Democratic political operatives have been banging their heads against the wall trying to figure out what went wrong in 2016. How did the party lose one of the most winnable elections in recent history? What can they do differently in 2020 to right that electoral wrong?

But what if Democrats are looking at the wrong election for lessons about how to win 2020?


When all is said and done, the 2016 election might end up being a black-swan event. The combination of Russia's interference, FBI Director James Comey's intervention and multiple third-party candidates makes that election a hard one to extract guidance from. Besides, running for an open seat is a fundamentally different political task than defeating an incumbent.

Rather than obsess over 2016, Democrats should focus on 2012—the last year a challenger took on an incumbent president. There are more parallels than you’d think: Barack Obama was a president hugely unpopular with the opposing party, but the economy on the upswing; the Republicans had a big field and took a while to coalesce around a consensus choice. In the end, that choice was Mitt Romney—and his campaign misread and misplayed the election in ways that the Democrats desperately need to pay attention to now.

Long before he became a hero to Never Trumpers and the #Resistance for having the courage to fulfill his constitutional oath, Romney was the last politician to take on an incumbent president. A year before the election, Nate Silver famously asked on the cover of the New York Times Magazine “Is Obama Toast?” I was working for the Obama reelection campaign at the time, and in our internal polling, Obama was losing to a generic Republican in most of the battleground states. We hoped the Republican voters would nominate anyone other than Romney, because Romney might be unbeatable. We were wrong, because while Obama benefited from an economy that strengthened over the course of the campaign season and a messy, overly long primary, Romney also made a series of strategic miscalculations. And the Democratic nominee cannot afford to repeat those mistakes in 2020. So, some words of advice to Democrats from the 2012 election:

First, do not make this election solely about Donald Trump. The idea that the challenger wants a campaign to be a referendum on the incumbent rather than a choice between two candidates is a staple of political conventional wisdom. It is also a mistake. From the very beginning, Romney’s primary goal was to make the race all about Obama. His campaign ran virtually no ads that introduced Romney to voters. He rolled out very few policies. All of his messaging firepower was focused on Obama. This was a fundamental misunderstanding of the contours of a modern presidential campaign and a fatal strategic error. Romney left a vacuum of information that the Obama campaign, and other Democratic groups, were more than happy to fill with information about Romney’s far-right positions, his pro-corporate policies and his long career of carrion capitalism. Remember the Obama campaign ad with Romney singing “America the Beautiful” that featured his record of shipping jobs overseas and using off-shore tax havens?


By the time the Romney campaign got around to telling the story of Romney’s life, how he saved the Olympic committee and other good works, it was far too late. The damage was done. Romney famously made a number of historic gaffes, but Obama’s campaign-trail performance was far from gaffe-free. The reason Romney suffered more from saying “corporations are people” and “I like firing people” than Obama did for saying “you didn’t build that” is because voters knew Obama. They didn’t know Romney, and Obama’s campaign was happy to tell people who he was.

Trump has dominated the national conversation for five years. His flaws are known by all. The Democrats should want this to be a choice between competing, starkly different visions for the country. If it’s all about Trump, Democrats will lose.

Second, find ways to frame this economy on your own terms. As Obama showed in 2012, the candidate who succeeds in defining the terms of the economic debate will win the election. In October 2012, the unemployment rate was nearly 8 percent and American families were still feeling the effects of the Great Recession. These economic conditions could have spelled doom for Obama. According to exit polls, 59 percent of voters in that election believed the economy was the most important issue and only 21 percent of voters rated the economy as good.

Romney’s entire strategy was to lay the blame for the sluggish economy at Obama’s feet while claiming that his business experience made him better suited to jump-start the recovery. But Obama won handily because he reframed the economic question before voters. Instead of an up-or-down vote based on the unemployment rate or weak growth, the Obama campaign turned a question of economic performance into one of economic fairness by focusing on how Romney’s policies favored the wealthy over the middle and working class.


Because Trump has managed to not screw up the strong economy Obama handed him, the 2020 Democratic nominee must replicate Obama’s feat and reframe what a strong economy means. Yes, the unemployment rate is low and the stock market is soaring, but Trump is vulnerable because of who benefits from his policies. Trump’s only major legislative accomplishment is a massive tax break for big corporations and Wall Street, which might be the most obvious and exploitable political vulnerability this century. During Trump’s presidency, corporations have rarely made more money or paid less in taxes, yet middle- and working-class Americans are paying more for health care, food, college and retirement while wages have barely budged. Like Romney, Trump wants to make the race about macroeconomic indicators, and so Democrats need to make it about people’s personal interaction with the economy. If they do that, they have shot.

Third, get out of the liberal Twitter bubble. Finally, one of Romney’s biggest errors was being stuck in the conservative news bubble. The only people truly shocked by Obama’s victory, which was predicted by the polls and the various data models, was the Romney campaign. They had been mainlining the anti-Obama propaganda from Fox News and others for years and therefore had lost touch with how voters saw Obama. Romney was running against the protosocialist, madrassa-educated, wholly un-American caricature of Obama that Fox News pumped out into the world. That may be how Sean Hannity saw Obama, but it’s not how voters in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin saw Obama.

The Democratic nominee needs to recognize that a lot of the voters we need see Trump very differently than most of us that populate liberal Twitter, watch MSNBC and listen to Pod Save America. According to polling and focus groups, despite a Cheesecake Factory menu’s worth of scandal, they still see Trump as someone who represents change. Despite multiple bankruptcies and investigations into his finances, they believe that Trump’s business experience makes him qualified to deal with the economy. And despite a plethora of plutocratic policies, they see Trump as a populist. Voters are not naïve. Outside of the MAGA base, most have a pretty nuanced view of Trump. These impressions can and must be changed—in some cases with only a modicum of new information. But only if Democrats run against the person these voters see, not the person they know Trump to be.

Trump has a lot of advantages heading into the 2020 election. Defeating an incumbent is hard, and it’s especially hard in a strong economy. But Trump absolutely can be defeated by any of the Democrats running for president, if—and only if—the party learns the lessons from where Romney came up short.