$38 Million for Beto, and Why It Matters

The big dollars we are seeing Dems raise this cycle isn’t just about anti-Trump sentiment, it is about Dems succeeding in a new, always on media and information landscape.   This election cycle will be the first where more Americans got their news from the Internet than television.  And whereas the broadcast era of politics was about raising money to put on tv in the last few weeks of a race, the new politics of the digital age requires candidates to be generating interest/making connections every day all year long. Beto was not a likely candidate to raise all this money.  He was unknown, from a small and distant Texas media market, and has never led in the polls.  But what he has created is perpetual, compelling values-driven digital media – viral videos, social media checkins; and he has used the rally format Trump used to build his lists and grow a powerful support network. It is a model all Democrats should study and learn from. 

While not at the same scale, the DCCC made a commitment early in 2017 to ensure its candidates used modern internet based fundraising techniques – think Dean, Obama – to give them a shot to tap into the energy out there.  And as this story in the Washington Monthly suggests, it worked.   The Democrat’s well funded candidates have been instrumental in giving the Democrats a real shot at winning the House; but by expanding the battlefield to twice as many races as the Democrats competed in in 2016, it has also lessened the extraordinary GOP fundraising advantage this cycle.  See this new tweet from Nate Silver for more data on just how extraordinarily successful this strategy has been. 

I will have more to say in the coming days about the struggle Democrats have had in transitioning to an "always on" post-television media era, an era of Trump, social media and a 24/7/365 debate about our future. But one area I've grown concerned about is whose job is it exactly in the center-left ecosystem to take on Trump directly, both in the final days of the election and next year? Imagine if $50m had been directed against him in recent months.....do we really believe he would be at 42% approval given what is known? And would have it made a difference in the coming elections? Of course it would have.  No candidate in modern American history has developed a more powerful set of negatives to be used against them as Donald Trump has.  Time now for voters to be reminded of them.  It's the basic blocking and tackling of politics, something I address in this new thread.  The new WSJ/NBC poll out on Sunday has a lot of good news for Democrats except this - Trump is now at 47/49 approval, his best showing in many many months in this poll. 

This issue of the Democratic Party's understanding (or lack of) of the modern media landscape was at the core of debate over the debates in 2015-2016.  At the end of the day a badly designed debate schedule allowed the GOP candidates to be seen by 100 million peple than the Democratic candidates.  In the fall of 2015 I wrote: "Regardless of the virtue of the original DNC debate strategy, the RNC has produced a far better approach that will guarantee their candidates hundreds of millions of more impressions.  This gap is so large that it could sway the outcome of a very close race, and the DNC should take steps to close this gap in the weeks ahead."  Something it never really did. 

The Washington Post's Michael Scherer quotes this portion of my analysis in a new story about the RNC and its 2019 strategy.