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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Politik: När politiska etablissemanget fick ”ägg i ansiktet”!

VAL 2016 | En av de roligare konsekvenserna av Donald Trumps valkampanj var den moralpanik som följde på valsegern.

(The Reckoning: ”Donald Trump’s sinking polls, unending attacks and public blunders have GOP reconsidering its strategy for November”)

Och hela ”etablissemanget” – politiska, media, kulturella – hängde villigt på både här och over there. ”En ond och sjuk människa ska leda världens mäktigaste nation. Detta är inte bra för världen!”, skrev t.ex. riksdagskvinnan Hillevi Larsson (S) på Twitter.

(Inside Donald Trump’s Meltdown: ”Donald Trump’s sinking polls, unending attacks and public blunders have the GOP reconsidering its strategy for November”)

Två andra exempel: Skoladministratörer i Boston erbjöd ”råd och stöd” till ungdomar som oroade sig över Trump medan Olle Wästberg, ”USA-kännare” och tidigare generalkonsul i New York, påstod att Trumps seger var värre för Sverige än för amerikanarna.

(Final Days: ”As the unmanageable, unrepentant, and unprecedented candidate careens to the finish line, Donald Trump’s advisers try to figure out how to save themselves – and the movement he started.”)

Men speciellt pinsamt var valresultatet för opinionsinstituten och den politiska journalistiken som ”ended up with egg on their faces”.

I detta inlägg är tre favoriter från Time och New York som borde förfölja redaktörerna i sömnen framöver. Time t.o.m. följde upp sitt omslag med den alltmer smältande Trump i augusti med ett ”total meltdown” omslag i november. Så säker framstod Hillary Clintons valseger vid det laget.

För den som redan känner sig nostalgiska kan klicka på länkarna för att läsa hur fel alla hade.

Tidskriftsomslag: Time den 22 augusti (amerikanska editionen) och den 24 oktober 2016 samt New York den 31 oktober-13 november 2016.

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Opinion: Därför röstade britterna för Brexit!

VAL 2016 | Det kommer att krävas mycket forskning innan vi får ett tydligt svar på varför britterna föredrog Vote Leave snarare än Vote Remain.

I väntan på forskarnas svar får vi nöja oss med de opinionsundersökningar som gjorts.

En analys som låter högst trovärdig är den som Frank Luntz redogjorde för i tidskriften Time i slutet av valrörelsen när det var näst intill dött lopp mellan Leave och Remain.

Luntz är en amerikansk nyhetsanalytiker och jobbar bl.a. för CBS News och Fox News Channel.

For a majority of the British population, life today is just about getting through the day. They accept that Remain makes sense on a macro level; they get that the Big Guys (multi-national corporations, governments at all levels, political parties, even the media) benefit from The System—and the majority hopes that those benefits will one day trickle down to them. They recognize that abandoning the E.U. requires a level of risk-taking that may not turn out well for the British economy overall. But an increasing number of Brits believe the consequences to the economy are more than outweighed by the feeling (if not the reality) that they are taking control of their country and their destiny once again. After decades of feeling betrayed by the very same people and institutions that are now telling them to support the status quo—to Remain—the public appears ready to take matters into their own hands and demand radical change.

Yet on an individual, personal level, their hopes and dreams are anything but radical. It’s really about simple survival. In our polling, Britons are most worried about:

1.Day-to-day existence. Families and individuals are asking: “Will I have enough to pay the bills every month, and hopefully a little left over to save?” Translation: The E.U. may be relevant to political and economic leaders, but it is meaningless to (or even a negative for) the average taxpayer.

2.Generational survival. Parents are asking: “Will our children have the same, better or worse opportunities that I had at their age?” Translation: With Europe in perceived decline, why hitch our future to a sinking ship?

3.Services survival. Citizens are asking: “Do our current policies help, or hurt, the goal of preserving and protecting our pensions, benefits and NHS?” Translation: with the flood of immigrants, asylum-seekers and refugees into Europe, a majority of Brits are crying out, “Enough.”

[…]

Yes, the Remain campaign is making very sound policy arguments, backed by the overwhelming majority of economists, but voters are saying right back: “You can claim it, but we don’t believe it. We aren’t feeling the benefits you promised in our daily lives.” Once again, the heart wins out over the head.

