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You are here: Home / Archives for Political Strategy

The MAGA Playbook

May 17, 2022 at 10:02 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Philip Bump: “Deny, deny, deny. Lump the media in with critics on the left. Never acknowledge that you erred but, instead, argue that you are being unfairly accused of having erred because of bias. By now, it’s rote — even when the question is whether you stand by an argument that was allegedly deployed by a man accused of killing 10 people at a grocery store.”

“In 2016, Trump ran in explicit opposition to immigration, even at one point making an argument that the Democrats wanted to bring in uncountable numbers of immigrants who would vote for their party. He refused to admit his errors or his lies. And then he won. And then he retained enormous popularity with the base.”

“And lessons were imparted.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy, Trump Legacy

Skipping Debates Is Big This Year

May 2, 2022 at 2:53 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Associated Press: “As the most competitive phase of the midterm primary season unfolds this week, many candidates for leading offices — often Republicans — are abandoning the time-honored tradition of debating their rivals before Election Day.”

“For some gaffe-prone candidates such as Walker, avoiding the debate stage reduces the chance of an embarrassing moment. For others, it’s an opportunity to snub a media ecosystem they find elitist and cast themselves in the mold of former President Donald Trump, who made a show of missing some debates during the 2016 campaign.”

Filed Under: 2022 Campaign, Political Strategy

Democrats Mostly Ignore GOP’s ‘Pedophile’ Attacks

April 13, 2022 at 12:05 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Vice News: “Half of Republicans—and almost a third of Americans overall—said in a recent YouGov poll that it’s definitely or probably true that ‘top Democrats are involved in elite child sex-trafficking rings.’ That’s a slight uptick in belief of that core QAnon conspiracy from when the pollster started asking the question in 2020…”

“But claims made in bad faith can still pay political dividends, making even bonkers attacks risky to ignore. Democrats largely shrugged off GOP claims last election that even their most moderate members were socialists who wanted to defund the police‚ and then they were shocked to lose House seats in 2020. During a furious post-election conference call, many centrists complained their party had done too little to push back against those GOP claims.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

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New Democratic Organizing Strategy Catching Fire

April 8, 2022 at 7:48 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“A group of Democratic strategists is trying to spread a novel organizing tactic in this year’s election. Technically, it’s called ‘paid relational organizing,’ but it boils down to this: paying people to talk to their friends about politics,” Politico reports.

“Democrats think it helped them win the Senate in 2020 — and are hoping the get-out-the-vote strategy will help limit the pain of a brutal 2022 election environment.”

“Conversations with friends, family members or neighbors are more likely to earn a voter’s support than chats with a stranger at their front door, which is the traditional way campaigns have run paid canvassing programs in the past. And an important test case for deploying the strategy at scale came out of the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021 when now-Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-GA) campaign, flush with nearly unlimited cash but only two months to spend it, used a paid and volunteer relational program to get people talking to acquaintances instead of strangers about the election.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

Money Still Can’t Buy You Love

February 1, 2022 at 3:59 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Walter Shapiro: “At what level of spending does an extra dollar fail to have any effect on vote totals? And is there a point when the omnipresence of a candidate’s TV ads annoys voters so much that it actually costs votes?”

“The analytical difficulty here is that no major candidate is willing to run his or her campaign as an empirical test of the value of additional TV buys. So ridiculous levels of spending ($277 million squandered in the small state of South Carolina on the 2020 Senate race) are maintained because any fundraising restraint is viewed as the equivalent of unilateral disarmament.”

Filed Under: Campaign Finance, Political Strategy

Carville Says Democrats Are ‘Addicted to Hopeless Causes’

January 28, 2022 at 2:09 pm EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

James Carville told Vox that Democrats need to be smarter about how they prioritize their resources.

Said Carville: “Just look at how Democrats organize and spend money. For Christ’s sake, Jaime Harrison raised over $100 million only to lose his Senate race to Lindsey Graham by 10 points. Amy McGrath runs for Senate in Kentucky and raises over $90 million only to get crushed by Mitch McConnell.”

He added: “They were always going to lose those races, but Democrats keep doing this stupid shit. They’re too damn emotional. Democrats obsess over high-profile races they can’t win because that’s where all the attention is. We’re addicted to hopeless causes.”

Filed Under: Democrats, Political Strategy

Democrats ‘Steal’ Elections by Persuading Voters

December 28, 2021 at 8:44 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) quoted an article about how Democrats won Wisconsin in 2020 suggesting it offered a roadmap on “how to steal an election.”

The offending passage: “Seeding an area heavy with potential Democratic votes with as many absentee ballots as possible, targeting and convincing potential voters to complete them in a legally valid way, and then harvesting and counting the results.”

John Harwood pointed out that “convincing potential voters to cast legal ballots is the how you win elections in a democracy.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

Democrats Fall Flat with ‘Latinx’ Language

December 6, 2021 at 9:14 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“As Democrats seek to reach out to Latino voters in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get traction among academics and activists on the left,” Politico reports.

