referendum, not a Leave/Remain.”

3 ”Losing Dominic Cummings as head of Vote Leave.”

4 ”Michael Gove backing Cameron — and Remain.”

5 ”Vote Leave not being recognised as the official Out Campaign.”

6 ”Accurate opinion polls.”

7 ”Cameron making a pre-referendum ‘vow’ on immigration.”

När det gäller punkt sex och sju skriver Shipman följande:

Korrekta opinionssiffror:

Throughout the campaign, Stronger In’s pollster Andrew Cooper told Cameron and Osborne that they would win the referendum and that economic risk would trump immigration with the key swing voters. Cooper’s surveys — indeed, those of most pollsters — dramatically underestimated the number of traditional non–voters who would turn out for Leave (nearly three million of them). Cooper’s polls convinced Tory high command that they should stick to the gameplan which won them the Scottish referendum and the general election — of using warnings about economic risk. Had they known they were behind throughout the campaign, Cameron’s team would have felt compelled to change tack. As one campaign aide put it: ‘Frankly, we’d have been better off having no polling at all, or going out into the street and randomly stopping every fourth person and asking them what they thought.’

Cameron och immigrationsfrågan:

Non-Tories in the Remain campaign, including Will Straw and Peter Mandelson, repeatedly demanded that Cameron make a Scotland-style ‘vow’ telling the public he had listened to their concerns on immigration. Cameron’s aides wanted him to say he would veto Turkish entry into the EU. Cameron felt any public comment on migrants helped Leave.

In a meeting 11 days before the referendum, Cameron ruled out making a speech or a vow. The following day his communications chief Sir Craig Oliver emailed Cameron to say he should do something. Cameron went into work the next morning resolved to act, but was again talked out of it. In a call with Merkel, he made no requests. ‘If you ran the perfect campaign on immigration you still wouldn’t have made the fence on the issue. But you would have been competing,’ a Remain campaign staffer said. ‘And we just didn’t compete.’

Bild: PA

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Strategi: Hur stoppar man en framtida Trump?

USA | För lång tid framöver kommer man att studera Donald Trumps valkampanj. Var den unik eller kan strategin kopieras av andra?

En bra början är att studera varför de övriga republikanska presidentkandidaterna inte lyckades stoppa honom.

James Fallows, som en gång ingick i Jimmy Carters kampanjstab och numera är på tidskriften The Atlantic, pratade med några strateger om hur man försökte hantera Trump.

After the fact, representatives of all the fallen candidates told me that none of it was inevitable, and that Trump could have been stopped if any of the others had imagined that he would go as far as he did. “If you put any of us in a time capsule and told us a year ago that he might be the nominee, then each candidate would have tried to prevent it in their own way,” Alex Conant, the communications director for Rubio’s campaign, told me after Trump had locked things up. “We all thought that the summer of Trump would not last. So our early strategy was not just to ignore him but actually to try hard not to offend his supporters, so we could be the alternative to him when he inevitably went down. He largely got a free pass until it was too late.” Tim Miller, who worked for Bush, agreed that the other non-Trump candidates were more intent on finishing one another off than attacking him when he might have been vulnerable. “By the end, Marco was scoring points against him,” Miller said. Before his humiliating loss to Trump in his own state of Florida, which forced him out of the race, Rubio was attacking Trump for his ignorance about policy and mocking him on hand size and blowhard traits. “But Marco was already sinking by then, so it was from a position of weakness rather than strength.”

“The rest of them were convinced that Donald Trump didn’t need to be defeated,” Stuart Stevens, who was Mitt Romney’s campaign strategist in 2012, told me. “That was a convenience, because they didn’t have to take him or his supporters on. With Jeb and Rubio, it became like the Bosnian civil war—more into killing each other than winning.” Meanwhile, Trump cruised ahead.

No one can say whether an earlier attack might have finished off Trump. It’s clear that the free pass he received allowed him to dominate and diminish his opponents […] “Low-Energy Jeb.” “Little Marco.” “9Lyin’ Ted.” His impulsive approach also paralyzed the other campaigns. “When we did our debate prep, we wondered how you can prepare to debate against someone who doesn’t prepare at all himself,” Alex Conant said. “I don’t think Trump had any idea what he was going to say until he said it. All you could be certain of is that if he said something funny or outlandish, that would dominate the news, and you’d be even further behind.”

