EXCLUSIVE Daily Wire Q&A: Ed Morrissey, Author of ‘Going Red’

The Daily Wire had the opportunity to chat with Ed Morrissey, editor-in-chief of HotAir.com, and author of the brand new bestseller Going Red: The Two Million Voters Who Will Elect the Next President–and How Conservatives Can Win Them. Instead of taking a 30,000-ft. view of Republicans’ uphill battle to reclaim the White House, Ed traveled to seven key bellweather counties across the country, speaking with hundreds of people on the ground, and studied the data: how can these two million swing voters be won for Republicans?

Here’s our conversation with Ed:

Going Red is a manifesto about how to win in November. How screwed are Republicans with Trump as the nominee?

Going Red is nominee neutral, focusing on the seven battleground counties in key swing states and the people who live there. Theoretically, at least, any nominee should be able to pick up the book and follow its advice. On Trump, the risk is that the campaign sticks to the national messaging model of 2008 and 2012 and that the campaign antagonizes younger voters, African-Americans, and especially Hispanics. We’ve seen some indications this week that they recognize the importance of the ground game, but they will need to understand that it’s more than just about data.

Are there enough moderate swing voters to make Republicans competitive again, or can Republicans win by driving out the base?

There aren’t enough of the traditional GOP base voters in the swing states in Going Red. The demographics in those battleground counties have changed considerably, which is why the GOP has had a tough time competing when using a national-messaging, base-callout election model. The path for a base-callout election would have to go through Pennsylvania and Michigan as well as Ohio and Wisconsin, but there’s no evidence yet that Trump generates more support in those states than Romney did in 2012. Plus, a base-callout model would probably lose North Carolina, and might lose Arizona.

In short, to be competitive, one has to compete, and not just fall back to safe zones that are inexorably shrinking.

How much Republican policy needs to change in order to win, and how much is just a matter of messaging?

GOP policy – better yet, conservative policy – doesn’t have to change as much as it has to matter in the lives of communities that have to be won. That’s not just messaging, either. What people told me time and time again in Going Red was that Republicans showed up to lecture rather than listen, and offered 30,000-foot slogans rather than solutions. Republicans and conservatives have to do the hard work of listening to people in these battleground communities, learn their issues and their priorities, and then put policies in the context of their lives. We need to explain in very specific terms how policies will improve what’s wrong in these communities and how it will raise the standard of living in them…not on a philosophical level or an ideological level, but on a nuts-and-bolts pragmatic level.

That takes a big investment in resources, time, effort, and some humility. It’s the kind of hard work we have been shortcutting around for too long in these swing states and battleground communities especially. It’s easier to rely solely on national advertising, but that just doesn’t work any more in the states where elections are won and lost.

In Going Red, you talk about the notion of “problem solving” rather than ideology. Do you think that’s what doomed Ted Cruz?

Perhaps, although I think Cruz also has a problem projecting himself in a way that makes a connection to people. One on one, he’s very personable and his sense of humor comes across well, but for some reason that didn’t translate on the stump or in interviews. People should keep in mind that this was his first presidential campaign after just four years in the Senate, and that he actually did quite well in that sense. However, people in the swing-voter communities in Going Red made it clear that they have tired of pitched debates between uncompromising ideologues, and want leaders who can find common ground for solutions to pressing issues. Cruz’s track record as one of the staunchest of the ideologues could have caused him problems in these states in a general election, and may very well have held him back in the primaries too.

Going back in time, if you could have picked a candidate most closely geared toward victory, who would it have been?

It’s funny – I get that question a lot, but it exists in a hypothetical universe that ignores the mood of the primary electorate. In talking with voters in these seven swing counties, a governor with a track record of accomplishment would have appealed most to them, but one got the sense even at that time that a political outsider could gain serious traction if he or she emphasized pragmatism and a departure from endless debates over ideology. The problem with first profile is that the candidates who fit it this time turned out to be ill-prepared to run for president in the context of the current primary electorate, so it’s far from clear that they would have succeeded in a general election. We ended up with a race between two outsiders instead, and the most outsider-ish outsider won, perhaps because he offered a departure from ideology and promised instead to pursue what worked.

