Lessons from Trump's media team

Where Harris gained, moderates overperform, the end of the decline of Christianity, where the college-educated are moving, two AI agents walk into a bar, East Germany before it was cool

No. 351 | February 28th, 2025

🇺🇲 2024

This was a terrific lessons-learned piece from Trump 2024 media strategist John Brabender. Some of what the campaign learned:

“Reality TV worked better than feature films.” — Nothing beat the ability to use Kamala Harris’s own words to define her. The campaign’s ads were less about the individual issue and more about demonstrating how far-left she was.

“Speed kills… and so does ‘content velocity.’” — Anticipate events and have have ads pre-made to release as quickly as possible. Be your own news distributor.

“Repetition was critical.” — The Harris campaign had too many creatives on the air at once — 6 to 8 times what Trump had — which didn’t allow any one of them to sink in.

“The voters aren’t buying a drill… they’re buying holes.” — “Start with a problem and how it affected the voter personally. Position Biden/Harris as the root of the problem and President Trump as the solution. Rarely did we start with President Trump or feature him throughout an ad. That's because we weren't really selling President Trump... we were selling the benefits the voters were most interested in... a better home economy, a safer neighborhood, and more pride in their country.”

You have to work hard to subdivide the electorate enough to find voters where Harris did better than Biden: white cosmopolitan voters in some urban cores, but not in Florida or California, or Northeastern white ethnics.

Split Ticket’s Wins Above Replacement data by House caucus: moderates like the Blue Dogs tend to overperform, ideologues like the Justice Democrats and “MAGA Squad” tend to underperform.

👫 Demographics

Has the decline of Christianity finally leveled off?

Religious identification among racial groups: Black Americans are much more likely to identify as Evangelicals than whites.

Where college-educated transplants moved in 2023. Top cities:

• New York City — 6.1% of moves

• Washington, D.C. — 3.5% of moves

• Dallas — 3.2% of moves

• Atlanta — 2.9% of moves

• Chicago — 2.4% of moves

• Denver — 2.4% of moves

• Los Angeles — 2.4% of moves

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Two Al agents realize they are bots and upgrade their communication.

🗣️ Public Opinion

Ruy Teixeira on the question Democrats should be asking before they open their mouth: “What would the working class say (WWWCS)?”

“The WWWCS test is not so hard to do but it does entail getting outside of the liberal college-educated bubble so many Democrats live within, particularly as experienced on social media, in activist circles and within advocacy, nonprofit, media and academic institutions. Look at actual public opinion data—not as summarized by someone you know or something you read. Look at focus group reports. Talk to actual working-class people—there are lots of them! Listen to your intuitions about how working-class people would likely react to policies and rhetoric currently associated with the Democrats —not how you think they should react. Think of family members or people you grew up with who are working class. Try to get inside their heads. They are less ideological, more focused on material concerns, more likely to be struggling economically, less interested in cutting edge social issues, more patriotic and generally more culturally conservative. All this makes a difference.”

How talk of structural racism gave way to conversation about DEI.

🏛️ Congress

The death of competition in American elections: more and more elections are decided by primaries that fewer voters participate in.

“After decades of gerrymandering and political polarization, a vast majority of members of Congress and state legislatures did not face competitive general elections last year.

Instead, they were effectively elected through low-turnout or otherwise meaningless primary contests. Vanishingly few voters cast a ballot in those races, according to a New York Times analysis of more than 9,000 congressional and state legislative primary elections held last year. On average, just 57,000 people voted for politicians in U.S. House primaries who went on to win the general election — a small fraction of the more than 700,000 Americans each of those winners now represents.”

🌎 Global

Some election maps from Germany, where the far-right AfD rose and the conservative CDU became the largest party.

East Germany was voting like East Germany before there was an East Germany.