Trump didn’t “win” all the debates, nor was he always effective minute by minute. When questions got into details of policy, he would set himself on pause until an opportunity for a put-down occurred. “With eight or nine others onstage, he could pick a moment to position himself as the alpha,” Tim Miller said. “And eventually the media got conditioned not to say negative things about his debate performance, since whatever he did, he rose in the polls—while for Jeb or Marco or Ted Cruz, any mistake was seen as ‘devastating.’ ”

James Parker, även han på The Atlantic, konstaterar att Trumps sätt att kommunicera gör det svårt för en motståndare eftersom han inte hade ett politiskt budskap i traditionell bemärkelse.

Trump-space is not democratic. It depends for its energy on the tyrannical emanations of the man at its center, on the wattage of his big marmalade face and that dainty mobster thing he does with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. But it is artistic. Within its precincts, the most vicious and nihilistic utterances retain a kind of innocent levity: They sound half-funny, theatrical, or merely petulant. The scapegoating and bullying are somehow childlike. This is why, so far, no political strategy has succeeded against him. It rolls on, his power grab, his wild Trumpian trundling toward the White House, because he’s not doing politics at all. He’s doing bad art. Terrible art. He can’t go off message, because his message is “Look at me! I’m off message!”

Det blir svårt att tänka sig att någon kommer att kunna kopiera Trumps stil i kommande valkampanjer. Trump framstår som genuint unik i sin still.

I USA kommer det kanske räcka med en variant av Lloyd Bentsens put-down i vicepresidentkandidaternas valdebatt 1988. Bentsen fick Dan Quayle att krympa rejält i tv-rutan med klassikern ”You’re no Jack Kennedy!” Kanske kommer det att räcka med ett ”You’re no Donald Trump!” för att stoppa nästa Trump-wannabe.

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Strategi: Planerna bakom Donald Trumps kampanj!

VAL 2016 | Bilden av Donald Trump är att han alltid säger vad som faller honom in för stunden. Men kanske är detta bara en myt som borde avlivas.

Enligt Gabriel Sherman, i tidskriften New York, tog man fram en strategi för hur valrörelsen skulle bedrivas långt innan Trump lanserades som presidentkandidat.

Ansvarig för den informationsinhämtning, kartläggning och planläggning som krävdes var, enligt Sherman, Trump själv.

As much as his campaign appears off the cuff, Trump diligently laid the groundwork for his 2016 run over the course of several years, cultivating relationships with powerful allies in the conservative firmament and in the media, inviting them to private meetings at Trump Tower and golf outings in Florida, all the while collecting intelligence that he has deployed to devastating effect.

As early as 1987, Trump talked publicly about his desire to run for president. He toyed with mounting a campaign in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket, and again in 2012 as a Republican (this was at the height of his Obama birtherism). Two years later, Trump briefly explored running for governor of New York as a springboard to the White House. “I have much bigger plans in mind — stay tuned,” he tweeted in March 2014.

Trump taped another season of The Apprentice that year, but he kept a political organization intact. His team at the time consisted of three advisers: Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, and Sam Nunberg. Stone is a veteran operative, known for his gleeful use of dirty tricks and for ending Eliot Spitzer’s political career by leaking his patronage of prostitutes to the FBI. Cohen is Trump’s longtime in-house attorney. And Nunberg is a lawyer wired into right-wing politics who has long looked up to “Mr. Trump,” as he calls him. “I first met him at Wrestle­Mania when I was like 5 years old,” Nunberg told me.

Throughout 2014, the three fed Trump strategy memos and political intelligence. “I listened to thousands of hours of talk radio, and he was getting reports from me,” Nunberg recalled. What those reports said was that the GOP base was frothing over a handful of issues including immigration, Obamacare, and Common Core. While Jeb Bush talked about crossing the border as an “act of love,” Trump was thinking about how high to build his wall. “We either have borders or we don’t,” Trump told the faithful who flocked to the annual CPAC conference in 2014.

Meanwhile, Trump used his wealth as a strategic tool to gather his own intelligence. When Citizens United president David Bossie or GOP chairman Reince Priebus called Trump for contributions, Trump used the conversations as opportunities to talk about 2016. “Reince called Trump thinking they were talking about donations, but Trump was asking him hard questions,” recalled Nunberg. From his conversations with Priebus, Trump learned that the 2016 field was likely to be crowded. “We knew it was going to be like a parliamentary election,” Nunberg said.

