Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis. Matt Latimer is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. He is currently a co-partner in Javelin, a literary agency and communications firm based in Alexandria, and contributing editor at Politico Magazine.

Though the outcome is hardly settled, it’s looking increasingly probable that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be facing off as the Democratic and Republican nominees, respectively, in this fall’s general election. Politico Magazine asked a liberal commentator, Bill Scher, to counsel Trump on how to beat Clinton, below, and a conservative pundit, Matt Latimer, to advise Clinton on how to win against Trump, here.

To: Donald J. Trump

Re: The 2016 Election

From: Bill Scher, liberal pundit


SUBJECT: How to beat Hillary Clinton in November

Congratulations, Mr. Trump. You are well on your way to winning the Republican nomination. Time to start thinking about how to take on Hillary Clinton.

This won’t be easy, but you can do it. Unlike the GOP primary, in which you led from almost the moment you entered the race, this race you begin behind. I know you like polls, and you are behind in nine of the 11 polls taken this year gauging a Clinton-Trump matchup. In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, you lose by 13.

You also start from behind in terms of the 2012 electoral map. Assuming you don’t lose any of the Mitt Romney states, you need to pick up, at the absolute least, three additional states from Barack Obama’s column.

You could go for a sweep of the “big three”: Florida (one of your “home” states), Ohio and Pennsylvania. If you can get only Florida and Ohio—the two tightest states of 2012—you’d need to add two or three of these Northern states: Michigan, New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa. If you can get only one of the big three, you need four or five of the smaller Northern states. If you can’t get any of the big three, you’ll need all five of the smaller set plus some of the less white swing states: Virginia, Colorado and Nevada.

Contrary to much speculation, the magical unicorn of new voters will not be your savior. Voter turnout has already been relatively high the past few elections. The 61.6 percent registered voter turnout of the 2008 election was the highest since 1968. In 2012, turnout slipped slightly to 58.2 percent, a loss of 2.2 million voters. Romney lost by 4 percentage points and 5 million voters. You need to make up far more ground than that.

The hard reality is that you need to win over some swing-state voters who went with Obama in both of the past two elections: the blue-collar workers saved by the auto bailout, the unmarried women who want equal pay and reproductive freedom, the Catholic moderates and other irregular churchgoers who swung from George W. Bush to Obama and, yes, the Latinos who made the same jump.

Stitching together such a Republican rainbow coalition would be a steep challenge for a typical Republican politician. But you, Mr. Trump, are no typical Republican politician!

It’s time to use your unmatched media skills to take you where no Republican has been able to go in recent years. But that means abandoning much of what has carried you to the brink of the Republican nomination and resisting a political consultant paint-by-numbers approach to attacking Hillary Clinton.

Scorching the earth? Tempting, but wrong.

The path to victory may seem obvious. Hammer her on trust: Benghazi, emails, Goldman Sachs speeches and Wall Street donations. Twist the knife by dredging up charges of Bill Clinton’s sexual harassment and abuse, and accuse Hillary of enabling. Pick up disgruntled Bernie Sanders supporters and white working-class voters by rejecting big corporate donors, highlighting your opposition to unfair trade deals and assuring you know how to bring back jobs.

But that’s not so simple. You, your supporters and others have been doing that hammering for months. Yet her lead over you in the RealClearPolitics poll average has been fairly steady since September.

Furthermore, your insult game on Hillary lacks the panache you have for your Republican rivals. Correction: your male Republican rivals.

You have a knack for crystallizing the character flaw of your enemies—“low energy” Jeb, “Little Rubio” the “choke artist”—but your mockery powers fell flat when it came to Carly Fiorina. After you said of her, “Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that?” Fiorina faced you down in the next debate. You were forced to grovel on stage, “she’s got a beautiful face and she's a beautiful woman.”

With Hillary, you also miss the mark. “Clinton does not have the strength or the stamina to be president,” you keep repeating. There are a lot of things you can call Hillary that will make voters nod their heads, but questioning her endurance isn’t one of them. You don’t seem to know how to cleverly insult a woman. If you can’t do it, don’t do it.

