What Ads Work With MAGA Voters

Spoiler: they don't.

Last week, a New York Times article from the great Jonathan Swan featured a leaked memo from The Club for Growth. Titled Republican Group Running Anti-Trump Ads Finds Little Is Working, it outlined the Club’s failed efforts to persuade Republican primary voters from Donald Trump’s sticky political embrace.

Well, obviously.

Hi. 2015 called, and it wants its desperate, flailing Establishment and Conservatism, Inc. strategies back.

In my Republican days, The Club for Growth was one of the most powerful forces on the right; well-funded, aggressive, and a much-desired endorsement. Trump and Trumpism were always going to pose a challenge to CFG, given Trump’s profoundly anti-conservative, statist, and authoritarian nature, his lifelong commitment to financial irresponsibility, and his howling vacuum of conservative principles.

CFG is trying to break GOP primary voters off Donald Trump, and they’ve discovered that their ads don’t work. This says much more about the GOP primary electorate than it does about the quality of their ads and creative approach, which are workmanlike and not obviously terrible. They’re not stupid people, but they’re dealing with a problem Washington has persistently been unable to address.

And so, they’re making the same mistake everyone in the GOP made in 2016, your correspondent included.

What Club for Growth, and almost every other anti-Trump group, and most Democrats get wrong is that the MAGA primary voter can’t be reasoned with. They can’t be persuaded to leave the Trump Matrix. None of the rational bounds and arguments of policy, no nugget of opposition research, no focus-grouped message, no conservative influencer, no poetic line of soaring Reaganseque rhetoric moves those deep in the thrall of Trump’s populist spell.

It’s not simply that the ads stopped working.

It’s that the MAGA base has evolved into a new political form, and the old models of Washington-based PACS, media companies, and messaging simply don’t work.

The disconnect is the fallacious belief that MAGA voters are still motivated by economic conservatism, a desire for a strong foreign and military policy, or probity and restraint.

Republican primary voters aren’t driven by positions, policy, philosophy, voting record, legislative or leadership accomplishments, or electability. They exist in a post-policy era where transgression, Trumpian agitporn media, weaponized rage, lib-owning stunts, grotesque conspiracy theories, and wilful intransigence are the mechanisms of their war on wokeness, people of color, the Democrats, and any American rule, law, institution, tradition, norm, or standard that gets in the way of their Dear Leader and his return to power.

If you want your ads to work, do what we do at the Lincoln Project:

Know that the Old GOP is dead.

We know and embrace that truth about the current GOP and aren’t trying to save it.

We’re not trying to slap the paddles on the chest of the moribund political carcass of the Republican Party. If you want a center-right party based on economic freedom, individual liberty, a strong defense, Constitutional fealty, and personal responsibility, it will be created ab initio.

The current GOP is irredeemable, no matter how often well-meaning folks try. No heroes are left to stand up and lead the GOP out of the chthonic darkness of Trump’s reign.

We know the primary is a lost cause.

You can’t make a horse race from horse manure. Every single candidate in the race — and those about to enter it, like Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin — lack the one thing the GOP primary voters crave…the name and persona of the former President.

Between Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Chris Christie, Youngkin, and the rest of the crew of also-rans, something like half a billion dollars will be incinerated in their races against Trump. So far, DeSantis has a negative ROI that makes donors’ eyes bleed.

Every GOP primary candidate’s predicates were based on magical thinking, political fanfic, stratospheric self-regard, consultant avarice (Jeff Roe, QED), and a fundamental misreading of the MAGA electorate.

Anything we do in the primary is to divide the GOP base and trawl for voters who will be so disaffected by Ttump’s win they’ll be — even for a moment — up for grabs and migrate them to the Bannon line.

We hit the Bannon Line.

What is the Bannon Line? It’s a pool of educated, more affluent, more moderate GOP and conservative-leaning independent voters based largely in the prosperous suburbs. In 2020, our models had them at between 3-8% of the voting populace, depending on the states.

Today, that number is between 7-11% in the post-Dobbs world, again depending on the state.

(It’s called the Bannon Line because Steve Bannon once said if the Lincoln Project took 3% of the GOP vote away from Trump, he couldn’t win. Our response: “Hold my beer. Watch this.”)

We’re not trying to win over MAGA voters.

You can’t change them. They aren’t conservatives. They’re not Republicans. They’re in a statist, authoritarian cult driven by racial animus, lurid conspiracy twaddle, and a corrupt media-entertainment outrage complex that has conditioned them to constant outrage with a steady drip of agitprop.

It’s why none of the GOP primary candidates can contrast their records or voting history with Trump. The contest isn’t about conservatism; it’s about the Dear Leader. No message-tested focus-grouped idea will change them. They are impervious to fact, logic, reason, history, and sense. No revelation about Trump’s vast mendacity, boundless hypocrisy, or mental and moral shortcomings flips the switch.

I gave up on focus groups in 2015 when several otherwise normie Republicans repeatedly argued that Trump was the richest man in the world, the owner of most of New York, and a loving family man who would be the greatest President in history. Try to message your way out of that.

We do work to divide, dispirit, and distract them. It’s no secret. We know they live inside a media and political bubble so tightly insulated from reality and so effective at fleecing them for support, money, and loyalty that the best and highest use of any communication with them is to slam a big bolus of cognitive dissonance down their throats.

We move the Audience of One.

To this date, Donald Trump has never attacked another SuperPAC other than The Lincoln Project. No other SuperPAC, right or left, was faced with the discovery that the White House pushed Bill Barr to go after them. He’s ranted about us on airport tarmacs and during reporter calls. He’s threatened to sue us at least twice. No one else has ever managed to get in his head, make him respond to them, and alter his behavior.

He attacks us — publicly and privately — with amusing regularity. He never threatens to sue other SuperPACS because what they do doesn’t affect his bottom line, politically, legally, or financially.

Candidate and PAC ads that try to thread some nano-scale needle and never offend Trump are a capitulation to him.

We speak from conviction.

We’re not afraid to call out his personal, moral, political, and business failings. We don’t massage our messages into an innocuous paste. We believe he is a danger to democracy and the Republic. We assert he was a terrible, divisive, destructive, failed President who led with violence and intimidation as part of his political portfolio. We aren’t trying to excuse or quietly send him into retirement.

We’re here to put him in the political ground, salt the earth, pour in a few tons of radioactive waste, cap it with a mile of reinforced concrete, and mark the site as unsafe for human habitation for a thousand years. We’re here to break his movement because it represents a proximate threat to liberty and sanity. The GOP media and strategist community still wants to find a diamond under the pyramid of politically toxic waste that is Trump and his crapulous movement.

Most of these failed ads, failed messages, and failed strategies try to cushion the shock, to lure in the MAGA voters with a “Trump was great, but…” construct that loses them at the comma. Creating ads that mean something and speak the truth is shockingly liberating.

We know what works…because it worked when nothing else did. It worked in 2020, and it worked even better in 2022.

Some of you will disagree with our approach. Some of you will pretend the old magic of 3000 GRPs of broadcast and a cloud of dust functions in today’s environment. Some still imagine there’s a necromantic incantation to break the spell of Trump.

By the end of this election cycle, Trump will have defeated roughly 25 Republican presidential primary challengers. What you’re doing doesn’t work, because it can’t work.

The painful and costly lessons will continue until you embrace the reality that defeating Donald Trump in the general election is the only path to both rebuilding a center-right party and saving the nation.