Which is how Trump’s scorched-earth strategy coalesced. To break out of the pack, he made what appears to be a deliberate decision to be provocative, even outrageous. “If I were totally presidential, I’d be one of the many people who are already out of the race,” Trump told me. And so, Trump openly stoked racial tensions and appealed to the latent misogyny of a base that thinks of Hillary as the world’s most horrible ballbuster.

[…]

One way in which Trump’s campaign is like others is that its advisers have jousted for primacy. Over the summer, Lewandowski became embroiled in a battle for control with Stone, Nunberg, and Cohen. The principal fault line was over Stone and Nunberg’s belief that Trump needed to invest money into building a real campaign infrastructure and Lewandowski’s contention that their current approach was working fine.

[…]

Having won the power struggle with Nunberg and Stone, Lewandowski focused on letting “Trump be Trump,” which is what Trump wanted too. There would be no expensive television ad campaigns, no bus tours or earnest meet-and-greets at greasy spoons. Instead, the cornerstones of Trump’s strategy are stadium rallies and his ubiquitous presence on television and social media. “Mr. Trump is the star,” Hicks said.

Pundits have scoffed at this. Trump has no “ground game,” they say. His refusal to spend money on television ads spells disaster. But from the beginning, Trump knew he was onto something. “I remember I had one event in New Hampshire right next to Bush,” Trump told me. “I had 4,500 people, many people standing outside in the cold. Bush had 67 people! Right next door! And I said, ‘Why is he going to win?’ ”

[…]

The small scale and near-constant proximity mean they can respond to events quickly. In February, when the pope suggested Trump might not be a Christian owing to his plan to build a wall along the border, the campaign struck back within minutes. “If and when the Vatican is attacked by isis, which as everyone knows is isis’s ultimate trophy, I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president,” his statement said. Lewandowski recalled how it happened: “We found out about it as Mr. Trump was giving a speech on Kiawah Island in South Carolina, and within three minutes or less, he provided the response to Hope.” (By contrast, Clinton’s tweets are vetted by layers of advisers. “It’s very controlled,” one said to me.)

But if speed is the advantage of the small campaign, insularity is its inherent disadvantage. By all accounts, Trump doesn’t seek much counsel beyond his staff and children.

[…]

Meanwhile, the Trump team has poured almost all of its efforts into producing rallies down to the most minute details. At a Christmas-themed one I attended in Cedar Rapids in December, eight perfectly symmetrical Christmas trees lined the stage. As Lewandowski told me, “It’s all about the visual.” He requires reporters to stay behind metal barricades and positions television cameras for the most dramatic shots. “We want to know, what does it look like when he walks out on the stage?” Lewandowski said. “Sometimes we’ll allow cameras up close, sometimes we’ll show Mr. Trump on the rope line.” And the networks, hungry for ratings, have played by these strict rules.

[…]

After the rallies, Trump makes sure his fans stay mobilized. Everyone who attends a rally has to register by email, and the campaign uses this list, which Lewandowski estimates is “in the millions at this point,” to turn out voters. Most campaigns spend a lot of money to acquire voter lists; Trump largely built his own. “If you look at what the Obama campaign achieved many years ago, they were successful at bringing new people in, and then communicating with those people. What we’re doing is not dissimilar,” Lewandowski explained.

Tidskriftsomslag: New York den 4-17 april 2016.

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Strategi: (MP) tror kommunikation löser allt!

IMAGE | Miljöpartiet krishanterar. Både inom och utanför Miljöpartiet har man sökt svaret på frågan vad som hänt med partiet.

Ett svar har varit valet av politisk strategi. ”De dubbla budskapen har varit en genomtänkt del av miljöpartiets strategi”, konstaterar t.ex. Maggie Strömberg i Fokus.

Partiet har konsekvent kritiserat den politik man själva är med om att ta beslut om i regeringen. Strömberg tycker sig se att strategin fungerar bra på lokalplanet men inte inom rikspolitiken.

På riksnivå är dubbelstrategin svårare. Miljöpartiet har hela tiden vetat att regerandet skulle innebära svåra kompromisser. Små partier i koalitionsregering straffas nästan alltid av väljarna. Tanken var att miljöpartiet skulle undvika det genom att ministrarna skulle stå upp för regeringens linje medan partisekreterare, riksdagsledamöter och andra i stället skulle framföra vad partiet egentligen ville. Om man samtidigt satsade på mer politikutveckling skulle väljarna förstå vad man egentligen var. Tillsammans med legitimiteten från att ha regerat skulle det göra att partiet växte och om man var större rent procentuellt i nästa regering skulle man inte behöva kompromissa lika mycket.

