David Plouffe - A Citizens Guide to Beating Donald Trump

November 9, 2016, 2:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Do you remember how you felt the moment the United States of America elected a racist, misogynist, accused sexual predator; business fraud; and obstructor of justice to represent America and you on the world stage? To the most important job in the history of the world? Of course you remember. Still feel this way? Maybe more so. So do I. This pain, and the desire not to extend it for four more years, is why Im writing this book and why youre reading it.

Twice Ive forced myself to rewind the 2016 election- night coverage by the anchors on Fox News all the way through, from the first closing of the polls in the East to the final call of Wisconsinand therefore the election. And Ive stared at the time-lapse sequence of the New York Times election tracking needle more than once, and every single time it swings, slowly but inexorably, from blue to red. Gods honest truth is that in terms of long-lasting emotional resonance, the gut punch from Trumps victory had a greater impact on me than the elation eight years earlier when Barack Obama wonand Id worked nonstop as his campaign manager for two years.

Without a doubt, I will be proudest of that victory professionally when I finally kick the bucket, but Ive never gone back and watched more than a few minutes of either its election-night footage or the reelection four years later. I do admit to enjoying occasional reruns of Karl Roves meltdown on the Fox set in 2012, when he insisted Mitt Romney could still win Ohio after his own network had just called the Buckeye State for Obama. That still gives me a laughless funny is that there were few people I respected more when it came to Presidential numbers than Rove, but it shows how even experts can be seduced by the alternative reality of the Fox set.

How could anything possibly top the emotion of that unseasonably warm night in Chicago in 2008? And yet it had, and I know that many Obama alumsincluding our amazing volunteers, the ordinary voters who stood in long lines in 2008 and then again four and eight years later, the kids who were too young to vote but not too young to understand and care, and people all over the world who were studying Americas revered political system in actionall of them felt the same way in 2016, and not just because we were gobsmacked by the unexpected result. Almost all veteran politicos and voters alike have been crushed by other surprise election results. But this one hit us with its own especially awful, cruel, hard-to-get-out-of-bed-the-next-day effect. And then it was still hard to get up the day after that. The year 2016 will scar us for as long as we breathe the same air that Trump befouls with his every word.

Its not that we were simply horrified by the reality show performer and his grifter family appearing on stage as Americas next first familythough what a horrifying sight that was. Its not that we were petrified and panicked about what Trump would do to our economy, our planet, our alliancesthough everything we feared and much more has come true. And its not that Trump lost the popular vote by three million votes and somehow won the presidency. Thats the way politics can break in our system. The electoral college is the only scoreboard that matters. Its how many points you score, not how many yards you gain. My advice is to just get over this inequity. Until we change the systemand I hope we doyou have to win the game as the founders designed it. Because whats the choice?

No, I suspect that this loss still cuts so deeply for so many of us because we wonder what else we could have done to prevent this historically disturbing and perhaps democracy-destroying outcome. Weve all got excuses, or ways of shifting blame upward or outward. We didnt run the Clinton campaign. We didnt help prep her for the debates. We didnt counsel James Comey to throw the most overcovered nonscandal in recent American history, Hillary Clintons emails, right back on the front pages in the closing week of the campaign. We didnt make the editorial decision at the New York Times to cover that bogus issue more than any policy issue or difference between the candidates

All true. But the brutal truth is that the election was decided by less than 70,000 votes in three states. And this wasnt the first time either; other elections have been decided on even smaller spreads, with huge consequences. Think about 2000, Bush versus Gore. But for 537 votes in the state of Florida, 4,424 U.S. soldiers and more than 600,000 Iraqis would not have died in Iraq, and we might have more than a flickering chance to prevent the planet from catching fire. In 1960, JFK beat Richard Nixon by grabbing the decisive state of Illinois (perhaps with more than a little help from his father and Mayor Richard Daley) by less than 9,000 votes out of more than 4,000,000 cast.