The Lincoln Project: 'Could This Anti-Trump Republican Group Take Down The President?'
Savage attack ads from a well-funded group of dissident Republicans are aiming to sway a key sliver of opinion in swing states. By Richard Wolffe in Washington, The Guardian, Aug. 1, 2020. - Excerpts, Ed.:
In the noise of an election involving Trump one set of ads has somehow managed to break through. There’s the one of the US president shuffling down a ramp that declares that the president “is not well”. There’s the whispering one about Trump’s “loyalty problem” inside his WH, campaign and family. And the epic "Mourning in America" that remakes Reagan’s election-defining 1984 ad, turning sun-bathed suburbs into a dark national portrait of pandemic and recession. The Lincoln Project, run by a group of renegade Republican political consultants, has crystallized one of the core narratives of the 2020 campaign in ways that few other political commercials have in past cycles.
Its work on brutal attack ads sits alongside the swift boat veterans against Kerry in 2004, the Willie Horton ad against Dukakis in 1988, and the daisy ad against Goldwater in 1964.
Their reward? Disdain from independent media, distrust across the political spectrum and a recent series of harshly negative coverage from pro-Trump media outlets. Atlantic magazine called their ads “personally abusive, overwrought, pointlessly salacious.." The New Republic suggesting they couldn’t “persuade voters of anything”. But that’s not how the project’s leaders see their work or purpose. In their launch manifesto, published as a column in the New York Times, the founders said their goal was “defeating President Trump and Trumpism at the ballot box”, including his Republican supporters in Congress. To that end, they said their efforts were about “persuading enough disaffected conservatives, Republicans and Republican-leaning independents in swing states and districts” to defeat Trump and elect congressional majorities opposed to Trumpism.
In practice, that means organizing anti-Trump Republicans in 8 swing states – including FL, OH, AZ and NC – to hold virtual town halls and write postcards to Republican neighbors and friends. It also means organizing surrogates to speak to those voters in their home states and towns. “These are Republicans they are familiar with – former representatives and mayors,” said Sarah Lenti, executive director of the Lincoln Project. “People like Rick Snyder in Michigan who will come out and say, ‘We’re supporting the Lincoln Project and supporting Joe Biden this cycle.’
It gives people the cover to say, ‘Our leadership is doing this, so it’s OK for us too.’” There is also a grassroots effort to organize women, veterans and evangelicals to reach out to persuade Republicans to abandon the president. “There are certain voters we’re not going to move – the one-issue voters on the right to life – and that’s OK,” says Lenti.
“We’re looking at 3-5% of Republicans in certain states. They tend to be more educated than not. Over 40 years old, and the demographic split is about 50/50, maybe a little towards men. We’re also seeing traction with some evangelicals, and those are typically older and less educated.” That sliver of disaffected Republicans is the target for the "Mourning In America" ad, people who remember the 1984 original and are also old enough to be at the highest risk of the coronavirus. “Under the leadership of Donald Trump,” the narrator says, “our country is weaker, and sicker, and poorer.”...
More, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/01/lincoln-project-donald-trump-republicans-campaign-ads
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