Could this anti-Trump Republican campaign group
take down the President?
Savage attack ads from a well-funded group of
dissident Republicans are aiming to sway a key sliver of opinion in swing
states
Richard
Wolffe
Richard
Wolffe in Washington
@richardwolffedc
Sat 1 Aug
2020 11.00 BSTLast modified on Sat 1 Aug 2020 11.06 BST
Amid all
the noise of an election involving Donald Trump – all the inflammatory tweets
and shadowy Facebook posts – one set of ads has somehow managed to break
through.
There’s the
one of the US president shuffling down a ramp that declares that the president
“is not well”. There’s the whispering one about Trump’s “loyalty problem”
inside his White House, campaign and family.
There’s the
epic Mourning in America that remakes Reagan’s election-defining 1984 ad,
turning the sun-bathed suburbs into a dark national portrait of pandemic and
recession. On Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, those three ads alone have racked
up more than 35m views.
The Lincoln
Project, run by a group of renegade Republican political consultants, has
crystallized one of the core narratives of the 2020 campaign in ways that few
other political commercials have in past cycles.
Its work on
brutal attack ads sits alongside the swift boat veterans against John Kerry in
2004, the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis in 1988, and the daisy ad
against Barry Goldwater in 1964.
Their
reward? Disdain from independent media, distrust across the political spectrum
and a recent series of harshly negative coverage from pro-Trump media outlets.
Disdain
appears to be the consensus view from the pundits. Atlantic magazine called
their ads “personally abusive, overwrought, pointlessly salacious, and
trip-wired with non sequiturs”. The New Republic examined what it called “the
viral impotency” of the Lincoln Project, suggesting they couldn’t “persuade
voters of anything”. Even the Washington Post declared most of their ads were
“aimed not at persuading disaffected Republicans but simply at needling the
president”.
But that’s
not how the project’s leaders see their work or purpose. In their launch
manifesto, published as a column in the New York Times, the founders said their
goal was “defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box”, including
his Republican supporters in Congress.
To that
end, they said their efforts were about “persuading enough disaffected
conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states
and districts” to defeat Trump and elect congressional majorities opposed to
Trumpism.
In
practice, that means organizing anti-Trump Republicans in eight swing states –
including Florida, Ohio, Arizona and North Carolina – to hold virtual town
halls and write postcards to Republican neighbors and friends. It also means
organizing surrogates to speak to those voters in their home states and towns.
“These are
Republicans they are familiar with – former representatives and mayors,” said
Sarah Lenti, executive director of the Lincoln Project. “People like Rick
Snyder in Michigan who will come out and say, ‘We’re supporting the Lincoln
Project and supporting Joe Biden this cycle.’ It gives people the cover to say,
‘Our leadership is doing this, so it’s OK for us too.’”
Alongside
the top-tier surrogates and ads, there is a grassroots effort to organize
women, veterans and evangelicals to reach out to persuade Republicans to
abandon the president who dominates their party.
“There are
certain voters we’re not going to move – the one-issue voters on the right to
life – and that’s OK,” says Lenti.
“We’re
looking at 3-5% of Republicans in certain states. They tend to be more educated
than not. Over 40 years old, and the demographic split is about 50/50, maybe a
little towards men. We’re also seeing traction with some evangelicals, and
those are typically older and less educated.”
That sliver
of disaffected Republicans is the target for ads like Mourning in America:
people who are old enough to remember the original from three decades ago are
also old enough to be at the highest risk of the coronavirus. “Under the
leadership of Donald Trump,” the narrator says, “our country is weaker, and
sicker, and poorer.”
That was
the first ad that triggered Trump enough to tweet-storm about the group two
months ago: a presidential outburst that transformed the Lincoln Project’s
profile and resources.
“A group of
RINO Republicans who failed badly 12 years ago, then again 8 years ago, and
then got BADLY beaten by me, a political first timer, 4 years ago, have copied
(no imagination) the concept of an ad from Ronald Reagan, “Morning in America”,
doing everything possible to get even for all of their many failures,” Trump
tweeted.
If Trump
was truly tormented by the Reagan reference, the irony is striking. Trump
himself stole, without attribution, Reagan’s 1980 slogan: Make America Great
Again.
For the
most part Trump’s tweets focused on the individual founders of the project that
troubles him so deeply. Given their track record in GOP politics, his dismissal
of them as Rinos – Republicans In Name Only – means there are very few
Republicans who can pass the Trump test.
The Lincoln
Project founders include John Weaver, who was a political strategist for George
HW Bush in 1988 and 1992, as well as John McCain’s strategist for a decade;
Reed Galen, who worked on both Bush campaigns in 2000 and 2004; Steve Schmidt,
who ran the McCain campaign in 2008 and worked in the Bush White House and
campaigns before that; and George Conway, a conservative lawyer whose wife
Kellyanne just happens to work as Trump’s counselor in the West Wing.
The
pushback did not stop there. The conservative Club for Growth took the
extraordinary step of creating and airing its own ad attacking the Lincoln
Project. It depicted the group as a bunch of failed strategists trying to make
a quick buck by hating not just Trump but the American people.
This month
they have been joined by two hit stories in the Murdoch-owned New York Post,
accusing the founders of “ties to Russia and tax troubles” as well as secretly
wanting to work for Trump. These may be confusing lines of attack for Trump
supporters who have grown numb to ties to Russia, tax troubles and think highly
of those who want to work for Trump.
For
Democratic ad-makers, the work of the Lincoln Project has earned their respect,
even if questions remain about its impact. “The ads have struck a chord with
progressives and activists who see the Project as validating everything we’ve
been saying about Trump, but now being voiced by the people we usually campaign
against,” said Jim Margolis, a veteran Democratic strategist and ad-maker for
the Obama and Clinton campaigns. “The question is whether independent voters,
moderate Republicans and white suburban voters will respond as well.
“If the
objective is modest – moving a point or two in the right states with the right
people – I think they can help win the election. Remember: Hillary Clinton lost
the presidency in 2016 by less than one point in Michigan, Wisconsin and
Pennsylvania. So even small gains can mean the difference between a Trump
second term and a new day in America.”
But for
some of the ads it is clear they are engaged in a battle for the attention of a
singular target.
“Some of
these ads have an audience of one,” says Lenti. “That’s always been part of the
strategy. Because every time he gets off message, spewing grievances, he’s not
campaigning. The idea is to get him off message again and again and again. It
bothers him. We hear from people inside the White House that he wants them to
make us go away. But we’re not going away.”
Trump’s
concern about the Lincoln Project has only helped to fill its coffers. After
seeing Mourning In America, Trump stepped off Marine One and talked to
reporters before boarding Air Force One.
“They
should not call it the Lincoln Project,” he complained, after taking more potshots
at its founders. “It’s not fair to Abraham Lincoln, a great president. They
should call it the Losers Project.”
Instead of
turning them into losers, Trump helped raise $2m for his sworn enemies. The
group raked in more than $20m by the end of June, far ahead of its target of
raising $30m by the end of the election cycle. Most of those funds came after
Trump’s attacks in May, with small donors making up the bulk of its supporters:
the average donation is around $50.
Now the
group has enough funds to go after Trump’s supporters in tight Senate races.
This week it placed its biggest ad buy – $4m in Alaska, Maine and Montana – as
the expanded battlefield underscores its bigger goal.
“I don’t
think this wing of the party is going away,” says Lenti. “Our job isn’t to
reform the Republican party. Our job is to end Trump and Trumpism.”
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