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On the Arrogance of Republican Party “Experts”
Several years back I worked for a state Republican Party running a Victory Center, or local campaign headquarters. I devoted more to that job than I had to any job prior and more than I have to any job since. The hours were nine to nine Monday through Friday, nine to five on Saturdays, and near election day several hours on Sundays. Initially, I was thrilled to have been given the opportunity to contribute to a cause about which I cared very much. Moreover, it didn’t hurt my ego to be interacting on a regular basis with people I had regularly seen on television and their close advisors.
During my initial state of humility, I found myself taking in every bit of knowledge the “experts” for whom I worked imparted to me. When I was told to do something, I did it, and did it as well as I could without question.
However, I couldn’t help but notice that much of what I was asked to do seemed, frankly, stupid. I asked for explanations from my direct supervisor, who was actually competent. He (eventually replaced by a “she”) informed me that “experts” had devised our strategy, our call scripts, and everything else. They knew exactly what they were doing. Anyone who questioned them was a moron.
“Do you really believe that?”
“No. You’re right. It’s stupid. I’m just told to tell you that.”
I found we were introducing ourselves as Republican during calls when we should have brought it up later in the conversation, but we weren’t announcing we were Republican when it would have made sense to say so up front. We used a push-poll format when honest opinions would have made our database more accurate. We were instructed to mark people as “pro-life” if that’s what they answered in response to our question, even when it was obvious they had no idea what that phrase actually meant. (These folks would later receive “sanctity of life” pamphlets in the mail). We could get pizza and only pizza for our volunteers; one guy who got ice cream instead (spending far less than he ever did on pizza) was chewed out. We had no flexibility about which script should be used for which type of volunteer; at one point we were forced to ask new volunteers to use a “universe” (the type of voter selected for a specific call list) full of dead people. Being told, “Why the hell are you calling here, you bastard, my mother died three years ago?” five times in an hour might not bother a hardcore volunteer, but it’s hardly the ideal way to get a new one to return.
“Just use the scripts we give you. We know what we’re doing.”
The State Party Heads in State Capitol were flummoxed about why we were having such a tough time finding and keeping volunteers. Those of us in the field who interacted with people tried to explain why: flawed political strategy, little flexibility about how to use volunteers, etc. They ignored us and instead gave us a call script with which to call ostensible Republicans to recruit them. The call script required us to ramble on for 35 seconds about the sorry condition of our state before asking any questions or giving the recipient a chance to speak. When this script was correctly followed, to my knowledge not a single volunteer or campaign worker made it through more than fifteen seconds without being hung up on.
On a conference call, one of the mid-level field directors dared to call into question the perfection of this script. He was berated in the harshest of terms, told he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, that the script’s language was perfectly crafted based on focus-group responses and expert political communications experts who were such experts at the relevant expertise that anyone who dared to question them again would be fired. My job just prior to this was in the US Army, an organization with leaders far more likely to accept criticism from its lower levels.
But we were making a lot of phone calls, more phone calls than had ever been made before, for in the prior election phone calls seemed to have made the difference. The law of diminishing returns didn’t apply.
The local Major League Baseball team made the World Series for the first time in ages. I saw articles about Democratic election efforts in both our state and that of the opposing team (another swing state) discussing how they were working extra hard early in the day so as to not bother people during the baseball games at night. Our instructions? Call. More than ever, both day and night. Interrupt people during the game, and it’s your fault if nobody wants to volunteer those nights. Also, follow the script to the letter so that the person testily answering the phone when it’s three and two with two out and two on in the bottom of the eighth knows that the person annoying the hell out of them is a Republican the instant they pick up the phone.
Still, there was a surety in the manner and behaviors of my superiors that led me to think that perhaps they were right. After all, I was no “expert” myself. I just saw one small piece of a much larger puzzle. These people had devoted their entire lives to politics. They had to know what they were doing. I got an e-mail with all sorts of charts and internal polling data stating that there was no possible way at all that we could lose this election.
