It's The Morality, Stupid

The year 2000 will be remembered as one of those rare sweet spots in American history. The economy was entering its eighth year of uninterrupted growth. Unemployment hovered around 4 percent. People at all income levels were experiencing wage growth. The stock market was minting new millionaires every day. We stood as the world’s lone superpower. On September 30, 2000, the end of the federal government’s fiscal year, the Treasury recorded a budget surplus of just over $236 billion. In December, the White House estimated that all of our outstanding debt (which at that time was about $5.5 trillion) would be paid off by 2009. Hell, even Y2K had been a bust. The President’s approval rating hovered around 60 percent. Times were good. So how was it that at a time of such peace and prosperity, that an empty suit with a thin résumé but a gold-plated family name, convinced the country that change was necessary? And what can George W. Bush’s 2000 campaign tell us about 2020? 

Bush had certain built-in advantages. His last name for one. The media’s antipathy toward Al Gore (who had to bat away a pesky primary challenge from Bill Bradley) for another. The public’s reluctance to hand the Democrats a third term was also a factor. But the Bush team also recognized the power of taking an opponent’s perceived strength and turning into a liability. And the biggest liability Al Gore had in 2000 was the man he was trying to succeed. 

While the public was supportive of Bill Clinton, President, they thought much less of Bill Clinton, person. One of Bush’s catch phrases from that campaign was his promise to “restore honor and integrity” to the White House. It was a subtle, but effective way of reminding people that for all of Clinton’s accomplishments – and they were myriad – he also carried on a sleazy affair with a White House intern more than half his age, was hip deep in a sexual harassment lawsuit and was being accused of raping a woman back in the 1970s.  This was all on top of the various faux-scandals Republicans had effectively tarred the Clintons with – Whitewater, Travelgate, Vince Foster and on and on and on. 

Gore, spooked by this tactic, held his boss at an arm’s length. Clinton was largely kept on the sidelines in 2000 for fear of alienating moderate “swing” voters who were turned off by Clinton’s unseemly personal life. Of course, even with this tactic, Bush lost the popular vote. Ralph Nader, running a quixotic third-party campaign, siphoned off just enough votes (perhaps by people who assumed Gore would win and wanted to lodge a protest vote, telegraphing a similar phenomenon in 2016) in key states to hand Bush the White House (with a major assist from the Supreme Court). But that is largely beside the point. Bush’s morality play took a race that should have been a cake walk and transformed it into a contest that was close enough for a butterfly ballot design and some shady legal maneuvering to decide it.

So what does this have to do with 2020? It is simple really. Aside from his overt appeals to white voter resentment, Trump is touting the strength of the economy. At a macro level, this makes sense. By some metrics like unemployment and the stock market, the economy is doing well. This talking point has been picked up in the media even though the underlying argument is debatable. If presidential elections were simply based on “it’s the economy, stupid” than this would probably be a winning argument. But Bush 2000 inserted an important caveat, one that Democrats would be wise to follow: “it is also the morality.”

What do I mean by that? Bush negated Clinton’s strength and highlighted his glaring weakness. Trump’s behavior toward women is every bit as odious as Clinton’s (if not more) and without the other underlying economic strength of the Clinton economy (the deficit will be $1 trillion at the end of this fiscal year and we are $22 trillion (and rising!) in debt).

On top of that, Trump has lowered our standing abroad and riven us apart at home. This matters to Americans on a visceral level. We believe, wholeheartedly, in our exceptionalism. Reagan famously appropriated the idea of our nation as a shining city on a hill. We prefer to scrub away the unsavory parts of our history in favor of the belief that we stand as a beacon for the world. But Trump has smashed that idea repeatedly. He picks fights with our allies, attacks institutions like NATO, cozies up to dictators who murder their own people, and projects our strength not as a beneficent super power, but as a thuggish mobster, demanding tribute and fealty. We do not like the idea that our President is met with protests in London or that his decision making may be influenced because Saudis buy condominiums in his buildings. We certainly do not like the idea that he would welcome interference in our election by Russia if it helps him personally. This all goes to the idea that the President’s first and only interest should be in our nation, not in his own personal enrichment or gain.   