[…]

So the momentum is with Leave—and yet the punters and pundits still expect Remain to win. It’s not difficult to see why. In our polling, the Remain campaign’s two best arguments are “leaving will create years of uncertainty” and “we need to keep our seat at the table.”

While this is an intrinsically negative message (“bad things will happen if you reject the status quo and turn away from security…”), it does keep voters in line. Plus, the constitutional nature of the question—that there will not be the opportunity to change your vote in four years’ time—tilts the scales still further in the direction of the status quo. It’s the same “better the devil you know” strategy Cameron used to stitch together his Parliamentary majority last year.

Och nu vet vi hur det gick. David Cameron och de övriga i kampanjen Vote Remain lyckades inte med sitt i huvudsak negativa budskap.

Om argumenten låter mer som skrämselpropaganda övertygar den ingen. Kanske fick deras varningar motsatt effekt – deras negativa budskap signalerade att de inte litade på att fakta skulle övertyga väljarna att rösta Remain.

Slutsats: Desperata kampanjer gör desperata och överdrivna utspel.

Bild: iStock på International Business Times.

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Kampanj: Clintons krig mot Bernie Sanders!

VAL 2016 | Den som tror att det bara är Donald Trump som spelar ”hardball” i årets valrörelse borde titta närmare på striden mellan Sanders och Hillary Clinton.

I början såg det ut som om demokraterna skulle kunna genomföra sin valkampanj i en civiliserad ton och utan smutskastning. Men det var innan Clinton blev trängd av Sanders överraskande framgångar.

Idag är det ingen som tror att deras kampanjer skiljer sig nämnvärt från hur det brukar se ut i amerikanska valrörelser. Clinton och Sanders har båda visat att de kan ge och ta som riktiga politiska sluggers.

Philip Elliott och Sam Frizell har i en artikel för tidskriften Time tittat tillbaka på hur relationen mellan de två presidentkandidaterna har utvecklats under valrörelsen.

Sanders didn’t expect to win; he wanted to make some points and push a progressive agenda. If he were planning on running a traditional campaign, he would have rented bigger headquarters. Longtime Sanders aides assured reporters and donors that their boss would never run a negative ad against Clinton.

[…]

If Sanders had promised never to go negative, no Clinton had ever done so. The hammer fell during the first debate in October. When a moderator asked Clinton if Sanders had a tough enough record on guns, she pounced. “No, not at all,” Clinton said of her rival, who represents a mostly rural state. Months later, Sanders still smarts over the constant attacks about guns.“The idea that I am being called a tool of the NRA, a supporter of the NRA, is really quite outrageous,” he says.

Soon the hits from Clinton’s boosters were relentless. Sanders’ aides expected them, but the candidate’s shock at the Clintons’ hard-nosed politics was unmistakable. The tactics went against his hopes for a high-­minded campaign fought on issues, not on microfiche or her email practices. And as Sanders’ crowds grew, so did his poll numbers and contributions from small donors. And so did the Clinton attacks.

[…]

In fact, the Clinton machine was just warming up. Clinton researchers had spent months digging into Sanders’ vulnerabilities—standard operating procedure for any modern campaign—and countless outside allies offered their binders of research too. There was plenty to go around: he was once ambivalent about South American socialist dictatorships, he honeymooned in the Soviet Union, he voted against the Wall Street bailout that ultimately helped U.S. autoworkers and he had been critical of Barack Obama’s first term. Clinton tagged Sanders for being AWOL during the fight for health care in 1993 and ’94, despite plenty of TV footage and photography to the contrary. Fair or not, the onslaught left Sanders upset; he had never faced this kind of scrutiny. “We know a lot of stuff has been leaked into the papers which are lies and distortions,” Sanders says. “Their response is, ‘Look, that’s the world we live in, that’s what you gotta do.’ I understand that. I don’t think that’s what you gotta do.”

Goaded by his insular, mostly male circle of advisers, Sanders lashed back, questioning Clinton’s integrity and railing against her speaking fees from big corporations and Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs. “He got into a space where he felt comfortable pushing back,” says an adviser. “People get into a corner and they strike back very hard.” The cordial chitchat between their aides in the post-­debate spin rooms stopped or turned confrontational, with Clinton adviser Karen Finney and former NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, a Sanders ally, clashing in open view of reporters after one forum in Flint, Mich.