“But that very effort could be counterproductive in courting those of Latin American descent, according to a new nationwide poll of Hispanic voters.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

What Moves Swing Voters

November 9, 2021 at 7:46 am EST By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

David Leonhardt: “This morning, a creative new poll exploring these issues is being released. It asks working-class respondents — defined as people without a bachelor’s degree — to choose between two hypothetical candidates. The candidates are described both personally (their gender, race and job category) and politically (including a sound bite in which they talk about their views).”

“A central conclusion is that infrequent voters are not a huge Democratic constituency just waiting to be inspired by a sufficiently progressive economic message… The poll instead finds that working-class swing voters hold a swirl of progressive and conservative views.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

Extra Bonus Quote of the Day

November 6, 2021 at 1:37 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

“Wine moms won’t save us. Need the beer moms.”

— Wisconsin Democratic operative Irene Lin, quoted by Politico, on the need for Democrats to attract rural voters.

Filed Under: Democrats, Political Strategy

The Failure of a Political Slogan

October 19, 2021 at 9:30 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece is only available to Political Wire members.

From a new Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll:

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Filed Under: Members, Political Strategy

Popular Policies Don’t Win Elections

September 29, 2021 at 10:00 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Jonathan Bernstein: “We know, for example, that many voters don’t pay attention to much of what politicians say, and have short memories about what they do notice. Even big deals, such as the major bills Congress is acting on right now, get ignored; indeed, many voters this summer failed to recognize that the current Congress (and President Joe Biden) had delivered anything to them despite the stimulus checks that they had received.”

“Most voters aren’t up for grabs because of partisan polarization. For the rest, fundamentals such as peace and prosperity, or their absence, tend to be extremely important, either directly or mediated through their opinion of the current president. (That is, if things are going well, people tend to like the president, and that drives their votes). All the rest — policy positions, speeches, clever ads, the candidates’ personalities — only matter on the margins. Of course, elections can be won or lost on the margins! During campaigns, it makes sense to maximize everything a candidate can maximize. But most of it just doesn’t matter much.”

“It’s also not as easy as it might seem to succeed by supporting policies that poll strongly. That’s because even high-quality survey research is limited in value by the fact that most of citizens don’t think much about most policy questions, which makes their views on them not very strongly held.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

Workers, Wages and Weed

July 14, 2021 at 12:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Julie Oliver and Mike Siegel: “Joe Biden, in defeating Donald Trump, won more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history. But as we saw with several ballot initiatives from this past election cycle, a handful of issues outperformed Biden in red and blue states — and may offer Democrats both a popular message and a slate of wedge issues to take to voters.”

“We’ve dubbed these ‘workers, wages and weed.’”

“Legislation supporting workers, improving wages and legalizing marijuana are progressive, Democratic policies. But they’re also extremely popular among Republicans and moderates.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

How Republicans Use Uncertainty as a Weapon

June 22, 2021 at 11:46 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Philip Bump: “A pattern has emerged in Republican politics over the past several years, a three-part system by which to generate a cloud of uncertainty about certain things.”

“One component is to suggest a failure to treat something unserious as serious is a reflection of an unwillingness to debate, that the party considering the unserious thing as unserious is somehow afraid to confront it. Another is cherry-picking from huge pools of information, using isolated and usually misconstrued claims to construct alternative narratives. The third is the existence of a sympathetic media and social universe that collectively agrees the unserious and unproven thing is, in fact, both proven and serious.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

To Talk About Him or Not

June 1, 2021 at 3:49 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

This piece for members is by David T.S. Jonas.

One of the long-standing debates of the last six years has been whether—strategically speaking–it’s better to ignore Donald Trump.

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Filed Under: Members, Political Strategy

Democrats Seek to Export Their Georgia Playbook

May 26, 2021 at 9:36 am EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Associated Press: “The Georgia Democratic Party has its answer for how the state delivered its electoral votes to Joe Biden for president in November and gave Democrats control of the U.S. Senate with runoff victories two months later.”

“The short answer: time, money and plenty of staff and volunteers using ‘tailored outreach’ to make Georgia’s electorate younger, less white and more focused on absentee and early voting than it’s ever been.”

Filed Under: 2022 Campaign, Political Strategy

Why So Many Voters Want to Be Lied To

May 7, 2021 at 8:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: “Often, people just want to believe the liar. Personality cults increase the leader’s credibility, since they present him as possessed of special powers or ruling with a divine mandate, making him seem infallible. Strongmen also know how to be persuasive, especially if they previously worked as journalists (Mussolini and the Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko), in television (Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Trump) or were professional dissemblers (Putin was a KGB case officer). These practiced liars work hard to seem authentic.”

“Moreover, once people bond with the leader, they may be inclined to dismiss any evidence that conflicts with his claims, or overlook contradictions in his messages. They believe him because they believe in him. Or, in an interesting twist, they know he is lying, but they decide that they don’t care: better him than his enemy (who, as they have been taught to believe, lies even more). And some people actually approve of all the lying, seeing it as rule-breaking by a rogue they adore.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy

You Won’t Beat Biden With Personal Attacks

May 3, 2021 at 4:00 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard Leave a Comment

Ramesh Ponnuru: “Republicans are more likely to drag Biden down by associating him with bad decisions than they are to discredit his decisions by besmirching him personally.”

“They can win, that is, but they may have to do it without a nickname.”

Filed Under: Political Strategy, White House

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About Political Wire

goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

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