Never forget that Clinton’s best moment in all of 2015 was her 11-hour marathon congressional testimony on Benghazi, an event concocted by unwitting Republicans. Her performance was akin to Obama’s table-turning race speech in the 2008 campaign responding to the controversial sermons of his Chicago pastor—reassuring Democrats that the candidates could handle whatever the Republicans threw at them.

You are unlikely to bag your bounty by drowning yourself in the right-wing fever swamps of Clinton scandal theories. Always tempting. Often backfires.

What you need to fix, now

So if you can’t easily tear down Hillary, what can you do to build up yourself between now and the convention? How can you re-introduce yourself to the constituencies you need?

You already know your biggest hurdle in this race is race. A whites-only strategy is mathematically daunting, and your pursuit of Republican white voters has severely damaged your reputation with nonwhites and socially liberal whites. Blithely asserting you are going to win with “the blacks” and “the Hispanics” will be far from sufficient in the general.

Look at the failures of the Sanders campaign. Just showing up for a few events in black neighborhoods, with a few surrogates and a lot of promises, does not impress when you haven’t been present in their communities for most of your professional life.

Consider spending your spring on a Hillary-esque “listening tour” of small roundtable discussions with African-Americans, Latinos and Muslims—not for the cameras, but for actual listening. Allow some unvarnished talk on bigotry in America to seep into your brain and change how you think and speak. Show understanding and personal growth, and you’ll at least get a hearing.

Although people-of-color voters are an obvious challenge for you, most assume you have an easy path to win over working-class whites. They see themselves in your politically incorrect persona and eat up your broadsides against the pending trade deals and “hedge fund guys … getting away with murder.”

But you’re about to go six months tangling with a candidate who is both one of the biggest wonks and one of the most surgical attackers in the country. She can match your populist rhetoric and expose yours as lacking substance if you don’t beef it up.

You are generally allergic to policy specifics, but that didn’t matter because so were most of your Republican rivals. (Even the ones with position papers didn’t dwell on them much.) Clinton is on another level.

Yes, yes, voters don’t read position papers or sweat details. But some of Sanders’ weakest moments were when Clinton’s policy fluidity made him seem out of his depth. When she shows off her plan to rein in Wall Street and reduce income inequality, your “I’m just gonna do it” bit isn’t going to fly.

And Clinton is going to take that back-of-the-envelope tax plan of yours, one of the few policy papers you grudgingly agreed to develop, and put it in the shredder. The Republicans won’t hit you for an $11 trillion tax cut that mostly favors the rich and nearly doubles the nation’s debt-to-GDP ratio. But the Democrats have been running that play for years to win working-class and middle-class votes.

You need a real policy team, and you need it now.

In the general: Pivot like nobody has pivoted before

Fortunately, you have a “psych profile” akin to that of Martin Blank of the film Grosse Pointe Blank: “moral flexibility would be the only way to describe it.” You can run a general election campaign that is completely different from your primary campaign, without a care about past contradictions. And you won’t lose your die-hard supporters because, as you have practically proved, you could “shoot somebody” without losing voters.

But what you have also said, back in November 2012, was that incendiary comments made in the primary can sink a candidate in the general: “[Romney] had a crazy policy of self-deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country.”

To save yourself from Romney’s fate, you need to pivot like nobody has pivoted before.

You had elements of such a pivot in your Super Tuesday news conference. But it lacked a certain…coherence. “Planned Parenthood has done very good work for many, many—for millions of women,” you said, with a clear eye on moderate female swing voters. However, these pro-choice suburbanites are not impressed when you follow that statement with “we're not going to fund as long as you have the abortion going on.” You will need to pivot much harder.

And you planted the seeds for a Latino pivot back in August when you said your “great wall” would have a “big beautiful door.” Shelve your rhetoric about deporting everyone. Talk more about how you will ensure healthy flows of legal immigration, protect immigrant worker rights once they are here, and keep families united. Maybe you can avoid Romney’s disastrous results and have a shot in Colorado, Nevada and Florida.

Attack Hillary with finesse

Of course, your campaign can’t be all positive. Hers won’t. But ask failed New York Senate candidate Rick Lazio about trying to humiliate her on the debate stage. Or ask President Obama how smart it was to call her “likable enough.” You can turn Hillary into a sympathetic character real fast. Besides, plenty of other independent entities will be throwing their own mud at her.

