Here's What Beto Could Unleash on Trump

[DonViejo]

He almost beat Ted Cruz. Could he take down Donald Trump? Inside the radical campaign strategy of Beto O’Rourke.

By SASHA ISSENBERG February 22, 2019

Sasha Issenberg is the author of several books, including The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns.

AUSTIN, Texas—With rain hammering outside, Zack Malitz stood in a warehouse space lit by strands of bistro lights and began to reveal the campaign strategy of Beto O’Rourke in exacting detail. Malitz, who was the field director of O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, is a tall 30-year-old with thick glasses and a haircut that over the course of an election season can drift inexorably toward mopheadedness. He laid out the exact numbers of potential voters the campaign believed it should try to reach, how many of those voters had a cellphone contact available, and—with a bit of arithmetic—a critical sum that would drive the campaign's final push: the exact figure of volunteer phone-bank shifts he believed would be necessary to win the state.

This kind of granular campaign information is normally considered top secret, the kind of thing strategists guard behind passwords and fire underlings upon suspicion of leaking. If Malitz’s talk had resided in an encrypted PowerPoint presentation on a private server, it would have amounted to a creditable haul for a shift at the WikiLeaks home office. And if O’Rourke mounts a challenge to Donald Trump in 2020, that presentation may offer the purest encapsulation of how he might do it.

Yet Malitz was sharing it publicly, to hundreds of people who had seen an online call for supporters and decided to show up that day. It was September 15, less than two months before the Senate election, and nearly 2,000 people had registered for the stop on the campaign’s Plan to Win tour. More than 800 had ultimately traveled, through a rainstorm to a part of East Austin not known for available public parking, to attend.

“The plan to win is actually pretty simple,” Malitz said at the outset, his voice echoing from a handheld microphone. “Build a voter contact machine that enables thousands of volunteers in every single one of Texas’ 254 counties to have conversations with more voters across the state than any campaign in Texas history.”

For Democrats, that history was dismal. Malitz reminded his audience that the most recent presidential candidate to carry the state was Jimmy Carter, in 1976, and that no Democrat has won statewide office since 1994—the party’s longest losing streak in any state in the country. No Democrat running for Senate has come within even 10 percentage points of defeating an incumbent Republican in four decades. To construct a different fate in a midterm election, O’Rourke’s campaign would need to conjure 1 million votes from outside the current pool of active voters—in essence, create an entirely new electorate within the state’s borders.

more
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/02/22/beto-orourke-campaign-strategy-2020-225193

[SWBTATTReg]

1. And these people almost did it too. They came from almost virtually impossible odds to nearly...

pulling off the impossible, winning against a long established republican candidate in TX. Pretty good, I say. Pretty good. I wish them the best of any other future campaigns, and look eagerly forward to what comes out of TX in the future (and not just Beto either).

[Stare Decisis]

2. Of course

he can win. I want the most qualified to do the job however. That is not Beto in considering the current crop of candidates. I love Beto's heart, and would be proud to vote for him, but we have a duty to choose the absolute best President, not just candidate.