Kanye 2020

The Trump campaign has virtually no infrastructure, with few offices even in battleground states that are in reach as well as an odd distribution of resources, he has several campaign offices in NYC for example, despite the fact that he has literally no chance of winning there thanks to his last few decades of effort making the entire city hate him. His get out the vote effort is virtually nonexistent, with one effort in Colorado managed by a literal twelve year old volunteering his time. He has also chosen to do almost no ad buys, relying almost exclusively on rallies, attempting to dominate the news cycle, and grassroots efforts unsupported by the campaign, it is not a tactic traditionally thought of as effective.

This is interesting outside of being evidence of how incompetent the man is, for a long time now politics geeks have wondered just how much of a difference things like regional campaign offices and organized GOTV efforts actually help, or if ad buys make a difference at all really, but we have never really had a control election in the era of modern media, this election will give us a lot of evidence on the effects of real campaign organization on an election in the age of Twitter and the 24 hour news cycle.

I've long thought that after a certain point, money makes little difference in a presidential election, I think the Clinton campaign might be reaching that point, at least in terms of battleground and R leaning states, after a certain point ad buys just irritate people, so you have to either make them interesting or amusing or use them relatively sparingly, you can't just turn major station into a 24/7 infomercial for your campaign because people will find you and hit you. But outside of money I have never really thought about the other thing, can someone with as large a media presence as Trump or anyone else with the financial ability to run for president use that to make up for a lack of campaign organization?

The most recent example of someone who tried this is Ross Perot's 1992 run as an independent, there are a few similarities to the Trump campaign, Perot clearly had no idea what he was doing and was intent on micromanaging, did a few insane things like suspend his campaign for a few months while claiming that "enemies" had compromising pictures of his daughter, he fired campaign managers and refused to listen to the ones he had, and micromanaged his campaign, that said he did spend a great deal of his own cash on the campaign and put a fair amount of effort into getting a real organization and ground game going.

He got a little less than twenty percent of the popular vote, and no electoral college votes.

Trump isn't technically an independent of course, but functionally he sort of is trying to be one, and the party is kind of trying to let him, but he is absolutely relying almost exclusively on Republicans for his voter base, Perot drew pretty evenly from both parties as near as we can tell. Perot is also just not he same presence as Trump and never had the name recognition Trump has.

To my mind the most important difference though is the rise of social media as both a form of advertising and a news outlet, this wasn't anything even dreamed of in '92 and I think it is the primary factor in Trump's rise, such as it is.

Perot lost pretty badly, though by any standard it was a respectable showing for an independent, and if he had put that level of effort into the Reform party he started in '95 it might have gone a long way to breaking the two party system, but personality got in the way and here we are.

The lessons of the Perot candidacy would seem to indicate that while personal wealth can compensate for lack of party apparatus, the organization of a national party with proper funding is indispensable, the question now is how well does that hold true for the 2016 campaign or any other one going forward?

Trump is going to lose and rather badly, but attempting to parse out how much of that is due to being a hateful Cheeto given life by dark magics, or what is due to the lack of traditional campaign tactics will be interesting, because if it turns out you don't need it as badly as previously thought, then the next few election cycles are going to be weird as hell.

Kanye West said he wants to run in 2020