By spring, the candidates had stopped calling each other to offer congratulations on victories. Backstage at a campaign event in early April, an aide showed Sanders a headline in the Washington Post: “Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president.” Without reading the story, Sanders scribbled on his legal pad and angrily charged onto the stage at a Philadelphia event, saying “the American people might want to wonder about your qualifications, Madame Secretary!” Of all the arguments to make against Clinton, unqualified was perhaps not the strongest.

None of this was happening in a vacuum. Voters were paying attention, and in a year that favored outsiders over insiders, many cheered on Sanders, who chops his own wood for his stove and has never worn a tuxedo, even after 25 years in Washington. By West Virginia’s May 10 primary, exit polls showed as many as a third of Sanders supporters were saying that, to deliver the revolution their man was demanding, they would rather vote for Trump than Clinton.

[…]

She and her advisers know they must give Sanders something he can count as a win, lest they lose to Trump. Clinton’s closest advisers have promised him an open ear and a seat at the table in Philadelphia.

[…]

And if Sanders comes away empty-handed, more than the White House is at stake. A left-center split in the Democratic Party will unfold, and where that leads no one knows.

Tidskriftsomslag: Den amerikanska utgåvan av Time den 6 juni 2016.

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Image: Ted Cruz lägger om sin kampanjstil!

VAL 2016 | Ted Cruz har inte gett upp sina drömmar om Vita huset. Men rent röstmässigt kommer han att förbli den ständiga tvåan efter Donald Trump.

Ett tecken på att han försöker ta sin kampanj ända till det republikanska konventet är att han nu är mindre aggressiv och anslår en mildare ton i sina tal.

Han vill på så sätt öka chanserna att kunna fungera som en kompromisskandidat om det blir en strid om delegaterna på kommande partikonvent.

Ett exempel på denna ändrade stil är att han nu t.o.m. börjat citera John F. Kennedy i sina tal. Det hör inte vanligheterna bland konservativa republikaner vars bas är evangeliska kristna. Men det är sådant som brukar kallas signalpolitik.

Frågan är bara om det är speciellt trovärdigt. Cruz har varit en av de ledande figurerna inom Tea Party-rörelsen och är inte speciellt älskad av vare sig partietablissemanget eller bland partikollegor han kritiserat.

Att försöka vinna över de mer moderata konservativa är nödvändigt men kan också komma att skada hans trovärdighet så här sent i valrörelsen.

Michael Scherer skriver om hans nya stil i tidskriften Time:

Good politicians know how to recast their message for the moment. The great ones seem to do it without contradiction, alienation or any actual change in position. This is the leap that Cruz is now attempting. He won the Iowa caucuses with devotion and red meat. His rallies began like prayer circles and continued into fury. He would describe the hatred for him from his own party as “the whole point of the campaign.” He promised not just to repeal Obamacare but to rescind “every word” on Day One. More than unwind the Iran nuclear deal, he vowed to rip it “to shreds.” He would not just destroy Islamic extremism, he would find out if “sand can glow in the dark.”

Those bold positions all remain, but their packaging has been muted. The clenched fists are now open arms. “From the beginning, our objective was to reunite the old Reagan coalition to bring together Republicans and independents and libertarians and Reagan Democrats,” he said. “I believe the path to winning the Republican nomination and winning the general election is standing up for hardworking men and women of America who have been left behind by Washington.” The conservative caterpillar is becoming a general-election butterfly.

This same pivot animates his campaign. After Wisconsin, Cruz planned to work hard to move beyond the white, evangelical, mostly male voters who have always been his core supporters. In his campaign speeches, he has begun to address “single moms” and “working moms” directly, with a message of economic populism to match the appeal of Trump and the Democrats. The day after Wisconsin, he traveled to a meeting with black and Latino pastors in the Bronx, spoke halting Spanish with reporters afterward and repeatedly referred to “our community” when talking about Latinos.

Then there are the gauzy new references in his public remarks. The speech he had prepared for the network cameras the night he won Wisconsin included a quote from former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill about ending the quarrel between past and present to focus instead on the future. He would even quote Democratic President John F. Kennedy, who Cruz has long argued, improbably, would be a conservative Republican if he were alive today. “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future,” Cruz said, repeating Kennedy’s words.

