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Plan for 2016: Focus on 2018 and 2020. Four Things We Should Do
William Tecumseh Sherman, a man who learned from defeat and others.
In the Washington Post, Tom C. Korologos and Richard V. Allen give us some advice about 2016: Focus on 2018 and 2020.
It had been my hope the GOP would continue its Shermanesque political march through the United States, winning more political offices faster from any opposition party than ever before (about a 1,000 state and national seats from 2010 to 2014), but alas we may have extended our lines of communication too far. My plans this time last year were winning Ohio, Pennsylvannia, the White House, and then 60 seats in the Senate in 2018. Well, to borrow a line from Dana Carvey imitating George H. W. Bush, “Not gonna happen.” With this mind, here is the advice these two experienced men offer: These are desperate times. Dig in. Defend your line. Goldwater and 1964 are a parallel. A long, hard slog awaits. Do the hard stuff and things will be good again.
They offer no hope that Trump — too easily distracted and given to bombast — will pull this off. We need to admit they are right is to assume he is in trouble today, and the situation will get worse when Clinton’s campaign unleashes its full broadside. Trump’s campaign reorganizations, changes in message, and pivoting won’t work. He’ll probably get nasty(ier?), blame others, and become indisciplined, again. I hope it doesn’t happen, but it is time to build a game plan for the next round.
They offer a four point plan:
Korologos and Allen argue that the larger the margin of the Clinton victory, the greater the chances a Clinton administration will overplay its hand (see Obama and the 2010 shellacking that followed). This will hand the GOP an opportunity to repair the damage in 2018 and 2020. Refer to Sun Tzu: “The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.” (Note: We all get a free pass to whine, gnash teeth, rage, blame, erupt and cry for one day – 24 hours. Then pack it up, be ready to move out.).
Second, the GOP and we should do a massive educational program on how to “split ticket” vote. Staying home is not an option. Turnout for the down-ticket races is key. Hold the House and the get ready for hearings every week on the Clinton administration, the newly discovered emails, etc. Freeze the battle space. I might add, force the other side to “executive order” themselves into a corner and further alienate themselves from the electorate.
They add the GOP should shift focus to 2018 and make it another 2010. For my take, we will have elected a minority and a woman as president, so check and check. The public will be ready to get back to focusing on what is good for the nation again. Korologos and Allen point out that over the past 21 off-year elections, the party in the White House “has lost an average of 30 House seats and an average of four Senate seats.” Ka-ching!
They observe this means the Joe Manchin’s and 25 other anxious Democratic senators will need to flex and support GOP positions. The new majority leader — hopefully Senator Chuck Schumer because he is so decidedly irritating, though it might be Dick Durbin — will try protect the flock and make the Senate dysfunctional again. One thing I thought of is that in 2018 the GOP will have a bumper crop of up-and-coming candidates fielded to seize back the initiative from the 900+ seats we won over the past seven years.
Third, with over 2,000 presidential appointees and most of the key ones requiring Senate confirmation – the GOP should “pick and choose carefully the most egregious liberals and expose their views.” Help them destroy themselves (again, Sun Tzu).
As for Supreme Court, Korologos and Allen recommend the GOP just delay. Remember Bork? Give the process time to play out. Allow the real working conservative media (not Breitbart) time to surface information. Let is seep out slowly. Show the nominees as doctrinaire, extreme, different, not in sync, unqualified, or partisan. As things leak out, hold fire. Then, simply vote “No.” Reason: too many questions about the nominees pre-formed opinions.
Their fourth suggestion will be very controversial, especially among the GOP’s populist wing: They recommend the GOP clean house at the RNC and change the primary rules that allowed Trump to win the nomination.
The RNC must share major responsibility for the outcome on Nov. 8. Having allowed Trump to gain the upper hand over a very good crop of Republican candidates would be Exhibit A of its political malpractice. For the party chairman to declare that the “primary campaign is over” after Indiana (while Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas were still in the race) was a major blunder.
They call for reform in the delegate selection process for 2020, create superdelegates (stop the kind of games Cruz excelled at), limit the number of candidates, and set later primary dates. I would add, consider adding regional primaries with several proximate states voting on the same day so a candidate cannot keep scooting between this state poll and that poll to embellish themselves. And in a debate pass a rule that you cannot demean another candidate by name calling or attacking their family personally. This is a rule that will not need to be enforced. The candidates will enforce this on each other. But the debates branded the party as a bunch of yahoos talking about penis size this year. That should have been stopped in its tracks by the moderator.
Korlogos and Allen also call for forming a new “tank of thinkers” similar to what happened after 1964. Populism, the alienation of voters from their leaders, income distribution, fairness, etc. are key issues that will decide the next few elections. Clinton is a poster-girl of privilege and this is a primal opportunity for the GOP to reach the 25 million voters who decide our fate in presidential races (the independents who lean Republican).
