Conservatives are all kinds of confused right now. After Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, Republican leaders thought they knew the path forward: Invest in tech. Reach beyond the base. Take back the White House.
That strategy didn’t quite work out as planned, and now, Donald Trump’s resounding Super Tuesday victory has left the core of the party panicked, like so many anxious carnival goers on a Tilt-a-Whirl gone haywire. They’re stuck, slightly nauseated, and spinning.
So what do conervative activists do when they want to try to revive the party, or, at the very least, collectively prepare for the Doomsday scenario of a Trump nomination? Why, they head to CPAC---and completely freak out.
CPAC, short for the Conservative Political Action Conference, is an annual conference where party leaders, presidential candidates, and activists gather to galvanize supporters. It’s where the GOP’s tailored-suit-wearing consultant class, its cowboy-hat-and-camouflage-suspenders rural faction, and a new generation of libertarian-leaning college kids in matching red T-shirts come together to lay out their vision for the future of the conservative movement.
That vision has never been so cloudy. Which is why, when I arrived Wednesday, I was eager to check out Activism Boot Camp, a day-long training session that promised to reveal the “best-kept winning campaign secrets on both sides of the aisle.”
I wanted to learn the new rules for running a successful campaign in the Trump era. What I learned instead is that the rules haven’t changed much at all. They just come with a big, fat, orange (or is Trump more a burnt sienna?) asterisk. When it comes to Trump, nothing the Republicans thought they learned about electoral success during the Obama administration seems to apply.
For the most part, it seems, the trainers at the bootcamp still adhere closely to the Obama playbook. In one of the first sessions of the day, Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA, delivered a detailed lesson on how to energize students on college campuses, just as Obama did in 2008.
The key, Kirk said, is sticking to a message that unites instead of divides. Obama was all about hope and change. For Turning Point, it's “Big Government Sucks,” a slogan that fits nicely into a hashtag (#BigGovSucks), not to mention T-shirts and bumper stickers. But most importantly, it doesn’t get into the weeds of social issues or foreign policy. Neither, as it happens, does Turning Point.
That's by design. Kirk says the group steers clear of such things because they’re antithetical to reaching voters at scale. Case in point: Turning Point has 350 ambassadors at CPAC this week. “If I say, ‘Who here believes the Iraq War was a mistake?’ probably about 200 would raise their hands,” Kirk says. “If I say, ‘Who here believes big government sucks?’ Everybody would start screaming.” In a good way.
This is the kind of unification the conservative movement needs, he says. “We want to have broad-based coalitions and movements that are trained first and foremost on agreement, not disagreement.” And it seemed to be working. Last year, Turning Point reached 1 million students on college campuses nationwide with its "clipboard and tennis shoes" strategy. Then Trump happened.
Far from uniting the Republican party, he has driven a wedge through the heart of it, particularly its younger members, and that poses a direct threat to the movement Kirk and his team want to build. To demonstrate that, Kirk asked the room full of students to raise their hands if they believe young voters will support Trump. A smattering of people (not all of them, I'd add, young people) raised their hands.
“Ok, how about no?” Kirk asked. Nearly every hand shot up. “Ok,” he said. “That worries me greatly.”
Trump was also the subtext to a lengthy conversation about the use of data in effective campaigning. Data was, many conservative strategists believe, what pulled the Obama campaign through in 2012, despite the fact that Obama's unifying message of hope and change had lost its luster. Conservatives tend to be candid about the fact that they need to catch up, and the trainers at CPAC's bootcamp were no different. There was an entire track dedicated to using technology to propel political campaigns online and keep tabs on supporters.
Data, said Chris Littleton, who runs operations at the data management startup Voter Gravity, should drive every campaign decision, from which doors volunteers should knock on to which issues candidates should talk about on the debate stage.
Which is why, Littleton said, despite the fact that he's a libertarian, he cringed whenever former GOP candidate Rand Paul would rant about the Federal Reserve. "That is something that's very important," he said. "But guess what? No one even knows what the Federal Reserve is." A closer reading of the data, Littleton said, would have made that clear.
Later, Littleton's colleague at Voter Gravity, CEO Ned Ryun, celebrated the Obama team's big data awakening. He talked about Narwhal, the system that integrated the 2012 campaign's data and name-dropped Harper Reed, Obama's 2012 chief technology officer. He even quoted (and not maliciously, as is often the case when speakers at CPAC quote liberals) Jeremy Bird, Obama's 2012 national field director, who once wrote that the best antidote to the "enthusiasm gap" is good organizing.
But then, from the audience, came the inevitable question: What about Trump? Trump, who has spent a fraction of the money other candidates have on his campaign. Trump, who rarely advertises and appears to have no ground game. Trump, who seems to believe that polls, and now primary return figures, are the only real data points he needs. Trump undermines not only the best practices on how to use data, but the idea that it matters at all.
Ryun admitted as much. “99.9 percent of people running for office have to do this," he said. "Unless you’re Donald Trump.”
The fact is, in a room full of elephants, Trump is the biggest one of all. Not only has his speech here on Saturday already drawn protests from the so-called Establishment, but his rise to power undermines everything the brightest minds in conservatism thought they learned from Obama's ascent. Now these same minds are grappling with the crucial question the GOP must answer in 2016: is Trump the exception or is he, like Obama before him, rewriting the rules? And if it's the latter, then the question becomes, is that a rulebook the conservative movement can even stomach to replicate?