But it is another President who he said gave him hope his gambit could succeed. “Throughout the course of this campaign, as others have gotten nasty and gotten personal, have engaged in a war of insults and petty personal attacks, I haven’t responded in kind,” Cruz explained, referencing, among other things, Trump’s recent attack on the appearance of his wife Heidi. “That is very much the model of Ronald Reagan, even when Reagan primaried Gerald Ford in ’76.”

Tidskriftsomslag: Time, 18 april 2016

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Kampanj: Trumps vi-mot-dem strategi!

VAL 2016 | Att ständigt vara på offensiven är Donald Trumps kampanjstrategi. Så här långt har det fungerat mer än väl.

Roger Stone, Trumps tidigare politiska rådgivare, kallar det för ”tribal warfare”. Genom att definiera vem som är ens motståndare definierar man också sig själv.

Detta får också till konsekvens att man blir mindre sårbar för motståndarnas försök att klistra sina egna etiketter på en blir mindre effektivt.

Alex Altman skriver så här i Time om Trumps stil:

On the campaign trail, he leans on stereotypes to explain the world, in ways both inflammatory and complimentary. Persians are “great negotiators.” Hispanics are “incredible workers.” Mexicans illegally crossing the Southern border are “criminals” and “rapists.” After the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, he proposed a blanket ban on immigration by Muslims, not just those with radical Islamic ties.

Trump isn’t winning in spite of such statements; he’s winning because of them. […] Even Hillary Clinton is sharpening her smooth-edged coalition politics, telling voters they’re “right to be angry.”

But nobody does tribal warfare like Trump. “It’s us-against-them politics,” says Roger Stone, a Republican consultant and former Trump adviser. “You define yourself by who your enemies are.” Trump has been a master of this for much of his life. At various chapters in his business career, he has found the furrows in the cultural landscape and sown discord for personal gain. Now the same knack for divisive rhetoric could tear the Republican Party in two, leaving Trump as the commander of a new tribe, a coalition of the disaffected.

[…]

But there is no tribe Trump condemns more than the political elites, both Democratic and Republican. “The Republican Party, insofar as it is in favor of a lot of immigration and a lot of things that go on with globalization, are feeding the kinds of problems that are creating the anger,” says political scientist Charles Murray of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, who argues that the policies of the GOP establishment have hollowed out the party’s white working-class base. Generations of Republican leaders have exalted free trade and entitlement cuts, called for more high-skilled-labor visas and guest workers, sought deep tax reductions for the wealthy and pushed for tougher antiabortion policies and less federal meddling.

In each case, Trump has defied party dogma. He’s pitched protectionism and stronger social programs, a border wall and a wealth tax. He defends the merits of Planned Parenthood and eminent domain. From this vantage, Trump’s groundswell of support isn’t a spasm of a party in chaos. It looks more like a natural course correction. He hasn’t dragooned supporters into believing he’s a conservative; he’s leading a willing rebellion against modern conservatism itself.

[…]

“The reason their punches don’t land is they’re being thrown in a world that’s dying,” says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who says Trump may ultimately prove to be “the most effective anti-left candidate of our times.” In Trump’s postideological movement, the litmus tests that have long ruled Republican politics are irrelevant. “It’s a revolution. What it means is you’re going to have a new conservatism,” predicts Gingrich. “He’s demolishing the old order.”

Läs mer: David Von Drehles ”Donald Trump’s Wild Ride”.

Tidskriftsomslag: Time, 14 mars 2016.

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Image: Hillary Clinton är som en nyttig sallad!

VAL 2016 | Hillary Clintons största problem är att hon är Hillary Clinton. Detta enligt Joe Klein i tidskriften Time.

Klein, som bl.a. skrev boken The Natural om Bill Clinton, har bl.a. kallat henne en ”quinoa and kale salad, nutritious but bland”.

Clinton har varit ständigt närvarande i amerikansk politik. Hon är alltid närvarande. Hon skulle aldrig som Bill Clinton kunna kalla sig för ”Comeback Kid” ”because she never really goes away, she just keeps plugging away, pocketing any stray piece of progress that she can”.

Bernie Sanders, hennes politiska motståndare i demokraterna, må entusiasmera ungdomar men när allt kommer till kritan är och förblir Clinton det säkra kortet.