Such a group was formed in 1965 and headed efforts to develop a document called “The Republican Papers,” a mainstream conservative guide to action. Korlogos and Allen believe there will be “an urgent need to find and recruit the 2016 version of the 1960s visionaries.”
I would add that populism, the alienation of voters from their leaders, income distribution, fairness, isolationism, protectionism, nationalism, etc. are key issues that will decide the next few elections. Again, Clinton is a poster-girl of privilege and this is a superb opportunity for the GOP to reach the 25 million voters who decide our fate in the presidential race (the independents who lean Republican and without whom we perish).
These two gentlemen remind us that in 1966 the GOP won 47 seats, including one for George H. W. Bush and in 1968, Nixon won the White House. Nixon campaigned the for the GOP candidates in each of those 47 districts in 1966.
I guess we could say, “It’s time to get back to work!”
Published in General
I like where your thinking is but I have one question: Did the Union know it was going to win Gettysburg? I only ask because we haven’t even had the battle yet really. We have had some skirmishing through which each side has gained and lost but nothing definitive. Part of me thinks this election is more summer 1861 than summer 1863. Let’s wait until the actual battle happens first.
Well, if you think victory is in the air, I hope you are right!
But, . . . there are Norway Campaign’s and Dieppe’s. What exactly was the objective? How reasonable was it to ignore the situation?
Again, hope you are right – but are we pretending we are drawing against a flush when we really are up against a straight flush? ?
At the moment fivethirtyeight.com has a 26.4% chance of Trump winning. That doesn’t mean that the people claiming that he’s going to win in a landslide are sensible people who should be listened to, but it does mean that we’re a long way from certainty.
That said, I’m in agreement with you that the most important thing is to focus on 2018 and 2020. This is why I’m focusing on the horrors of Johnson. If Johnson gets 5% and hence $100m in public funding for 2020, Clinton will get a supermajority almost no matter what happens.
Oh, but there are so many more boxes to check. We haven’t had our first:
If you change a few names and leave out a few details, this could have been written in 2012, or 2008.
The real problem with the gop is that it wants to force unpopular policies upon the country that have not and will not succeed, and it lacks leadership competent enough to understand this and change course. Worse, any politically competent Republican is hounded out of office, one way or another, leaving only dullards to become party leaders. It’s really hard for a party to do well when faced with that sort of obstacle, and the gop hasn’t.
It’s also very cute to see a suggestion that the GOP reform itself to ensure that the voters aren’t allowed to choose the wrong candidate, as decided by party insiders. I’m sure that will go over well with the people who voted for the current GOP nominee, because the gop has so much good will built up with those folks.
The gop may as well just disband. It plainly can’t reform itself, it won’t represent the people who actually vote for it, and there is already an open borders globalist party- the democrats.
We don’t need another such party.
Great post, this is good plan for the future of the GOP right now. After Trump loses we must deal with this Alt Right nonsense, well also planning for the future. Conservatives need to start playing the long game though as well. We got to stop thinking in just these terms though, we need to start thinking of not just the next few election cycles, but indeed the next 100 years. We have over a hundred years of Progressive policies to eliminate.
That’s unlikely. Clinton will get more of a majority than Obama did and will do much more damage.
Big problem here. The Trump Democrats will likely vote D downticket. Even if Trump wins, we could lose bigtime downticket. This preening #NeverTrump campaign will only make the Trump Democrats more likely to come out and vote and vote D downticket. We should be doing all we can to get the Trump Democrats to vote R downticket.
The Seante is toast absent a coordinated effort with Trump to get Trump Democrats to vote R downticket. How, otherwise, can we hold NH, PA, OH, IL, WI just to name the goners?
This has its own merits and demerits. However raising a rules change before the election really risks a rebellion that would destroy downticket chances.
Explain your reasoning here.
Example?
@ctlaw,
I think you are making large assumptions about the size of the crossover vote for Trump. I think it is not a crossover vote as much as bringing unlikely voters to the polls. However, with Trump’s nonexistent ground game even this occurring is dubious. A lot of Trump voters are going to show up at the wrong polling place, get frustrated with not being registered and having to register at the polling place and voting a provisional ballot and just give up and not vote. Trump is going to lose 2-3% by not having a ground game.
I’ve never written this word before. Gobsmacked.
Trump is reality. This paragraph from the post reveals the mindset of those creating this latest distraction that’s diluting our effort to defeat and destroy Clinton, Inc.
