Do Something “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” —Quote often attributed to Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, although many sources question the attribution
T
A
merica is in the throes of the largest internal political war since its first, the American Civil War, began in Charleston 160 years ago. Then, as now, the nation was being pulled apart by injustice, inequity and white supremacy. Now, however, the battlefield is far different. The weapons aren’t rifles, cannon or a submarine. Rather, warriors often employ sophisticated technology, messaging, misinformation, disinformation, gerrymandering and fear to manipulate a sleeping electorate to question long-held values of decency, the common good, fairness and the American dream. Is anybody really standing up and fighting these days for democracy? Meet the Lincoln Project.
14
ORLANDO WEEKLY ● DEC. 22-28, 2021 ● orlandoweekly.com
he lies. The scandals. The narcissism. The continual conflict about anything from the size of a crowd to what to do about a pandemic. It was all just too much for a few veteran Republican campaign strategists who witnessed their beloved fiscally conservative party spin out of control to a pied piper who didn’t take democracy seriously. They had to do something. So they fought back with the tools they had — political messaging to get inside the head of President Donald Trump so voters would see him rage out of control. “Our belief is you have to fight this in the culture,” said Stuart Stevens, a key player for the Lincoln Project and top strategist for Mitt Romney’s 2012 GOP presidential campaign. The Lincoln Project spent tens of millions of dollars in 2020 on pithy short videos and persuasive campaign ads in targeted battleground states. It was a campaign against one person to keep him from remaining in the White House. “I quickly realized how liberating it was to not have a client,” Stevens recalled in an August interview. “We were in this kind of unique position of having freedom. We don’t have any clients. We Stevens don’t have any special interests.” In Pennsylvania, they completed 8.3 million often snarky digital ad messages targeting seniors and suburban women. In Arizona, 8.1 million messages targeted seniors and collegeeducated whites. Biden barely won both states. But the intricate list goes on, targeted and microtargeted, to move disaffected GOP voters away from Trump. “Of all of the work we did in 2020, we never had one ad about an issue,” said Stevens. “It was all about Trump. If you remember back in 2019, there was an opinion by a lot of Democrats that the way to successfully prosecute the campaign against Trump was to not talk about Trump. We took a very different approach. We thought the first 10 issues in the race were Trump.” The Lincoln Project rewrote the political playbook by going on the guerrilla attack instead of what they’d done traditionally for years — research an issue, strip it down to a core message, cut a campaign ad, test it with focus groups, re-edit and finally run it — weeks or months after the idea. At the Lincoln Project, an ad might be an idea one day and online the next. “We had more than 300 pieces of video content last year,” said Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson. “We didn’t have time to sit in focus groups.” All totaled, they completed 60 million views of their television ads and delivered 242 million digital impressions, Wilson according to a 2020 stewardship report. In the first few months of the Lincoln Project, the group raised about $5 million, a number that would grow 20-fold by the end of 2020. “The idea that you had to do something was something that really motivated us all,” Wilson recalled. “We couldn’t sit on the sidelines as the Trump movement became increasingly obvious what it was. We couldn’t say we were OK with authoritarianism, with cruelty. We couldn’t be OK with that because we saw what the alternative was — a country that looked so different from an American republic.” And today, pariahs in their old party, they’re still at it. “Our business is democracy and American liberty and the preservation of a republic that is challenged every day by people who would destroy it in order to gain political power. We live in a very dangerous moment. We’ll work with anybody who wants to preserve democracy.”