Moderaterna hade en likande strategi på 70-talet, då de gått in som minsta parti i en borgerlig trepartiregering. Moderaterna lät sin partisekreterare kritisera regeringen samtidigt som partiledaren försvarade den. Partiet växte.

Skillnaden mot nu var att moderaterna vill i samma riktning som mittenpartierna, men ännu längre, till exempel i frågor om att sänka skatten. Miljöpartiet drivs i stället i motsatt ritning än dit man vill, bland annat i migrationsfrågan. Läget skulle vara mer jämförbart om regeringen tvärtom hade liberaliserat flyktingpolitiken, och miljöpartiet hade velat gå ännu längre i den riktningen.

Skillnaden har skapat ett avgrundsstort glapp mellan ideal och realpolitik.

Problemet med miljöpartiets strategi i regeringen är att man nu bara framstår som ett parti som skyller ifrån sig. Inte partiet som vill någonting mer. Ju mer partiet betonar sin egen ståndpunkt, desto mindre regeringsdugligt ser det ut.

Men inom partiet är man nöjd med vad man uppnått inom regeringen. Någon kritik mot själva strategin har inte funnits. Den kritik som framförts har mer handlat om hur man kommunicerat sin politik. Och kommunikationen är bara en del av den övergripande strategin.

Men att kritisera den egna kommunikationsförmåga är något ett parti ofta tar till när opinionssiffrorna dalar. (Hur många gånger har man inte hört Annie Lööf säga att väljarnas bristande entusiasm för Centerpartiet bara beror på att man inte nått ut med sin politik?)

Kritiken inom Miljöpartiet verkar under lång tid mest gått ut på att media blåser upp vad man själva uppfattar som småsaker. Inom partiet har man överlag varit nöjda med både språkrören och vad partiet uppnått i regeringen.

Åsa Romsons debattartikel i Dagens Nyheter inför språkrörsvalet är ett tecken på detta. ”Åtta av tio punkter i MP:s valmanifest på väg infrias”, löd rubriken. Hela artikel hade karaktären av en påminnelse. För partianhängarna var det mesta välkänt.

Inte ens partiets nedgång i opinionen i efterdyningarna av skandalerna verkar få partiet att ta itu med problemet. Även de nyvalda språkrören hoppas på att miljöfrågorna och bättre kommunikation skall vända trenden.

”Vi ska ha större fokus på att se till att miljöfrågorna kommer upp på dagordningen. Vi ska visa hur de diskussioner som förs i Sverige är kopplade till miljö- och resursutmaningen”, säger Gustav Fridolin.

”Det viktigaste är att vi för ut vår politik och det vi gör. Utan oss i regeringen hade inte Sverige spelat en viktig roll i klimatavtalet, till exempel”, säger i sin tur Isabella Lövin.

Någon självrannsakan i efterdyningarna av affärerna Mehmet Kaplan och Yasri Khan har inte skett. Det finns inget tryck inom partiet att driva på för att situationen inte skall kunna upprepas.

Anledningen måste naturligtvis bero på att man inte tycker att de gjort sig skyldiga till några större fel. Tanken tycks vara att om det inte varit för elak media och den egna bristfälliga kommunikationsförmågan hade Kaplan säkerligen suttit kvar i regeringen.

Den distansering som man tvingats till har mest haft karaktären av att ske under galgen. När det gäller Yasri Khan-affären talar t.ex. Isabella Lövin lite vagt om att partiets problem mest handlat om lite ”svajighet”.

Till och med Sverigedemokraterna har ägnat mer tid åt självrannsakan än miljöpartiet. Miljöpartisterna verkar mer se sig som offer. Och är man ett offer för omständigheterna behöver man inte syna sig själva allt för mycket i sömmarna.

Tidskriftsomslag: Fokus, 22-28 april 2016.

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Strategi: Trumps helt unika kampanjstrategi!

VAL 2016 | Roger Stone, on-and-off politisk rådgivare till Donald Trump, berättade nyligen för The New Yorker om presidentkandidatens något udda strategi.

Jeffrey Toobin intervjuade Stone:

It started in 1979, when Stone was a twenty-six-year-old aide in Ronald Reagan’s Presidential campaign.

