Lew explores some of the differences between running a primary and a general election campaign. A general election campaign in most locales is much shorter than a normal primary campaign to win the party nomination. There are more voters in the general election, and particularly more low information voters, which requires spending more money to reach them with your message.
And then there is the fact that the campaigns you beat in the primary may not, or they may, endorse you. It can be weird either way. Campaigns need to staff up for the general election and the pressure is on to bring in staffers from other campaigns. This can be a real problem for an America First candidate who prevailed against RINOs in the primary.
Depending on the composition of the district, the type of general election opponent you draw, and the strength of your candidacy you are likely to have to persuade a new group of voters to join your primary base in supporting you, whether its RINOs who voted against you in the primary, or conservative but reluctant voters who aren’t registered or don’t vote very often.
In an earlier era it was standard practice for politicians to change and soften their message when they went into a general election. But today for the MAGA or patriot candidate consistent, forthright messaging is the only way to build a grassroots army large and enthusiastic enough to offset a likely money shortfall. Most of our candidates, not tethered to the special interests. have to deal with a lack of funds.
Finally, the general election candidate has to be able to pivot quickly after winning to selecting a competent staff that shares his sense of urgency about making some real changes, a critical element for the candidate to be effective as an officeholder. In addressing this topic Lew discusses questions about Donald Trump’s political operation.
There is the concern that the people who currently run Trump’s campaign may try to sideline loyalists after a Trump victory, just as they have kicked Trump backers to the curb who have been involved with Project 2025. They view Project 2025’s data base with 5,000 vetted potential Trump staffers as usurping what they see as their future role: running the transition team that will indeed make a few thousand personnel decisions to staff up a new Trump administration.
As FDR once said “personnel is policy.” It is Midnight in America and the Trump team has to get this right, rising above anyone in their ranks who would sacrifice our future to build their own, short-term powerbase.
[00:00:00] It's midnight in America, and this is the Hour of Decision. My name is Lou Moore. I'm going to ask an important question for political activists, particularly those intrepid souls who work on campaigns or the crazy ones out there who have the guts to run for office.
[00:00:22] So the question is, when we win the primary, then what? When we win the primary, what comes after that? The primary and the general election are very different creatures. A primary campaign may last two years. It's slower paced. You're surrounded by allies. The staff is smaller.
[00:00:48] The drama, the pressure ratchets up more slowly. But the general election, depending on where you live, may be as short as six weeks. There's much more scrutiny by the media and by everybody else. The electorate overall is less
[00:01:07] informed. You have to buy media. You have to raise and then burn a lot of money in a short period of time. After the primary, specific dynamics of the race change, you have to deal
[00:01:24] with those enemies within the party who try to keep you from the nomination. It's foolish to keep fighting, but it's treason to our movement to be too accommodating to them. But, but, but everyone watching you expects you will try to unify the party.
[00:01:48] So how do you seek unity in a principled way? That is also a smart way. How do you bring new resources and maybe new personnel into a cash-starved campaign heavy on enthusiasm, but light on experience, on a compressed time frame?
[00:02:10] Where do you find the additional votes you will need to prevail in a general election? These are the important questions patriots in campaigns must think through, playing at any level. You know whether you're talking about the state legislature or you're
[00:02:29] running for governor. And these questions are critical for all of us deeply concerned about getting Trump back into office and equally concerned about how the Trump campaign might be answering these questions about unity, about new people in the campaign. The Trump
[00:02:50] campaign in fact has unified the party and brought in a huge amount of cash since Trump became the de facto nominee. Many public figures we know not to be with us on key issues have come
[00:03:06] aboard the Trump train. Will the price be too high for this needed support? Will we see these same faces in major roles in the new administration? And we have to win this election. We'll return to obsessing about Trump in a moment. The political game board is slightly
[00:03:27] different in every legislative and congressional district, and some are much more difficult for a patriot candidate to make it through the primary than others. Sometimes a well-funded rhino is there to confront our candidate. In most cases our candidates are outspent.
[00:03:48] In too many cases it's hard to tell which primary opponent or which primary candidate, excuse me, is our candidate as most GOP politicians are trying to sound MAGA even though they don't vote that way enough. And we have a growing number of imposters out there.
[00:04:09] I generalized throughout this episode to make my points. Every real world politician is different. Continuing now, to compensate for lack of funds, our side is usually more adroit at social media. They have likely worn out a lot of shoe leather. They probably come close
[00:04:34] to burning out a number of volunteers. And when they win they do it the hard way. Retail politics, door-to-door parades, rallies, etc. In the typical grassroots campaign, influential people haven't been around. Money people haven't been around.
[00:04:59] Experienced campaign people outside our movement haven't been around because they were busy trying to beat you. They were the ones trying to keep you from winning. But you won, they lost. And now with an impulse halfway between selfless team play and shameless ambition,
[00:05:25] many of these people are likely to come flocking around you wanting to help. The sudden switch can be unnerving to deal with. Feelings of fear may also be experienced. Will they somehow distort the message? Can they hijack the campaign's clear America First agenda?
[00:05:50] Then here comes the paranoia. Oh no, they're over there sweet-talking the candidate. Great, we'll win the primary and then the whole enterprise heads straight to hell. What to do? You could tell these newcomers to f off. They might not, that might not be very
[00:06:11] politic. Particularly if you're only a staffer and not the candidate and your boss is not on board with it. And also that might not be very smart. You need to protect the campaign but face it you also need more money, more human resources, more thinking and more friends.