Och när väljarna skall avgöra vem som är mest lämplig att fatta beslut om krig och fred – hon eller den fullständigt oförutsägbara tornadon Donald Trump – kommer man med största sannolikhet att välja Clinton.

Eller som amerikanarna själva brukar säga: ”Steady does it”.

Joe Klein skrev i februari följande om Clintons kampanj:

“I know what it’s like to be knocked down and how you dust yourself off and you get back up and you keep fighting for what you believe in,” she said when I asked how she differed from the young activist who worked for McGovern. “But you do it within the process so that you can actually try to get results for people, so that you can point to our political system working. And I think that that’s what we need more of right now–not less.”

This is what Clinton brings to the table in this campaign, an idealism tempered by time and hard experience. She has become more realistic, and moderate, because–unlike Sanders, who has existed on the periphery of practical politics–she knows what it’s like to lose (on health care, particularly) and to negotiate the small victories (children’s health care) that are the guts of practical politics. It is the precise opposite of what Donald Trump–that other exemplar of the baby-boom generation–is selling. It is about patience and making the phone call to the mayor of Flint–or to the Chinese–about what can actually be done to improve things. This celebration of incrementalism is very difficult to communicate in a campaign, under the best of circumstances. And it’s virtually impossible this year, when grand notional gestures–build a wall, ban the Muslims, bomb ISIS until the sand glows–have become the currency of choice.

In a way, Clinton is the most (small-c) conservative in the race, standing athwart the utopian fantasies proposed by the left and right. Her gamble is that the toughness and stability she offers will slowly become more attractive in the mayhem of the campaign; her problem is that her very Clinton-ness makes the prospect of stability seem remote. Her cast of characters–Bill, the Clinton Foundation, her email server, Huma Abedin, Sidney Blumenthal, the shameless publicist David Brock–will provide constant fodder for those seeking to outrage or titillate the public. Being “Hillary Clinton” is the single greatest obstacle to her being Hillary Clinton.

Läs mer: Joe Kleins intervju med Hillary Clinton.

Tidskriftsomslag: Time, 15 februari 2016.

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Strategi: Ted Cruz kopierar Barry Goldwater!

VAL 2016 | Donald Trump ser allt mer ut att kunna bli republikanernas presidentkandidat.

“He’s got the mo, he’s got the masses”, säger den politiska strategen Rick Hohlt. ”He’s attracting a new class of voters.”

Försöken att stoppa Trump har så här långt misslyckats. Inte minst för att han blivit smartare ju mer han har varit ute och kampanjat. “He knows when to push and when to back off.”

Men hans motståndare måste försöka göra något för att stoppa honom om man skall ha en rejäl chans att bli nominerad.

Enligt David Von Drehle på tidskriften Time har Ted Cruz plockat fram en gammal strategi som användes av Barry Goldwater redan 1964.

Men om denna strategi lyckas kan det mycket väl innebära att Cruz splittras och sänka möjligheterna för Cruz att bli president om han skulle lyckas bli nominerad.

The man is moving people, and politics does not get more basic than that. Trump is a bonfire in a field of damp kindling—an overcrowded field of governors and former governors and junior Senators still trying to strike a spark. His nearest rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, has traction in Iowa among the evangelical bloc and—in contrast to Trump—is a tried-and-true conservative. But with little more than half the support Trump boasts in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, Cruz has a long way to go to show that he can move masses.

Cruz staffers, tellingly, have been studying a 1967 tome titled Suite 3505 as a playbook for their campaign. This F. Clifton White memoir, long out of print, tells the story of the 1964
Barry Goldwater campaign. That was the last successful populist rebellion inside the Republican Party, propelling a rock-ribbed conservative past the Establishment insiders–just as Cruz hopes to do. But this triumph of intramural knife fighting proved a disaster at general-election time. Goldwater suffered one of the worst defeats in American political history. It’s no wonder that GOP leaders are every bit as wary of Cruz as they are of Trump.

In short, the GOP has awakened less than a month from the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary to find itself in bed between a bombshell and a kamikaze. It’s a sobering dawn for a political party that seemed, not long ago, just a tweak or two away from glory.

Bild: Omslaget till boken Suite 3505 av F. Clifton White.