They offer no hope that Trump — too easily distracted and given to bombast — will pull this off. We need to admit they are right is to assume he is in trouble today, and the situation will get worse when Clinton’s campaign unleashes its full broadside. Trump’s campaign reorganizations, changes in message, and pivoting won’t work. He’ll probably get nasty(ier?), blame others, and become indisciplined, again. I hope it doesn’t happen, but it is time to build a game plan for the next round.
Allowing, aiding, abetting or any other action or distraction that helps Clinton will destroy this nation’s last hope for saving the American Dream for our children. The Catholic, Protestant and Evangelical churches ought to be arguing forcefully from their pulpits, organizing against Clinton (aka Satan), and essentially doing everything in their power to help us save our communities from the murder and mayhem that is Clinton policy. How many more must be murdered in the womb, how many more innocents must be gunned down in the ghettos, and how much more of our freedom to act according to our faith-inspired religious convictions will be eliminated from society before the Judeo-Christian founding force of our nation’s creation finds the courage to act?
I still see it as unlikely that we lose the Senate and it is very unlikely that HRC gets a majority of the popular vote.
The key in my opinion is to clean up the message in the media. Trump must obviously be drummed out of the camp along with many of his more cancerous followers. Outlets like Breitbart and even Fox News, need to be cleaned up. The one issue for the next 4 years will be “Decentralize power away from DC!”
Short of using Democrat-style superdelegates, how is the GOP supposed to ensure that another Trump can’t win? It’s not easy to set up a system where the guy who gets the most votes doesn’t win!
How dare you suggest there’s such a thing as a “not-so-wise Latina”. Shame.
I don’t see much evidence for the idea that if Hillary wins huge they’ll overplay their hand and force a major backlash. Or if it does produce a backlash that it will do any good. There’s was a huge backlash after Obamacare, the GOP had major congressional gains, and we got ourselves a glorious stalemate. (As a best case description of what happened. Our massive electoral waves didn’t seem to do much to stop the IRS that’s still not-approving conservative groups, Obamacare’s still here, omnibusses are still massive, Planned Parenthood still gets its half billion per annum, the military’s becoming a social justice petri dish, etc.)
Moreover, to conservatives a Trump loss will mean he wasn’t conservative enough, to party bigwigs it will mean he was too harsh on immigration. I therefore see a similar standoff to what we’ve got now, the only difference being a healthy does of Rick Wilsonesque “purging” of Trump supporters, thus leaving the two remaining groups to fight amongst each other over and increasingly small sector of the electorate.
We’re playing the long game, which would be great if we weren’t at the two minute warning of the fourth (and our “long game” actually accomplished anything other than defend gun rights). Unfortunately, once Scalia and either of the two conservatives or two squishes gets replaced on the Court, there won’t be a thing we can do that won’t be ruled “unconstitutional”.
Ha! I hadn’t thought of that. However, the Dem’s get out the vote machine is pretty discriminating. If their computers haven’t sussed out who the Trump voters are, then Trump voters are very good at lying.
Six ideas for reform. We can never again have a candidate who is hated by a third of Republicans and supported by only 37% of Republicans.
First, any candidate who has not yet disclosed their taxes is unable to participate in the debates. Once they disclose, they can participate.
Second, like the Democrats, the proportionate award of delegates. No more “winner take all” or “winner take most” primaries which allow a plurality to win all or most of the delegates.
Third, like the Democrats, Super-Delegates.
Fourth, require candidates to reveal their medical records before they can participate in a debate. Better yet, have an independent medical doctor do an medical exam, and a neurologist do an examination. (Trump’s father died of Alzheimer’s Disease, and I have strong neurological questions about him. At a minimum, this would provide a base line if a President starts slipping.)
Fifth, “freedom of choice” at the convention. Clearly Trump was slipping between the Indiana primary and the convention. The delegates are like a jury and must have freedom to stop a disaster.
Sixth, have only “closed” primaries, where only registered Republicans can vote.
The dems. may not care.
Johnson’s money is likely to see a more efficient return than Clinton’s in siphoning off Republican votes; the law of diminishing returns is a genuine thing in advertising. If you talk to the people in the LP who will be in charge of spending the money, their ambitions are almost exclusively about taking down Republicans; at the LP convention there was a single (1) panel on Democrats, and the rest was all about Republicans. If you talk to the professionals, they’re mostly people who go back and forward between the GOP and the LP, like Roger Stone and Wayne Allyn Root. The activist base, the donor base, and the voter base are all Republican. In polls that ask about the party identification of those who vote Johnson (like this one), Republicans are consistently about twice as numerous as Democrats; this is often confused by looking at the question of whether “third party” voters are more friendly to Trump or Clinton (Stein is much, much, more appealing to Democrats than to Republicans). Weld is very clear that he wants Clinton to win (he’s suggested that she would be excellent while comparing Trump’s policies to the Holocaust), and Weld’s understanding of the polls is as good as anyone’s is; he gets the internal polls as well as the published stuff.