At home, stoking racial division, attacking immigrants, and showing antipathy toward women is not what we expect from our President. The chaos that surrounds Trump may have looked like a savvy political ploy when he was running, but the ocean of corruption that has defined his Administration offends our collective sense of fairness. Cabinet secretaries caught in ethical scandals, using the public fisc for personal gain, and a President shamelessly blending his personal business interests with those of the public are not right, whether or not anything illegal has happened. Put differently, there is a basic level of decency, of morality, of integrity, we expect from people whose salaries we pay and who, regardless of party, run our government. Trump has violated this idea from the day he was sworn in and the steady drip drip of scandal, of prosecution, of resignation in disgrace that has followed the people who work for him has a cumulative effect that makes our nation look like a tin pot dictatorship, not the world’s oldest democracy. That matters to people.  

I know what you are saying. He did the same thing in 2016 and still got elected. To that, I have a few points. First, I do think there is a difference between acting like a bully as a candidate and acting like a bully as our President. The former is your own personal conduct, the latter is you representing us and our nation. For all of the oxygen Trump sucks up and all the credit he gets for playing three-dimensional chess, when you look at polling, majorities disfavor what is happening on the border and what he is doing to gin up racial resentment. Regardless of your views on immigration, denying a child access to a toothbrush, who sits in his own filth, and is locked in a cage is offensive, full stop. Telling elected members of Congress to “go back to where they came from” is racist, full stop. This may find favor with Republicans, but that is it and that is not enough to be reelected. 

Second, Trump lost the popular vote. He only received 46 percent and was helped by a spike in third-party voting (Jill Stein and Gary Johnson both ran in 2012 and 2016 yet somehow tripled their vote, and their vote totals were both greater than Trump’s margin of victory in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania) to thread a very narrow electoral college needle. As President, Trump’s approval rating hovers in a tight range between the high 30s and low 40s. A hiccup in the economy would probably doom him regardless, but even if the economy remains relatively stable, the same honor and integrity message that worked so effectively for Bush should be even more persuasive against Trump. 

Third, media outlets hated Clinton and the myriad of outside forces (the Russians, Wikileaks, Comey, etc.) that conspired against her will not be present in 2020. While it is true that each potential Democratic nominee will have his or her record attacked and the media will make mountains out of molehills, Hillary generated a level of antipathy rarely seen in modern times. It of course did not help that 2016 was the culmination of nearly three decades of negative press coverage of her, but the media will be hard pressed to frame 2020 as a “lesser of two evils” campaign as they did last time around. 

Finally, while a no-doubt-about-it electoral route akin to Obama’s in 2008 would be preferred, at the end of the day, winning is what matters. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is around 90 percent. If anything, he has solidified his standing within the party since his election. Yes, Democrats need to vote like their lives depend on it, but articulating a morality message to that thin slice of independents, or that thinner slice of Obama-Trump voters (or Obama-Johnson, Obama-Stein, or Romney-Johnson voters), and doing it through relentless advertising so the idea that Trump has not just sullied the office, but the nation’s reputation would matter. Less than 100,000 votes separated victory from defeat in 2016. Surely, reminding fair-minded voters of Trump’s abhorrent behavior as our nation’s chief executive would move enough people to vote him out of office. 

Ironically, the same thinking that kept Clinton on the sidelines in 2000 (fear of alienating suburban voters) should push the morality argument against Trump front and center. Democrats’ success in 2018 in suburban areas and in places that leaned Trump in 2016 should serve as further validation of the potency of this strategy. Democrats would also be well-served by learning a lesson Republicans absorbed long ago. Basic messaging works, so why not use it.

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