Very shortly after the election, we got another e-mail informing us that there was no possible way we could have won, for the political environment was so hostile to Republicans that victory was completely and utterly out of reach. The strategy that had been implemented was the best possible. Insurmountable headwinds. Just one of those things.
I got laid off, as did virtually every other person who worked his or her tail off in the far flung reaches of the state. As far as I know, every person who worked normal business hours in State Capitol either kept his or her job or was promoted. The guy who berated his underling for questioning the call script was snatched up by the RNC. His boss now works for a high-powered political consulting firm. My immediate supervisor, who did an extraordinary job of managing multiple impossible operations hundreds of miles away from each other, went on to manage a Target.
One of the cardinal rules of politics is that “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” In the State Capital, they knew each other quite well, often in the biblical sense. Those of us hundreds of miles from the State Capital never had the chance to partake of the parties, after-work happy hours, and love triangles because we were alone in our Victory Centers, getting screamed at by hardcore leftists who somehow ended up in the fiscal conservative “universe.” For our efforts (we implemented our orders remarkably well), we received a grateful pat on the head, but we were not yet insiders and thus not in any position to expect rewards for losing. Advancement opportunities were reserved for those directly responsible for the loss.
During the “turn in your equipment” party after the election, our superiors failed to ask our opinions about how we might have done things better. After all, they were experts and we weren’t, so there would have been little point.
Entirely of their own volition, my volunteers sent letters to the Party Chairman suggesting that the party find a role for me of some sort because I was so good at working with people and was such a great face for the Party. But there were simply no positions to be had. We needed every expert in State Capitol to stay on board (save those promoted to Washington) so we could use their expertise in crafting our next campaign strategy. (You’ll be shocked to learn that this next election was equally successful.)
Some time later, the Party Chairman went on a “listening tour” around the state, and I attended when he came to a town nearby. Those who attended were angry with him; he was visibly annoyed with them. “Why didn’t we make sure people knew about the awful thing the sitting Democratic governor did?” asked a volunteer. “We sent out a press release but nobody reported on it,” answered Party Chairman. “How about that other ridiculous policy of the governor? Why didn’t we even bring that up?” asked some impertinent slob. “We can’t make the press report on what it doesn’t want to report on” said the expert. “Those call scripts were idiotic!” said another backwoods rube. “We’ll work on better scripts for the next cycle,” replied the expert, for there was not so much as a hint indicating the scripts were inadequate that could have possibly been detected until after the election.
I’m sure they did a post mortem of sorts after I was gone, but I suspect it was either done by the very people responsible for the loss or others beholden to them. I seriously doubt it contained anything equivalent to “the people who hired us to write this should be fired immediately and never work in politics again.” How’s anybody going to get to write more election post mortems if they say offensive stuff like that?
Thus I learned during my tenure as a low-level political operative that there is in fact a culturally unified Republican Establishment, certain of its own superior wisdom, expert in data collection techniques but oblivious to how calling people during the World Series might be counter-productive, impervious to viewpoints that contradict its own. It consists of people who decided in high school that they wanted to get into politics, interned in State Capital or Washington, met all the right people (with plenty of pictures to prove it), found mentors who immersed them in “how things are done,” and were socialized by their frequent proximity to powerful people to believe that they are in fact better than you.
This is perfectly natural. Imagine a mediocre public school teacher who’s taken oodles of education classes and knows the fancy name for every educational technique known to man encountering some schlub on the street who thinks he’s somehow got what it takes to teach. You think it will actually matter if he’s able to connect with the kids and inspire them to learn? Hell, no — if the kids do better under the upstart than the expert, that just means the kids are faulty. Your betters have gone to the right schools, studied the right charts, have the right friends, and know enough jargon and acronyms to make your head spin. If an untrained yokel like you somehow managed to have an idea that’s better than theirs, it would destroy their entire sense of self.
So yes, it makes perfect sense for the political class to despise both Trump and his supporters (as they have Cruz, Palin, and others before). You see, Trump does things he’s not supposed to do, he’s not a political “expert” like they are, and thus has no business gaining so much support.