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Politik: Donald Trump och tidsandan!

VAL 2016 | ”Disintermediation” är ett uttryck som vi måste lära oss om framöver vi vill kunna förstå och tolka amerikanskt väljarbeteende.

Enligt David Von Drehle på tidskriften Time är detta förklaringen till både Donald Trumps framgångar hos republikanerna och Bernie Sanders hos demokraterna.

Disintermediation betyder helt enkelt att väljarna har tröttnat på att låta partiernas toppar, media och olika ekonomiska intressen tolka och lägga tillrätta vad de skall tro och tänka. Man vill nu ha det politiska budskapet direkt från källan – utan mellanhänder, spin och försköningar.

Disintermediation är med andra ord en del av den nya tidsandan.

Von Drehle skriver:

Big Money, the supposed superpower of post–Citizens United politics, is a dud so far. Super-PAC bets by various billionaires have done nothing to fire up such candidates as former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Bush has filled screens in key states with millions of dollars in both positive and negative ads. The result: falling poll numbers. Touted as a front runner a year ago, Bush is mired in single digits and rang in the new year by announcing that he was scrapping a round of ads in favor of more ground troops in early-voting states.

Big Media too has been brought low. The collapse of Trump was predicted so often, so erroneously, in so many outlets that the spectacle was almost comic, like a soap opera that keeps killing off the same deathless character.

[…]

What if all of these groundswells are part of the same tsunami? By coming to grips with Trump, Republicans might begin grasping the future of presidential politics, as the digital forces that have upended commerce and communications in recent years begin to shake the bedrock of civic life.

Disintermediation is a long word for a seemingly simple idea: dumping the middleman. It came into use a half-century ago to describe changes in the banking business.

[…]

Donald Trump is history’s most disintermediated presidential front runner. He has sidestepped the traditional middlemen–party, press, pollsters and pooh-bahs–to sell his candidacy directly to voters, building on a relationship he has nurtured with the public from project to project across decades.

[…]

This can explain why Trump is unscathed by apparent gaffes and blunders that would kill an ordinary candidate. His followers feel that they already know him. When outraged middlemen wail in disgust on cable news programs and in op-ed columns, they only highlight their irrelevance to the Trumpiverse.

Indeed, the psychology of disintermediation adds another layer of protection to a figure like Trump. For members of an online network, the death of the middlemen is not some sad side effect of this tidal shift; it is a crusade. Early adopters of Netflix relished the fate of brick-and-mortar video stores, just as Trump voters rejoice in the idea of life without the “lamestream” media. Trump gets this: mocking abuse of his traveling press corps is a staple of his campaign speeches.

[…]

With disintermediation, the power to set the campaign agenda shifts from the middlemen to the online networks, and those networks, this year, are very angry. Here, again, Trump is far outrunning his rivals in seizing the momentum. Americans are unhappy about an economy that punishes workers, according to opinion polls and conversations with voters. They are tired of politicians who don’t deliver on their promises.

[…]

These voters don’t want someone to feel their pain; they want someone to mirror their mood. Woe to the candidate who can’t growl on cue. Perhaps nothing has hurt the Bush campaign–whose money and endorsements, lavished by middlemen, have fizzled on the launchpad–more than Trump’s observation that the former Florida governor is “low energy.” Translation: he’s not ticked off. Voter anger in this sour season is less a data point than table stakes.

[…]

But if Trump voters are angry, that doesn’t mean they’re crazy. You meet more state representatives and business owners at his rallies than tinfoil-hat conspiracy buffs. In ways, they are a vanguard, catching sight of a new style of politics and deciding early to throw out the old rules. Their radical democracy helps account for Trump’s uncanny resilience: the less he honors the conventions of politics, the more his supporters like him. They aren’t buying what the political process is selling. They want to buy direct from the source.

Tidskriftsomslag: Time, 18 januari 2016.

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Kampanj: Bernie Sanders gräsrotskampanj!

VAL 2016 |  Bernie Sanders bygger en presidentvalskampanj från ingenting. Och det verkar lyckas. Han har börjat knappa in på Hillary Clinton.

I en tid när utmanare med budskap som utmanar konventionerna i respektive partier – Donlad Trump hos republikanerna och Sanders hos demokraterna – är det som entusiasmerar väljarna kan det vara en fördel att  strunta i vad politiska rådgivare brukar viska i örat på presidentkandidater.