[…]

Over the years, too, Stone shepherded Trump’s political ambitions through several near-runs for the Presidency. “In 1988, I arranged for him to speak to the Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Chamber of Commerce—that was his first political trip,” Stone said. “There was lots of speculative publicity. He liked the attention. He liked the buzz. He’s the greatest promoter of all time.” In 2000, Trump came closer to a real bid. Because Ross Perot had run in the previous two elections as the candidate of the Reform Party, there was a chance that Trump could have received federal funding on that party line. “He was looking at the prospect of running on O.P.M.—other people’s money,” Stone said. “He loved that.” But Trump backed away.

Now that Trump is actually running for President, Stone has been largely sidelined. (He currently has no official campaign role.) Stone says that he speaks to the candidate “now and then.” In any event, he said, Trump has little use for political advisers. “He listens to no one,” Stone noted. “On his own, he conceptualized a campaign model that rejects all the things you do in politics—no polling, no opposition research, no issue shop, no analytics, no targeting, no paid advertising to speak of.” He went on, “He had this vision of an all-communication-based strategy of rallies, debates, and as many interviews as he can smash into a day. The campaign exists to support the logistics of the tour.” Stone does maintain a small super PAC that he said will help corral delegates for Trump. “How many of the delegates will want to play golf at a Trump resort?” Stone said. “How many will want to have dinner at Mar-a-Lago? How many will want to go to a cocktail party at his apartment in Trump Tower, with its extraordinary view of Manhattan?” (Trump said he has no plans to court delegates in this way.)

There’s a wistfulness about Stone these days. He judges politics on aesthetic grounds as much as on issues. “On ‘The Apprentice,’ Trump was always perfectly dressed, perfectly lit, perfectly made up,” he said. “That helped him enormously in establishing a Presidential brand.”

Bild: Fotot på Roger Stone är från hans eget Twitterkonto @RogerJStoneJr.

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Kampanj: Strategin som skall ge Trump segern!

VAL 2016 | Roger Stones mentor var Richard Nixon. ”Attack, attack, attack. Never defend” är hans mantra. Och han har jobbat för Donald Trump.

Stone har inte längre någon officiell eller inofficiell roll i Donald Trumps valkampanj. Han valde att lämna (alternativt: avskedades) rollen som politisk rådgivare i augusti.

Han kallar fortfarande Trump en ”vän” och jobbar nu aktivt med att få honom vald till Republikanernas presidentkandidat vid partiets konvent.

Detta gör han bl.a. genom att organisera ”Stop the Steal”, en kampanjen som skall försöka påverka partiet och delegaterna att inte rösta på någon annan än Trump ifall han inte vinner nomineringen vid första röstomgången vid konventet.

Detta stämmer väl överens med hans uttalade strategi om hur man skall gå tillväga i en kampanj. ”Hit it from every angle. Open multiple fronts on your enemy. He must be confused, and feel besieged on every side.”

Dylan Byers på CNN skriver:

When it comes to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid, things did not initially go Stone’s way. He had one vision for the campaign; Trump had another. But after leaving in August, Stone is back, in a manner of speaking. With the Republicans potentially facing a contested convention, his brand of political trench warfare is now in greater demand than ever.

Late last month, Trump appointed veteran GOP strategist and lobbyist Paul Manafort — Stone’s longtime friend and business partner, dating back to the Reagan years — to lead his fight for delegates. Sources close to all three men say Stone played a role in that appointment, which gave him a new lifeline into Trump’s campaign.

[…]

In a contested convention, his mastery of political dark arts could prove instrumental in securing the delegates that Trump needs. He has been to every Republican convention since 1964, and he’s worked the floor at every convention since 1972. And even he readily admits that he is capable of employing tactics other operatives wouldn’t dream of, let alone try.

[…]

At the outset, Stone advocated for traditional methods: polling, analytics, advertising. But Trump had something different in mind: hold rallies, generate controversy, get free media coverage. Stone didn’t care for that approach, nor the man tasked with implementing it: Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, who didn’t much care for Stone, either, sources close to the campaign said.

[…]

But he never really was gone. He was not ousted, as was originally reported, nor was he forced into exile, as some journalists would claim. He was always there, on the sidelines, talking to Trump on a regular basis, planting stories in the press, influencing things where he could, several sources said.

Now, eight months later, Trump’s ”say anything” strategy has given way to a new phase. He’s trying to assemble the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, and he’s in desperate need of experienced political infighters who can navigate the contentious fight for delegates. Which means that Stone’s services are back in demand.

Bild: Affisch för kampanjen ”Stop the Steal”.

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Strategi: Bernie Sanders påverkanskampanj!

VAL 2016 | Rimligtvis inser Bernie Sanders att han inte har en chans mot Hillary Clinton. Så varför fortsätter han kampanja.

