Wicked Game by Rick Gates

Author:Rick Gates [Gates, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642937930
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2020-08-09T13:40:32+00:00

Chapter 10

A Candidate and Campaign Tested

Debates, Hillary’s Weakness Shines, and Trump’s October Surprise

In September, as Trump continued to tackle the campaign trail, going to rally after rally, hammering “Crooked Hillary” with everything her record provided for ammunition, we turned our digital operation to the task of raising the money needed to get Trump over the top in every way.

And since our coordination with the RNC was strained, we decided to focus our efforts intently on another avenue of fundraising: small-dollar donations.

By definition, small-dollar donations are campaign contributions of $200 or less.

Obama started the small-dollar donation game in earnest during his 2008 campaign and improved upon it in 2012. But the Bernie Sanders team perfected it in 2016, using internet campaigns to pull in more than $130 million—more than half of his entire primary campaign fund—from a formerly untapped electorate made up mostly of younger voters, the vast majority of whom donated less than an average of $27 at a time.

Once we knew that Hillary was Trump’s one and only opponent in the run for the presidency, we decided to try to capitalize on the small-dollar trend too.

Our messaging to potential Trump donors was as targeted as our messaging to potential Trump voters, and no sooner did we begin our efforts than we realized just how good our messaging and targeting machine had become: we found we could raise $50 million in donations from a single targeted message—in under two weeks.

In the first quarter after Trump secured the nomination, we raised $239 million from small-dollar donors.

How did we do it?

Data analytics and digital advertising.

But for all of our attention to data research and internal polling, the one type of research we didn’t budget for was “opposition research.” Trump never thought we needed it. There was ample “research” out there on Fox News and Breitbart that proved Clinton to be as “crooked” as Trump claimed she was. There was plenty there for voters to sink their teeth into if they Googled the Clinton family or their various campaigns and organizations.

But Trump also knew he could attack his opponent on her record, on Benghazi, on the sweetheart deals she made to sell uranium to Russia (the Uranium One deal), and on all sorts of policy stances at every turn. He would never run out of a political history to attack because Clinton had been in politics for so many years.

Clinton, on the other hand, didn’t have any Trump political record to attack. So she hired at least two opposition research firms (that we knew of) and had them working full-time to try to dig up dirt on Trump. Real dirt. Something that could bury him.

Try as they might, they never found any sort of a smoking gun issue that could take him down.

If they had, the Clinton campaign would have used it. Of that, I have no doubt.

As we rushed toward the first of three presidential debates on September 26, we were confident that Hillary wouldn’t come in with any surprises up her sleeve.

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