With $100m in public money, it’d be hard not to get $100m in private donations and with $200m, it’d be hard not to get 10% of the vote; no one has ever failed on that epic a scale before. Not only would the LP draw away Republican votes, it would also draw away Republican volunteers and Republican donors. Time and again, good limited government politicians like Mia Love lose races because the LP fields candidates. Give the LP some serious cash, a professional GOTV operation, and an advertising budget, and we should see that rate go from low single digits to high single digits. Take away the volunteers and donors from marginal GOP candidates, and races become much harder to win.
In 2018, Nevada, in which a huge portion of the Republican vote is libertarian identified and the Senator (Heller) is not particularly strongly so is one of the Democrat’s better opportunities for a pickup. Flake, in Arizona, is relatively vulnerable, too, and is a defence hawk in a state with an unusually strong LP and a highly restive GOP with substantial numbers looking to go third party.
2020 is a refight of the phenomenally successful 2014 elections in which Republicans gained nine seats. It would be difficult to retain all nine in a Presidential year anyway, but with incredibly savage Republican primaries likely and a Democratic machine that will be 100% behind the President, it should be harder still. Add the above problems to that, recall that e.g., Alaska’s GOP is particularly split and has an unusually large libertarian identified GOP electorate, and it becomes exceptionally implausible that the Democrats would not be able to drown GOP candidates with outdated software, outdated databases, massive advertising deficiencies, and undermanned campaigns.
Tom Delay.
You bestow upon us a list of ideas plainly intended to stop Donald Trump.
It may or may not be helpful in derailing the next candidate the establishment doesn’t like, because as I recall one way the gop ended up with a mess of proportional and winner-take-all contests is that the usual suspects wanted to grease the skids for Jeb!
Oops.
But by all means, encourage the party to introduce a set of reforms that will make the establishment even more despised by the base .
What could go wrong?
Overcorrections are common.
The conventional “wisdom” was that Romney had a harder time because he had to fight in a primary so long. So they frontloaded lots of primaries, believing that a well-funded candidate (Jeb) would be able to sew things up early and then be able to focus on the general election.
Oops.
Yeah, I broadly agree. The RNC’s job is not to put a thumb on the scale. There’s nothing to be done about the chunks of the conservative and, separately, liberal media that will lie outright about the party, but it is important that the party doesn’t become what either group pretends because there’s a bunch of organs that won’t invent the same stories. If the party continues to avoid partisan involvement, it mildly reduces the volume of pleading for the party to take sides and complaints about it doing so. These being among the central problems facing the party and all methods for selecting from among candidates blowing chunks, even a mild benefit to being an honest broker should be pursued on utilitarian as well as moral grounds.
I don’t think there was a meaningful mistake in the primary process this year, debate speaking time aside. If the primaries had stretched out longer, it seems to me that they’d have done yet more harm (and it is hard to overstate the harm caused by the viciousness of the fight; marriages that have been driven apart and such) and to no discernible benefit.
Trump’s numbers among Republicans have gradually improved since he won, which seems like a clear argument for maximizing that time. It’s let Rubio get back to Florida and Kasich back to Ohio. If Paul or Graham had been in the race longer or Cruz was doing something useful for the country it would have been helpful with them, too. It puts a slightly greater space between the Trump is a cancer and Trump should be President arguments of those who needed to pivot.
I hope the same tempo applies next cycle, and am sad that Nevada can’t be given a third chance to run another great caucus. Other than Nevada, though, I’m not sure what seriously failed in the party controlled elements. I disagree with the voters’ presidential choices, but the RNC doesn’t get to screen voters for the soundness of their views.
Borrowing at least one page from Trump and energetically courting the black vote more or less in the terms that he has done it would do several good things, IMHO.
First, of course, it would be the right thing to do, given that black Americans are disproportionately impoverished and that suffering is real, unnecessary and very much Our Problem.
Second, it would discourage the Alt-Right from thinking that the GOP, or whatever replaces the GOP, is on their side.
Third, didn’t someone say that if a mere 10-15% of black voters voted Republican, the Democrats would lose?
Fourth, the same programs and policies that are making the safety net into a trap for black Americans and discouraging black entrepreneurs small and large from starting businesses and creating jobs are causing problems for poor and working-class white Americans, too.
Fifth, when Trump gives his “What Have You Got To Lose” speeches in front of mostly-white audiences, the mostly-white audiences cheer. The separation between whites and blacks is, for the most part, a carefully-cultivated illusion that richly (so very, very richly) deserves to be shattered.