So give up the weirdly insecure “tweetstorm” rants and snarky Instagram video swipes. That feeds the long-time Hillary haters, but those folks are already with you, and they are not enough. You don’t have to be as noble as Sanders was and renounce any discussion of her “damn emails.” But you can play against type, and win plaudits for taking the high road.

Pray for an indictment

You could get lucky. Clinton is being dogged by six investigations and inquiries into her use of private email as secretary of state, most significantly by the FBI. If the political gods are with you, she’ll get hit with an indictment in October. More realistic would be a finger-wagging report from the State Department inspector general’s office (which the Clinton campaign suggests is being pushed by a high-level Republican staffer).

Of course, the Clintons are a family that survived a presidential impeachment. So nothing can be assumed to be automatically fatal. And the political benefit from a Clinton indictment could be negated with a loss for you in one of the three fraud causes against Trump University.

Obviously, you’d have to hit Clinton hard if she actually were indicted. But recall how Bill Clinton won the political debate over impeachment: by constantly assuring the public he was fighting for them while Republicans were obsessed with personal destruction. Surely, she would try to downplay any negative development as small beer or politically motivated, while staying focused on “the issues that matter to the American people.” No matter what happens on the legal front, to either of you, you will need to do the same.

You face an uphill battle. You won’t have a united Republican army at your back. Meanwhile, Obama’s approval ratings roughly match his 2012 vote, making it easier for Hillary Clinton to replicate his winning coalition. I make no guarantees that the above strategy is foolproof. But your path to victory lies in burying your current persona as a crude vessel of white rage, and repackaging yourself to a totally different audience.

And if anyone knows how to play to an audience, it’s you.

***



Though the outcome is hardly settled, it’s looking increasingly probable that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will be facing off as the Democratic and Republican nominees, respectively, in this fall’s general election. Politico Magazine asked a conservative pundit, Matt Latimer, to advise Clinton on how to win against Trump, below, and a liberal commentator, Bill Scher, to counsel Trump on how to beat Clinton, here.

To: Hillary Clinton

Re: The 2016 Election

From: Matt Latimer, conservative pundit

SUBJECT: How to Beat Donald Trump in November

Madam Secretary:

It’s probably not every day that you receive advice from a conservative Republican about how to win an election. You probably haven’t listened to many of our strange ilk since your father addressed the family dinner table.

But since I was asked to offer thoughts on how you might win a theoretical general election against Donald Trump—note: not necessarily my ideal outcome—it’s actually been an interesting challenge. It’s kind of fun to put yourself into the mind of your political opponents. Which is what you are going to have to do if you want to defeat Trump, who himself is an expert at getting into other people’s heads.

I’ve no doubt that somewhere in Brooklyn or wherever they gather, David Brock and, I don’t know, James Carville and a gang of hipsters are taking their photos next to a fat dossier of oppo research with The Donald’s name emblazoned on it. They’ve got pages and pages of photos and silly videos and divorce papers and wacky tweets. They’re learning all anyone cares to know about Trump Steaks. They’re handing out his cologne—Success—to each other as kooky gifts. Their fondest dream has come true—Trump is today the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

Of course, undisguised glee is what Democrats experienced in 1964 when the GOP was on the verge of nominating Barry “fire and brimstone” Goldwater, who was buried in an LBJ landslide that year. It’s also what they expressed in 1980 when Republicans selected Ronald Reagan, the former actor and alleged “warmonger,” who promptly went on to thump Jimmy Carter so soundly that Rosalynn was practically packing their bags before all the election returns had come in.

Right now at least, most polls have you leading Trump in a hypothetical November matchup. The RealClearPolitics average has you winning by 6 points, although one recent USA Today poll actually had Trump ahead of you by 2.