Enligt Ryan Lizza och The New Yorker siktar han på att maximera sitt inflytande. Genom att fortsätta kampanja vill han tvinga Clinton modifiera sin politik inför hennes nominering.

Den andra orsaken till att Team Sanders inte ger upp är att undersökningar visar att Clinton har ett imageproblem. Hon anses inte vara trovärdig och inte heller helt pålitlig.

Tre federala undersökningar, relaterat till hennes tid som utrikesminister, pågår parallellt medan hon kampanjar.

Och skulle det bli några uppseendeväckande avslöjanden innan Clinton nomineras på Demokraternas partikonvent kan allt hända.

Lizza skev så här i mars om Sanders kampanj:

Sanders has a large campaign war chest—he raised more than a hundred and thirty-five million dollars from more than 1.5 million individuals—and he is likely to score more victories. By staying in the race to the end, he will continue to force Hillary to respond to the anger and the frustrations in the electorate.

[…]

“The small donors can keep fuelling his campaign,” Joe Trippi, who ran Dean’s campaign, said. “Now you either have a super PAC or a small-donor base, and if you have one of those things you can keep going. So is he going all the way to the Convention? Yeah, if he wants to.”

There are two reasons for Sanders to soldier on. One is to exact concessions, as Warren was able to do on legislation restricting Wall Street employees. Sanders’s presence has required Clinton to adopt more populist economic policies, and the influence could go further. “She’s basically a conservative person, except on issues of gender and inclusiveness,” Gary Hart, who, with his insurgent primary campaign in 1984, almost beat former Vice-President Walter Mondale, told me.

[…]

If Sanders arrives at the Convention with a sufficient number of primary victories and between a third and half of the delegates, he will also be able to influence the Party’s platform. His advisers told me that Sanders will fight for more anti-free-trade measures, a commitment to campaign-finance reform, and breaking up big banks.

“He will come out of this with a prominent voice, with a committed e-mail list of people united around his issues,” Anita Dunn, who worked for Bill Bradley’s unsuccessful campaign against Al Gore, in 2000, and was one of Obama’s top strategists during the 2008 race and later in the White House, said. “That is the beginning of a potential movement, if he chooses to build on it. It’s not as though these issues are going to go away. Fundamental inequality and the inequities in the political process are not suddenly going to be fixed by anyone.”

[…]

The other reason for Sanders to stay in the contest is one that most Democrats, even Sanders, are reluctant to discuss. Polls show that Clinton’s greatest vulnerability has to do with trustworthiness and character. She is navigating three federal investigations resulting from her handling of classified data while she was Secretary of State.

[…]

At a Democratic debate last October, Sanders declared the scandal a non-issue. He said, “The American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails.” Some of his strategists have been trying to get him to change his mind, but they say that his wife, Jane, has opposed attacking Clinton too harshly.

[…]

Democrats outside the campaign remain surprised by Sanders’s decision not to raise the e-mail issue more directly and alarmed that more Democrats are not talking about the potential fallout from the investigations. “The person that the White House cleared the field for, and that everyone has fallen in line for, has three federal investigations going on,” a prominent Democratic consultant told me. “The guy who set up the system for her took the Fifth. You’re not supposed to read anything into that, but please. It’s the elephant in the room, and Sanders took it off the table. Trump will have no problem going after this stuff.”

[…]

Sanders has become increasingly aggressive in attacking Clinton’s relationship with the financial world. […] Meanwhile, Sanders’s aides have started to talk more openly, and delicately, about some of Clinton’s vulnerabilities. “Trust and honesty,” Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the Sanders campaign, told reporters on the morning after Super Tuesday. “Rightly or wrongly, the Secretary, when you poll independents, has some real problems with independents. They just don’t have confidence that what they’re hearing is what they’re going to get. And to overcome that hurdle in a general-election environment when you’re being pounded by Donald Trump day after day after day—I’m not sure that that can be done.”

But Sanders seems far more interested in affecting policy than in taking advantage of Clinton’s scandals. It might be the right decision in the long run; it’s not clear that attacking Clinton helps him win over the older and nonwhite partisans who are the core of her support. Sanders’s real legacy may be proving to the Democratic Party that the new generation of voters has no affinity for the old Clinton-era politics of moderation.

Bild: (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer).

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Strategi: Lärdomar från en politisk konsult!

VAL 2016 | Som under alla valkampanjer har årets sin beskärda del av färgstarka politiska konsulter. En av dessa är Mike Murphy.

