Navigating the 2020 Democratic Primary Landscape

You’re the campaign manager for one of the Democratic candidates for president. You’ve called an end-of-summer strategy retreat for your top advisors. As your colleagues gather, you sit down to sketch your view of the landscape, with five months until the Iowa Caucus. The stakes are high, so take a deep breath. Here are a few points to keep the group focused on what counts.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The national media obsesses over ideology but voters take a broader view

The media is keen to place the candidates on an ideological spectrum. You can’t blame them: it’s their job to sort through a crowded field, and ideology is a shortcut.

Here’s the problem with the approach: voters are not ideological. Yes, voters have strongly held opinions. Yes, voters have party and group loyalties. But voters generally haven’t done the ideologue’s work of immersing themselves in issues and constructing a framework on which to build their views.

This leads to an important strategy point. Staking out ideological positions may satisfy the media’s desire to sort the field, but it does little to persuade voters. Looking ahead, we will resist the impulse to fly an ideological flag, even when it feels like we’re lost in the shuffle.

Instead, we will focus on connecting with voters and persuading them. That’s our goal. We’ll accomplish it by presenting our candidate in full, as a leader, with deeply held values and a vision for the country. That’s how we win the primary — and the presidency.

Look Past the Horse Race

National horse race polls are everywhere. Unfortunately, they’re not terribly meaningful at this stage. Why? Because opinion polls on a topic people have not thought deeply about produce results that can easily shift. Further, presidential primaries are sequential: what happens in one primary election will affect what happens in the primaries that follow it. Polls today cannot take political momentum into account.

So the next time a friend asks why we’re stuck at 4 percent, send them this headline (at left) about a national CBS poll, 33 days before the 2004 Iowa Caucus. Remind them John Kerry beat Howard Dean by 20 points in Iowa. Remind them also we are 152 days from the 2020 Iowa Caucus.

More important, let your friend know our campaign uses opinion research to look past the horse race and understand the values underpinning voter attitudes. In contrast to candidate preference, voters’ values are unlikely to change over the course of a campaign. Horse race polls require our attention for one reason: the DNC debates. Which brings me to my next point.

The damaging consequence of a DNC decision

One of you made an astute point the other day. “Watching from my seat in New York, this campaign already feels national. Maybe it’s the sharp tone of the debates. Maybe it’s the big social media buys. But it feels like we’ve already entered the general election season.”

You’re right, and it’s a problem. Thanks to the Democratic National Committee’s formula for debate participation, campaigns are being bled dry to get their candidate on the stage. By one estimate, campaigns are spending $70 in online advertising to get a single $1 donation.

I don’t need to tell you our resources are limited. Every dollar we spend in online advertising is a dollar we can’t put toward an organizer in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.

It’s a sad irony that the DNC is keeping us from making the investments we need to win the nomination and election. The party’s debate requirements are national in scope — 130,000 donors from 20 states — but the party’s primary calendar is sequential. A damaging inconsistency from our party, especially when you consider the debates’ disappointing viewership numbers.

The bottom line is this: even if the campaign feels national, we’re still a collection of state races, not a national monolith. The national dialogue does not reflect local reality in the states where this race will be won or lost. We will prioritize local investment over national, even if it costs us a spot on stage. And we’ll argue for the DNC to re-evaluate its formula, especially as the field of candidates narrows.

Trust the process, but know things change

There’s an adage in Iowa Caucus politics: “organize, organize, organize, then get hot late.”

Right now, we’re organizing. It’s work that won’t make news, but it’s the beating heart of any successful campaign. You can’t win if you don’t have the organizing foundation in place to identify supporters, persuade undecideds and turn your people out.

So how do we get hot? There are opportunities we know we will have. The Iowa Democratic Party’s fall gala next month. Previously known as the Jefferson Jackson dinner, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barack Obama all gathered momentum from rollicking JJ speeches.

We also need to be ready to seize opportunities as they arise. When a Vietnam vet named Jim Rassman contacted the Kerry campaign days before the Iowa Caucus, telling them John Kerry had rescued him from the Mekong River during combat, the campaign didn’t hesitate to fly him to Iowa for an emotional public reunion. It only added to Kerry’s appeal that Rassman was a lifelong Republican.

Finally, we have to be willing to take strategic risks. One of our opponents, for example, has made the decision to break from confines of the primary calendar and focus his campaign on gun violence, immigrant rights and the president’s toxicity. Conventional knowledge suggests this is no way to win a campaign which depends on local organizing. But we are not in conventional times. Voters’ expectations evolve, including in Iowa and other early states. It’s possible younger caucus-goers, incited by Trump’s presidency and used to engaging with candidates online, will support a candidate who confronts a national catastrophe with a national approach. A bold theory, rooted in data, is worth testing. Because in a crowded field, milquetoast loses.

We know where we stand

You’ve heard our candidate say, “the only poll that counts is on Election Day.” That’s the bottom line. I’ll add this: we’re making daily progress, and we know where we stand. Each night the candidate and I receive a national field report outlining support and opposition on the ground. The data drills down to the individual level in each primary state where we have a team. I know we can win this thing because I see our support growing every night. So let’s stay focused — and remember what counts and what’s a distraction.