In one sense, these polls are meaningless since it’s like asking someone what they want for dinner 10 months from now. On the other hand—and how do I put this delicately?—YIKES! For the past several months, Donald J. Trump has been attacked by nearly every major figure in the Republican Party, by accomplished journalists across the spectrum, by a wide array of celebrities, by a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, by the Bush family, by the former president of Mexico, by the current president of the United States and by the pope. He’s been called a bigot, a liar, a con artist, a vulgarian, a fascist, a misogynist, the antichrist and Hitler’s love child. People denounce him routinely as a threat to the U.S. Constitution, a terrible role model for children, and a danger to international peace and security. And yet you, one of the most recognizable names in politics, are currently polling within the margin of error of him—AT BEST.

All the media poohbahs and pundits and sycophants who are high-fiving each other over a possible Trump nomination are crazy if they ignore, you know, actual data. And you’d be even crazier to listen to them.

The truth is that at the top of his game, Trump could contest you in places you might not expect. Like his hometown of New York, for example. With his economic populist message, he also could draw a significant number of blue-collar “Reagan Democrats” and, heck, even disaffected Bernie Sanders supporters who share an anger at Washington and politicians in general. Some of the smarter members of your party seem to know this.

This is not a year for politicians doing ordinary political things. For canned speeches, overly focused-group quips, predictable appearances with predictable people. Anything that smacks of politics as usual might well doom you to failure. (Unless, of course, Trump decides to doom himself. But if rhetorically dancing with David Duke didn’t make a bit of difference, it’s hard to imagine what could.)

How do you beat a guy like this? In essence, it all comes down—as most things do—to the words of Master Yoda: “You must unlearn what you have learned.”

Turn off your TV and shed your strategy memos

Trump has spent the entire campaign doing pretty much the opposite of what a high-priced consultant would tell him to do. Go to South Carolina—alleged “Bush Country”—and attack George W. for lying us into war? Not in anyone’s playbook. Praise Planned Parenthood, repeatedly, when the easier play would be to denounce it like every other Republican? Again, not what any GOP consultant would ever recommend.

Consultants—he doesn’t really seem to have any. And why should he? These are the geniuses who told the rest of us that Trump was a summer fling, that he wouldn’t win a single primary state, that he couldn’t get past a 30 percent ceiling. The kind of people who, knowing their own electorate thinks politicians are slightly more trustworthy than ISIS, lines up every politician they can find to endorse—and therefore doom—Trump’s most promising opponents. Last week, after Trump’s Super Tuesday triumph, they are telegraphing to the world their intent to set more of their money on fire with yet another SuperPAC that intends to define Trump as an existential threat to the GOP establishment. Are these people trying to let Trump win? As the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza recently tweeted: “In the movie version of this campaign the final plot twist would be that [GOP consultants] Weaver and Murphy were secretly working for The Trump Organization.”

Your own consultants, and the pundits you listen to on CNN or MSNBC, may know how to defeat a conventional candidate, like a Marco Rubio, but they have no clue how to combat a guy like Trump.

Which means this is going to have to be gut play on your part. What feels right to you. What if you were alone in a room, with no money, no entourage, no campaign apparatus, no polling. What would you do then? This may be something you haven’t had to contemplate in a very long time.

Learn the Art of the Steal

Donald Trump doesn’t play by any of the normal rules of politics or, many would say, civility. He is unpredictable and loves it. He could decide to cancel a debate with you one day, and on the next challenge you to two. He might win the endorsement of, say, the Dalai Lama or Chris Rock. An entire week could be spent debating David Duke or Juanita Broaddrick, or both. The point is that you will never know what’s coming next. Which is the last thing your political team would like to hear. How do you craft a strategy against someone who could be dominating the news for an entire week by engaging in a twitter war with Queen Elizabeth or placing Michael Moore under citizen’s arrest?

The only way to combat Trump’s tactics is to steal them. Keep him off balance by doing things he—and, most importantly, the media—won’t expect. Instead of the typical debates—or perhaps in addition to them—challenge him to meet you at a community center in Flint, Michigan. (It’s absolutely deplorable that Trump, like most leading Republicans, has said virtually nothing about the poisoning of an American city.) Invite him to a mosque to discuss his proposed ban on Muslims to their face. Show up at an event with enemies like Rosie O’Donnell or Penn Jillette and let them dress up like Trump and act out excerpts from his books (there is nothing he hates more than to be treated like a joke). Place in the audience at one of the debates the little old lady who he allegedly tried to bully to build a casino parking lot. Talk Jeb Bush into an endorsement. Or Bob Dole. Film an endorsement of Trump by Dennis Rodman—don’t give the basketball star a script. Just let him talk. Pledge to build a wall around Mar-a-Lago or to ban orange-haired billionaires from entering the United States. Do things that will make him uncomfortable, so he—and the media—responds to you.