Right to Rise, som Murphy ansvarade för, var en välfinansierad Super-PAC som stödde Jeb Bush. Som mest samlade man in hela 118 miljoner dollar.

Matt Labash tecknar ett både roligt och intressant porträtt av Murphy i den konservativa tidskriften The Weekly Standard.

När Bush hoppade av var det också dags för Right to Rise att stänga butiken. Men Murphy är fortfarande stolt över att Bush inte nedlät sig till Donald Trumps nivå.

Han har en hel del att säga om valkampanjen och varför Right to Rise och Bush misslyckades. Och han är inte nådig när han talar om Trump och Ted Cruz.

Like all hired guns in his trade, he’s taken his share of mercenary money just for the check. But Murphy says when it comes to presidentials, he thinks it matters more and is a sucker for long shots. ”I have friends I believe in who want to run. I’m a romantic, so I keep falling for that pitch.” Jeb wasn’t exactly a long shot, I remind him. Like hell he wasn’t, says Murphy. It’s a hard slog, not being a Grievance Candidate this year. ”He was the guy who was handing out policy papers when Trump was handing out broken bottles.”

[…]

Even pre-campaign, however, when they were allowed to coordinate as Right to Rise was amassing its unprecedented war chest, well before Trump’s ascendancy, both knew that despite the media billing Bush the prohibitive favorite — a position they both detested — they were facing long odds. (The assumption was Ted Cruz would be occupying the anger-candidate slot that Trump has instead so ably filled.)

Murphy says Bush regarded this election as a necessary tussle between the politics of optimism and grievance. At a preseason dinner, Murphy gave Bush his best guess of their chances of winning — under 50 percent. ”He grinned,” Murphy says, ”and named an even lower number. I remember leaving the dinner with a mix of great pride in Jeb’s principled courage and with a sense of apprehension about the big headwinds we would face.” And though he’d also have told his friend, if he’d been allowed to speak to him, that he was proud of Jeb ”for fighting his corner,” ultimately, Murphy admits, ”there is no campaign trick or spending level or candidate whisperer that can prevent a party from committing political suicide if it wants to.”

[…]

Bush was incapable, Murphy says, of coming up with lines about ”electrifying the border” or ”cutting the index finger off of every Muslim-American so they can never reach a trigger. He would never do that. If Trump turns out to be the answer, I’m incredibly proud that Jeb Bush did not want to be any part of the vile question.”

The campaign, he admits, was rocked by Trump’s ”low-energy” label, which stuck and hurt Bush. It’s kind of rich, suggests Murphy, since Jeb was a famous workaholic as governor. ”If Trump kept up Jeb’s schedule for one day, he’d be in the hospital.” Trump’s low-energy charge, Murphy says, was ”code for ‘Jeb’s not furious at anybody.’ He doesn’t open a rally with ‘I want everybody to write down the name of any Mexican they know and put it in a bin because they are going to pay.’ It was all a code word for ‘civilized.’ Jeb was the anti-Trump in a Trump year. But being the anti-Trump is a huge badge of f — ing honor. I think you get that tattooed on your forehead: ‘I’m the anti-Trump.’ People will be congratulating him on that the rest of his life.”

[…]

But what especially irks him are critics (”the bumper sticker glue” crowd he calls them, as in outsiders who second-guess your campaign right down to the kind of glue used on the bumper stickers) acting as though it were Right to Rise’s duty to take out Trump.

Not only was Jeb taking swings at Trump last fall, back when the likes of Cruz and Rubio were gingerly padding around him, seemingly auditioning to be coat-check boys at one of Trump’s tremendous, amazing properties. But according to Right to Rise’s numbers, the super-PAC spent nearly 15 percent of their TV advertising on anti-Trump ads.

Yes, they went after others, including and especially Rubio, just as hard if not harder, spending 33.4 percent of their TV advertising on ”other candidate contrast ads.” But, Murphy reasons, even if they had successfully taken down Trump, Jeb wasn’t about to get Trump’s voters anyway. In essence, Murphy would have been using hard-won donor money to clear the field for competitors who stood a much better chance of picking off Jeb’s voters (Rubio), as well as Trump’s (Cruz).

Not to mention, nobody has figured out the secret sauce for taking down Trump. Several deep-pocketed PACs have thus far not managed to. Even Trump seems unable to stop Trump, though it sometimes feels as though he’s trying harder than anyone.