Yes, it’s ridiculous that a political neophyte who’s supported Hillary Clinton and single-payer healthcare, has called Bush “evil,” and believes God-only-knows-what about dozens of issues he hasn’t even addressed is leading in the Republican primary.
A competent political class would see this as evidence that they’re doing something wrong. Ours sees it as a defect among the voters, for there’s no conceivable way it could possibly be the fault of those in charge. They’re experts. They know what they’re doing. GOP voters need to grow the hell up and accept that.
Keep this in mind the next time they call Trump, or anybody else for that matter, arrogant.
Published in Domestic Policy, Elections, General, Politics
I left out quite a few idiocies, one of which was that a guy working as liaison between the US Senate candidate’s campaign and the state party had that job only because his dad contributed lots of $$$$.
The guy made everybody else look brilliant.
Don’t worry. I was being sarcastic about their sarcasm deficit.
No need to “suspect.”
There are things they know how to do that we don’t like set up a campaign event. However, we “know” we’re guessing, they “know” that they know.
Funny that this post and mine are promoted together. We couldn’t have planned it better.
iWe spoke my thoughts. It’s a stubborn commitment to all-encompassing centralized power, with no respect for local variations or local leaders. If they practice that mentality in elections, then they surely practice it in pursuit of lesser priorities (policies and legislative strategies). This is not a party of limited, local government.
Calling oneself Independent while consistently voting Republican sends mixed messages. It makes clear that one isn’t proud of Republican association. But one is still in effect a Republican voter. The party doesn’t need voters to vote enthusiastically. Being less bad than Democrats has been enough to gain power.
Burn it down and piss on the ashes. It’s the only way to be sure.
We have been told by a number of people that essentially unless we have super-majorities in both houses and the Presidency, nothing can be done. Doesn’t that mean we already have a de facto permanent, one-party (Democrat) state?
Satire isn’t dead; its been aborted.
I don’t have much confidence in the national Republican organizations or leaders either, especially Reince Priebus. His post-mortem after the Romney defeat seemed clueless to me, but then again I’m no expert!
I haven’t read the book, so can’t evaluate the argument; I can’t quite imagine what an argument to the effect that this is inevitable would look like. Is it persuasive to you?
Usually post-mortems say something along the lines of “we didn’t win because we reasonable people weren’t able to do what we really want because of the rubes in our party.” Romney was pulled too far to the right on illegal immigration, which purely by coincidence interfered with the “inclusive” message they need for “outreach.”
Like I said in my post, the people who write those things either are or have been hired by the people who ran the campaign. Thus, analyses will tend towards “it wasn’t their fault” and thereby confirm what they already believed before the campaign began.
You’ll never see “fire the idiots,” ever.
My county GOP recently nominated an AFL-CIO Business Manager former Democrat who supported Obama, Joe Sestak and Bob Casey to run as the Republican nominee in a special election on August 4th for State House in a Republican district. Alas, the excellent, qualified candidate expected nominee had the whiff of Tea Party about her.
This comes not long after the state GOP nominated a former Democrat Obama supporter to run as the Republican for the US Senate in 2012 against Bob ‘Oodles of Personality’ Casey, Jr, thereby ensuring his re-election which was probably a given anyway.
Our county GOP has absolutely no ground game and, to my knowledge, neither does the state. And based on my time working the phones & the pavement through a local Tea Party group, they seem to prefer it that way since they never follow up or request volunteers. I know we hear the constant refrain to work at a local level but at least in my experience, it’s just as useless when the machine is corrupt.
Yes, extremely persuasive.
As bitter as I am about the top down lifelessness of the Republican establishment, they did somethings very right since 2008. None of them voted for Obamacare and only a sliver voted for Dodd Frank.
With the new genuine conservatives we are going to have to hold some feet to the fire but at least we have a good number of Congressmen and some senators to do that.
Trump is not the answer. Like Perot in 1992 he is a Clinton plant. He has always been a major contributor to the Clintons and how many companies has this man bankrupted. As people who worked on the Perot campaign in my state, Perot ran not to become president but to insure that Bush was not reelected. Do we really want a reply of 1992?