You mention that “optimism” wins – but the most optimistic candidates in the Republican field were the first ones out. Do Republicans have a catch-22 in that primary voters want “straight talk” and moderates want “optimism”?

It’s not entirely clear for me that the most optimistic candidates were actually running as optimists. Perhaps Scott Walker was at first, but he stumbled on foreign policy issues and seemed to lose the thread of his identity. Bobby Jindal would have done much better to stay optimistic and self-deprecatingly wonky, but he chose to run as a strident ideologue instead. Marco Rubio actually did well by staying optimistic, outlasting a dozen other candidates, but collapsed after getting into a nasty battle with Trump late in the game.

It’s not just moderates who want either optimism or “straight talk.” Many voters I interviewed were concerned with tone, and in some ways tone was the determining factor as to whether they would listen long enough to hear about optimism or “straight talk.” What these voters really wanted was to have the campaigns take the time to know and understand their concerns, and then get specific about how their agenda would improve their lives and address the voter’s priorities. Too often, Republican presidential campaigns assume they know the voters and lecture them on the candidate’s priorities, and that was a turn-off no matter how optimistic the “straight talk” got.

One final point on tone: Campaigns that are oriented to ground-up, peer-to-peer politics will have a natural feedback loop to know when the campaign tone isn’t resonating with voters. That’s a major benefit of that organizational model, and those who lack it put themselves at a disadvantage.

Who are your top 2020 picks if Trump loses?

I couldn’t offer an intelligent prediction this far out, but I think the profile of the candidate would still be the one that emerges from Going Red: an approach to governance that is both principled and pragmatic, the ability to articulate a positive vision and agenda for the next four years, and a leader that can make emotional connections with voters based on a campaign structured on peer-to-peer politics. We need a primary electorate where those qualities are valued in order to produce such a candidate.

Should 2020 candidates embrace Trump? If they do, do they hurt their own chances in the future by being smeared with Trump’s negative brand?

The question assumes that Trump’s brand will remain negative. I’m taking a wait-and-see on that point. Future candidates will need the assistance of the party, so undermining the party in 2016 by opposing Trump might make breaking out a bit more difficult in 2020. Voters will understand that there’s a difference between offering party-loyalist formal support for the nominee and offering a personal endorsement, i.e., campaigning for them on the stump. I suspect that those looking at 2020 will keep an eye on Trump’s progress and keep him at length when necessary. We’re not seeing much evidence so far that Trump’s weighing down incumbents at the moment, even with his current negatives. As long as that’s the case, then it may not be much of an issue either way.

Could a third party ever rise given dissatisfaction with the two parties?

It’s possible, but very doubtful. Ross Perot actually managed it in 1992 with the Reform Party, and its high-water mark came in my state of Minnesota with Jesse Ventura’s election as governor six years later. It dissipated not long afterward, despite existing in the populist/pragmatist sweet spot between the GOP and the Democrats. It turned out to be unsustainable, perhaps in large degree because of the candidates who emerged from it. To succeed where Perot eventually failed, a new party would have to have the ability to compete for seats in Congress and have enough cash to maintain its organizational structure for more than two or three presidential cycles. The new party would have to find ways to instill discipline and keep kooks and cranks from exploiting it, like Ventura did in Minnesota. And when a party becomes self-sustaining in that way, with the necessary “establishment” to keep order and run its organizational structure, how is it any different functionally than the Republicans and Democrats? All you’ve done is change the faces at the top, and there are less costly ways of doing that within each of the major parties.

The American two-party system makes a lot of sense if one views it in relation to parliamentary systems. In the latter, multiple parties based on ideology or shared interests compete for seats in a legislature, and then form into coalitions afterward to determine which coalition runs things. The various parties then jockey for power and occasionally hijack the system to force their pet issues to the forefront. In the American two-party system, we have multiple factions enter into the two main coalitions prior to the election, and then everyone votes to see which coalition gets to run things for a set period of time. That’s why a contested convention might have been interesting – it would have forced that coalition-building process into the open. Of the two systems, ours is more orderly and stable, even if it does tend to diminish dynamism and is slow to recognize the tempers of the moment. That might be a feature more than a bug.

You can purchase a copy of Ed’s book by clicking here.