[…]

As for Cruz, Murphy does not TrusTed and has no plans to fall in line with the man shaping up to be the Establishment’s hold-your-nose-and-kiss-your-sister Trump alternative: ”I think he’s cynical, totally cynical. .  .  . I don’t think he could win a general election, so he’ll be wiped out. It’s a choice between Trump, who is terrible for the country, and Cruz, who is terrible for the party. He’s too smart for his act .  .  . and he’s probably pissed that a bigger con man showed up.”

Murphy does speak well of John Kasich, his choice of the leftovers. ”I like Kasich a lot. He’s the only grown-up running.” He wishes Kasich well, as he labors to stay above the Friars Club roast, to be substantive and constructively positive, to offer people hope. But Kasich, Murphy adds, has an impossibly tall order this year: ”He’s trying to start an opera club at a tractor pull.”

Läs mer: Rebecca Bergs ”Mike Murphy: The Man Selling Jeb! to America” på Real Clear Politics.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Weekly Standard, 28 mars-4 april 2016.

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Kampanj: Clintons lugn besegrar Trumps ilska!

VAL 2016 | Den amerikanska väljarkåren är i stort sett uppdelad på 50 procent demokrater och 50 procent republikaner.

Detta gör att det oftast är mer kostnadseffektivt att lägga kraft på att övertyga de egna kärnväljarna att gå och rösta än att försöka locka över motståndarens väljare.

Men detta förutsätter naturligtvis att man inte gör de egna väljarna så upprörda att de hellre väljer att hålla för näsan och röstar på motståndarsidans kandidat.

Och det är detta som nu håller på att hända i USA där Donald Trump har gjort så många kärnväljare på högerkanten att de redan har börjat fundera på att rösta på Hillary Clinton om Trump blir deras partis presidentkandidat.

Det ser mer och mer ut som om valkampanjen – om det blir Clinton mot Trump – kommer att handla om att inte skrämma bort potentiella väljare (Clinton) och att övertyga tveksamma (Trump).

Team Hillarys strategi kommer därför att handla om att försöka minimera antalet uttalanden som riskerar stöta bort presumtiva republikanska väljare.

Risken för väljarflykt från den demokratiska sidan framstår ett av Clintons minsta problem.

En större risk är i så fall att Clinton, för att inte stöta sig med någon, väljer att kommunicera ett politiska budskap som är så utslätat att ingen orkar bry sig om att gå och rösta.

Men med tanke på att demokraterna har möjlighet att rösta fram USA:s första kvinnliga president framstår detta inte heller som speciellt sannolikt.

Vad Team Trump måste göra är att försöka övertyga både demokratiska och republikanska väljare att han är värdig deras röst. Med ett sådant scenario står Trump inför en rejäl uppförsbacke.

The Economist är inne på samma tankar i en ledarartikel.

Om hon bara kan undvika att framstå som lika aggressiv och arg som sin motståndare kommer hon att få det lättare att övertyga republikanska väljare som inte vill rösta på Trump.

For Mrs Clinton, going down the angry route might not split the party, but would almost certainly result in defeat. Democrats tend to fare poorly when their anguish overflows and begins to sound like contempt for America. It is hard to imagine Mrs Clinton credibly playing the political insurgent. She has decades of experience when the angriest voters want a novice. Nobody can out-hate Mr Trump. So it is encouraging that Mrs Clinton celebrated her victories on Super Tuesday by calling for more “love and kindness” in politics.

The opportunity for a better outcome lies in the asymmetry of the risks. Mrs Clinton has the opportunity to put together a coalition of anti-Trump voters broader than the one that carried Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012. Despair over Mr Trump has reached such an intensity among some Republicans that the usual rules about there being no swing voters may no longer apply. If Mrs Clinton were to combine a high turnout on her own side with a sizeable number of Republican abstentions and spoilt ballots and some voters who are prepared to switch from red to blue, then Democrats could not just win the presidency with a landslide, but also wrest back control of the Senate.

To form this coalition for stopping the blond Berlusconi, Mrs Clinton would have to woo moderate, business-minded Republicans, and such folk would in turn have to put the national interest ahead of their tribe’s victory in November. Republicans like to talk about the importance of character (see Lexington); Mr Trump offers a chance to show that means something. Mr Trump often insults other Republicans; they owe him no loyalty. Some prominent Republicans have already begun to attack him, including Mitt Romney, the party’s nominee in 2012. More will have to make that move.

Tidskriftsomslag: The Economist, 5-11 mars 2016.

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