“Let the other candidates worry about the horse race; Bernie Sanders is worried about forever. It is the opposite of everything we’ve come to expect from the political process–and this year, being an opposite is the secret to success”, skriver Sam Frizell i Time.

Frågan är bara om det kommer att hålla hela vägen även om han, mot förmodan, skulle lyckas besegra Clinton.

Dåligt organiserade kampanjer har en tendens att förr eller senare göra bort sig.

Kampanjstrateger har också påpekat att Clinton är betydligt bättre på att locka färgade medan Sanders inte lockar väljare hos minoritetsgrupper i någon större utsträckning.

The Internet has killed the kingmakers. Freshness beats incumbency, while the perception of sincerity beats all. There is no room for focus groups in the elevator to the top of the polls; America wants its candidates straight up and packing a kick. This is how a squinty-eyed New Yorker goes from shooting his cuffs and hawking condos to the head of the GOP pack. It’s how Bernie Sanders can join the Democratic Party in April and by August be battling for first place in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Without a single TV ad–or a single congressional endorsement–Sanders has exposed the weakness of the party’s Clintonian establishment while at the same time spotlighting its hunger for an ideological savior. Polls now indicate that if the nominating contests were held tomorrow, Sanders would edge out Clinton in Iowa and beat her in New Hampshire by 10 points. Nationally, he has cut Clinton’s lead from an impregnable 46 points to a crumbling 21 points in just two months.

But even those metrics don’t convey the extent of the Sanders phenomenon. At Clinton events, campaign staffers section off floor space before her speeches to make her crowds look densely packed. Sanders needs no barriers. His audiences are authentically huge–28,000 in Oregon, 11,000 in Arizona, 7,500 in Maine. His volunteer army, meanwhile, though mostly self-organized online, numbers more than 182,000 people spread out from rural Alaska to the Florida Keys, people who have asked the campaign how to improvise events, knock on doors and spread the gospel from campus quad to living room to farmer’s market.

[…]

Sanders is all rallying cry. When the Wall Street Journal attempted to tally the cost of his agenda–trillions in new government spending on health care, 90% tax rates on the superwealthy, free public college, a Scandinavian-style safety net–his defenders criticized the effort.

[…]

“Carter, Clinton and Obama all ran against the party,” Simon Rosenberg, Democratic strategist and veteran of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, observed of the last three Democrats to reach the Oval Office. “We don’t do coronations. It’s not our thing.”

[…]

The challenge Sanders faces is to build a campaign that can harness this energy effectively. His paid staff is growing rapidly, from four to nearly 40 in New Hampshire in just a month’s time. In Iowa, Sanders is quickly catching up to Clinton, with 54 paid staff to her 78 organizers. He’s set his sights on hiring in the Super Tuesday states.

He has volunteers eager to be involved in 47 states from Alabama to Michigan, where the campaign has no staff and no offices. In a largely unproven experiment, two staffers at the Burlington, Vt., headquarters are using conference calls, Internet chats, organizing parties and digital seminars to train hundreds of Sanders enthusiasts–who in turn are supposed to train other volunteers in rippling circles of self-sufficiency.

[…]

“The whole notion of self-organizing is a pipe dream,” says Marshall Ganz, a Harvard-based adviser to both the Dean and Obama campaigns. “One of the great values of the Internet is it’s a way to share information, but it’s not a substitute for relational structure and accountability.”

[…]

Clinton’s aides say they prepared for a strong challenger and they’re not changing course. The insurgent has been unable to break through with African-American voters, who could prove decisive in the later primaries. “Sanders may be rocking her with white progressives,” says Joe Trippi, a veteran Democratic strategist. “His problem is whether he can break Clinton’s domination of minorities. It’s a huge hurdle if it can’t be solved.” Clinton is still far ahead in nationwide polls, leading Sanders by around 20 percentage points. And her minions have begun to attack, sending out fact sheets that draw comparisons between Sanders and former Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chávez. “That is the kind of politics that I’m trying to change,” Sanders says of team Clinton’s attack.

Tidskrifsomslag: Time den 28 september 2015. Omslaget är den amerikanska upplagans.

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