When I was at George Mason, I attended one meeting of the College Republicans. Frank Wolf was a relatively new Congresscritter and came to speak. The stench of the pack of [expletive]-sniffing courtiers-in-waiting was so overwhelming that I left the meeting halfway through.
The wonder is that it took me until “No New Taxes” betrayal to abandon the GOP.
Yes, but I’m saying something different. We can look back and discern some important aspects about human nature, but that still doesn’t enable us to predict the future and all policy and politics deals with the future. Law, in contrast, requires us to know something about the past and human nature which with luck and wisdom enables us to build structures within which an unknowable future unfolds. It’s the difference between a Hayekian world or Keynes’. Keynes’s world or the progressive’s administrative state in general is awash in experts. In Hayek’s almost no experts but there lots of principles we ignore at our peril.
I’ll take this a little further. We talk about Republicans having lives outside of politics. Do the people who hand down these orders and dismiss all criticism run or work for actual private sector businesses? I’m sure there are really businesses run this way, but I would figure those were on the decline from heights reached by smarter managers. That’s how fortunes get squandered from one generation to the next.
Thank you, Martel for the post.
Shocking but not surprising, if that makes any sense.
Can we get a few “Amens” on this?
I suppose there are some lonely people that are just pleased when anyone calls them, but is there any normal well-adjusted person in America who appreciates receiving unsolicited phone calls from strangers?
Better strategy might be to set up a call center and call people extolling the merits of every opposing candidate on the ballot.
That second sentence is a brilliant point I hadn’t previously considered.
Second. It’s a good argument. You can read most the argument in this essay.
I remember that the Party Chair did in fact have private sector experience. He spent most of his time fundraising.
Most of the other Victory Center directors came straight out of college, but a significant amount had private sector experience like me. So did some of the field directors (just above us).
However, among those in the leadership level who concocted the whole strategy, my impression were that these folks had spent almost their entire lives in politics. After college they worked on a successful campaign or two and had thus worked their way into the in-crowd.
Business experience just meant you were wasting your time not doing politics.
Anyone have an answer for Distilled Samuel’s excellent question? Anyone? Bueller?
No surprise.
I almost wrote a post about that very conclusion this morning.
I have volunteered (in a variety of jobs) and been a delegate for both parties. It’s all about power and money.
The one difference is the Democrats are better at adopting new campaign ideas, and now, social media.
A grass root effort has a much better chance of catching fire within the Democrat base. Republicans party leaders (national, state, and local) think a grass root effort is something you spray weed killer on. It must be killed.
I got burned out working campaigns in my youth. It always amazed me how much the politicals expected people to give time, money, life to them with no return. I learned early it was all just a con job.
A few years ago a friend of mine got involved in a GOP effort in her county. They were all told to put in the time, go the extra mile, donate some money they would all share in the spoils when they won. My friend was encouraged and took out a home equity loan so she could in turn “lend” it to the campaign to get it over the final hump. the GOP did well that year and the efforts paid off. After the election the politicals went back the state capital leaving behind promises of positions in the GOP. It has been several years and all my friend got out of it was her picture in the paper for some BS award, no position, and a ten grand home equity mortgage for a “loan” that was never paid back.
That is your modern GOP. All broken promises and unpaid debts.
That sucks.
I wish I could think of something more to say, but words fail. If a charity were running an operation like that, someone would be in jail.
If there is any justice they were paid in raw seal meat.
Actually, nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure.
I cannot even begin to express how fed up I am with the Republican establishment. I would leave the GOP in a heartbeat if I felt I had anywhere else to go that had a chance of winning/being effective. It’s a terrible trap to be in. I don’t like Trump at all, and I think it speaks of the sad state of affairs in the national GOP that he has received as much support and attention as he has. This post (and Aaron’s) merely confirms things for me.
All in all I am wholeheartedly in support of Whiskey Sam’s solution.