We started talking about other generational scams. For instance, Social Security was also basically a system where people like them gave money they barely had to older people who didn’t save. They just got tired of being suckers, and that was our opportunity.
Now some of these young people’s wackier libertarian beliefs initially rubbed us the wrong way, but they also deserved some examination. Carrie Marlowe was, of course, very interested in legal reform designed to repeal laws that did nothing but criminalize people for essentially doing little or nothing wrong. Sometimes it was for drugs; sometimes it was just to protect businesses. The Dems had played along with their donors, and the independent agencies were busy criminalizing things like reprogramming your cell phones. Seriously, you could go to jail for doing something to your own property.
We got to argue that we had no business running a criminal justice system for the benefit of giant tech conglomerates. We won a lot of young, libertarian people by pushing for the reform of copyright laws that criminalized normal folks to protect big entertainment companies. Young, libertarian-leaning folks loved it. The Dems, being the party of the status quo, couldn’t do it. We cons could, and did.
Why not build networks with the enemy’s voters while punishing the jerks who support the liberal establishment with their cash? It was a win-win!
There was also drug law reform, which would bring in a lot of young people, libertarians, and especially minorities who were seeing a shocking number of their young men locked up. This was a tough bridge for cons to cross—hell, watery-eyed stoners lazing about on their moms’ couches halfheartedly watching reruns of Star Trek: Fifth Generation is everything we hate. But again, this was where conservative principles about small and limited government started crossing streams with our electoral self-interest.
Did you ever see Ghostbusters? Not the remake but the original from back in the 1980s? Do you remember the power of crossing the streams? They had these lasers and if you crossed the streams it was really bad, except at the end of the movie they did that to destroy the giant marshmallow man. Anyway, we crossed the streams with drug law reform. I guess liberalism was the giant marshmallow man. And we sure fried it too.
Our policies were not enough. We needed to go to those folks and make the conservative case, not just once for the cameras but continuously. So we did. Colleges, minority neighborhoods, places no Republican bothered to go consistently. And for years we got nowhere, but we kept going back.
When television networks were still big and I was working in DC for a big GOP consulting company, I would ask, “Hey, who is the go-to constitutional conservative guest on Univision, on BET, even on the damn Syfy network?” They’d book a conservative—we just needed to stop sending uptight dinguses who reinforced the reasons why these folks disliked conservatives in the first place. I mean, they sent one guy to the Azteca network for a news show and he spoke Spanish like a gringo and wore a freaking bow tie. ¡Muy estupido!
We started to use technology to cultivate potential converts and we targeted them with information and social media. Obama was using a data-mining system for turnout early on, and Hillary’s effort was even bigger. Supposedly they could tell you what some random guy’s magazine subscriptions were and figure out how he was likely to vote. We got that sophisticated too.
I found out some interesting data. Conservative males? National Review and American Rifleman. Liberal males? Mother Jones and Modern Bride.
Juggs? A red-blooded conservative male.
Barely Legal? Probably a liberal male, and usually a senator from New Jersey.
National Enquirer? Definitely a Ron Paul fan. Remember Rand’s dad, Ron? I shouldn’t talk bad about him. As nuts as he was, he saw that the Hillary monster was the real enemy, and he really helped by lending his credibility to us to approach libertarians in ’16 and ’20 while he was still healthy enough to do it. I always said that Ron was crazy, not stupid.
Anyway, we needed that kind of information and more to identify and focus on likely converts to conservatism. Instead of giving hack consultants a zillion bucks for some pie in the sky, top-down failure, we got some rich dudes to fund a bunch of entrepreneurial conservative tech guys to make this happen. Our donors didn’t get a meet and greet with any senators out of it, but they actually contributed to something more than the mortgage on the consultant’s Aspen summer home.
Regardless, the effect of these high-tech efforts was huge. The payoff was shaving just a few points off the Democratic share in some of their solid voting blocs, but that was enough. Libs always just slid into office with a tiny margin. Our effort helped destroy their solid voting blocs, which was awesome.
Back in the dark days, when Obama had been reelected and everyone was talking about doom and gloom, they asked, “Can it be done?” I said, “Why not?” Voting blocs are never permanent—the Democrat lock on the black vote was hitting the half-century mark. Before that, a lot of blacks had been Republican.
Eventually folks were going to wake up and realize that they had spent the last decade treading water in a sea of collectivist failure. We just needed to be ready to welcome them. Race and ethnicity correlated with being against us rather than for us due to decades of Democrat agitation and propaganda. We worked to turn that around.
Back then it took real bravery to be both a minority and a conservative. You had to have guts. The social pressure could be overwhelming. So that’s where we needed to begin. We needed to be welcoming to nontraditional conservatives. And how do you be welcoming? Step one: don’t be a jerk. Fortunately, cons tend to be pretty tolerant. They’re real live and let live types, so most were good to go.
But decades of propaganda had totally wrecked our image in some communities. We are still dealing with the fallout today. Back then, we needed to reach out and prove ourselves because, fair or not, we had nearly zero credibility in many minority communities. Yet we had one advantage the liberals didn’t—conservative policies didn’t cause the problems in the minority community, and some minorities, especially young ones, saw that.
We reached out to people who we did not see as allies. We accepted 50 percent friends, folks we could count on just half the time—a vast improvement over 100 percent enemies. We invested in the technology that allowed us to make these inroads, to identify those who might be approachable, and to make those approaches.
And sometimes we had to make tough compromises. As Florida’s governor, Carrie announced that “the people of Florida have spoken” after the initiative vote to allow same-sex marriage. Our supporters were split on the issue, some for, some against, but there was a vote and it was perceived as fair, so after it happened we moved on to fighting the progs. We didn’t ditch social issues. Some we won on, some we lost on, but the point is we didn’t dwell on it. We made a point of what brought us together, not what could drive us apart.
Jack Archer (Democratic Strategist)
The GOP kept counterattacking, passing laws that made them look good but always cut into our Democratic constituencies. Like the drug stuff—they got to our left on drugs and all of a sudden we’re hemorrhaging young people and minorities who couldn’t stand mandatory sentencing.