Unleash Bill

Trump has shown no hesitance in going there with your husband. He expects that will make you defensive. He expects that will encourage you to send Bill stumping for votes in the middle of the Ozarks, far away from a microphone and other distractions.

If I were advising, I’d say you should do the opposite. Over the past few years, your husband has won a reputation as—how shall we put it—an outspoken, occasionally indiscreet, sometimes erratic surrogate. The other day he yelled at a protester. Does that sound like anyone else we know? While you remain the serious and bemused future commander in chief, let Bill test out the best way to get under Trump’s skin—and do your dirty work for you. It’s about time your roles were reversed, isn’t it?

Find your inner Goldwater girl

Trump has alienated many mainstream Republicans—at least those in Washington, D.C. At the same time, he has won support from evangelicals, moderates, conservatives and even a legion of Democrats. Which means that in 2016, at least, ideology matters less than it ever did. Why not take advantage of this—and play for the Republican middle.

When he sought to demonstrate that he was a different kind of Democrat from, well, you, Barack Obama went out of his way to praise Ronald Reagan and to emphasize moral values that might appeal to those on the right. (He didn’t really follow through on this once elected, but I digress.) I forget who first noted this, but it is an amazing fact that the only person in the 2016 race who ever supported (the aforementioned) Barry Goldwater is you. Isn’t it possible you could pick a Republican issue—school choice, for example—and run with it? What about actually accepting an invitation to go on—horrors—Fox News? You've already done it once. There might be a lot more invitations this year.

Trump’s defense of Planned Parenthood likely isn’t just some random act. He’s already planning to make a play for the votes of women—he said so at his grand news conference on Super Tuesday. So why not make a play for issues that seem to appeal to men. Which brings us to….

Play the national security card

Trump is going to run to your left on national security. He will fault you for your support of the “disastrous” Iraq War. He will question your judgment on Benghazi. He will tie you to the disappointments and foreign policy mistakes of the Obama administration. This is very shrewd on his part. It’s all being done to take his weakness—his lack of national security experience—and turn it into a strength.

Your job is not to let him get away with it. He is not, as yet, a polished speaker when pressed on national security matters. Call him on it. I don’t mean in the very Washington way of faulting him for not knowing what the “nuclear triad” is—nobody in the real world cares about a dense policy-wonk phrase like that at all. But they might be a little more concerned if he doesn’t know basic facts about our defense posture. In debate negotations, I’d insist on a forum that allows you to ask him questions. Pick from a list of basic ones: What’s the difference between the Sunni and Shia? Who are the officials you’d assemble to deal with a terrorist attack? What does the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff do? Name three people on your current national security advisory team. What is their background?

The American people might tolerate a lot from the GOP front-runner. But they’ll think twice if he demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about how to protect our nation in a time of war.

Skip the rah-rah rallies

Trump’s rallies are must-see TV. He has no prepared speech. He seems to enjoy talking about whatever is the latest news of the moment.

Let’s face it. Even if you wanted to, your personality is not compatible with the freewheeling, impromptu circus atmosphere he cultivates. To be more to the point: There is something about your speeches that lacks a certain … warmth? … conversational tone . .. human quality? I call it the “Small Wonder” dilemma. You seem to say every line of your speech in the same loud monotone—like you are at home sitting in a recliner yelling for someone to bring you the remote control. In short, it’s not your finest forum. Besides, your crowds almost certainly will never compare to Trump’s, which will only exacerbate concerns about voter enthusiasm for your campaign. You will never compete with a Trump rally. So do not try.

If I were you, I’d find forums that make you comfortable. Maybe it’s sitting on a couch with a small group of people. Maybe it’s walking through a factory or a supermarket and talking with voters as you go. I’m not sure what it is—but find it.

So there it is. Advice from a Republican on how to beat a Republican. Not sure I should wish you luck.