[00:06:38] So you better be very smart about this because possibly you need more money and you need top-notch personnel helping you without doubt. And with all the new helpers there will almost surely be new suggestions about how to do everything. But now advice
[00:07:04] is coming from influential people who may also be experienced people at winning elections in your area. And there might be new suggestions about the message, suggestions about campaign staffing. Which by the way needs to be expanded at this juncture as you head into the general.
[00:07:29] And ominously important, new suggestions about who you should hire for your new staff at the state capital or Washington DC. Assuming you win there's going to be those kind of suggestions about those hires in the future. You want to be polite about all this,
[00:07:51] about all this new political advice but then go your own way. But come to think of it, do you know where to get the funding for the general? Do you know who won't waste your time
[00:08:04] while they unlock more support? Do you know who should be making the TV ads and placing them? Where do you find experienced staffer types? And plus aren't we supposed to all come together
[00:08:20] to unite, to defeat the Democrats? How do you navigate all of this? And then there's that magic number of votes needed to win the general election. How do you get to that number?
[00:08:35] How many rhino type voters do you need in your column to win? Is that even the right approach? But what will you have to do to get new support? Everywhere is different but it is not necessarily true that you need to suck up to the rhinos
[00:08:55] who voted against you in the primary election. It depends about, it depends on the makeup of the district, it depends on who the Democrat candidate is going to be. Are they going to be left of left or will they be some small business owner with three combat
[00:09:18] medals from Afghanistan? This will affect whether the rhino voter will be likely to hold their nose and vote for you. And many Republicans who voted against you in the primary are rhinos but they were disinterested right up until that voting time and then they did the act
[00:09:41] with low information. Plus primary and general election voters are not exactly the same group. Ideological voters come out in the primary with all those dutiful seniors and other good citizens but they're joined by many types of voters in the general. It's a larger group overall.
[00:10:07] There's another factor. Dems are voting more and more in GOP primaries in red states. They tried to stop you in the primary by participating in your primary in voting against you and they are not going to be coming your way in the general.
[00:10:29] I look no farther than to my own state of Utah where our governor Spencer Cox, just won I guess a primary here, I was involved in an effort to stop Mr. Cox and we brought in a national pollster, a pollster whose name you probably would recognize
[00:10:50] and he sends me the poll and first thing I'm thinking is crap. He didn't do this right because 21% of the participants in the poll said they were Democrats even though he, the pollster was supposed to be polling registered Republicans, the only people who
[00:11:11] qualify to vote in the primary in the state of Utah. But in fact he did exactly, he was very accurate in describing the people who made up the universe of folks that were going
[00:11:27] to and in fact did vote in the primary. It's now figured that about 20% of the voters in the Republican primary in Utah were Democrats. They weren't voting for our guy. So that's another thing, a little bit of a digression.
[00:11:47] Registering and turning out our people so to speak to vote is likely more a more productive task than going around trying to win people over. Now people who think like us are registered to vote surely. Well nope not necessarily. One good example unfortunately are hunters.
[00:12:15] Hunters generally don't vote, people don't know that. A lot of young males who like Trump don't actually get it together to vote. Actually a lot of Trump supporters overall that didn't come from the GOP are terrible about voting. We got a lot of data on that folks.
[00:12:41] If you are looking to find new supporters, the easiest to persuade, possibly historically Democrat voters, who would they be? We'll tell you friends they're going to be blue collar workers. Their neighborhoods is likely where you want to go if that's your decision that
[00:13:01] you need to be persuading some people and not just finding our people. Going hat in hand to the country club is not a good strategy for a patriotic candidate. In 2024 actually it was
[00:13:15] never a good strategy so you do have to figure this out. Where are you going to get the votes that you need to win? And in some districts there is an unavoidable discussion about appealing to minority communities, maybe Hispanics or East Europeans or East Indians
[00:13:38] excuse me. And then there's those that are shooting for that black turnout. Turn the tide with the blacks and get them voting our way. But I would say don't alienate a more likely target group by trimming your sales or weighing your message
[00:13:59] for an unproven voting block. In other words, let's look at Trump in 2016. He lost white votes in 2020 over 2016. He may have lost enough votes to have won the election. In other words, if he would have done a better job finding white votes and
[00:14:23] appealing directly to them rather than spending so much of his message and so much of his time seeking to appeal to black voters it might have been enough for him to win even with all the cheating that went on. Donald Trump was not anti-white but his messaging in 2020
[00:14:44] was so tailored to the minorities who didn't really come through despite his sentencing reform initiative, despite what he did for historic black college funding, despite the fact that there was the highest black employment ever under Donald Trump. And all of this was
[00:15:04] not conducive to getting disenfranchised whites very distrustful about the whole process to become excited for Trump. And I would say that and that would be even much more applicable for your guy if he's running for Congress or state legislature or whatever. Reach out to
[00:15:25] everybody but don't tailor your message. If you have common ground, fine. You need to always emphasize your strongest issues period to every audience. I firmly believe that in this day and age at this time where you have to be authentic and where it is midnight in America,
[00:15:47] your strongest issues are unbelievable that we're even talking about some of these things. Don't try to become an overnight expert on the Endangered Species Act or the complexities of public school finance. Being able to briefly answer questions in these areas is good
[00:16:08] just before you pivot back to immigration's effect on public safety or trade deals shutting down our factories. Stay ruthlessly on message and do not change your message. That will depress the base and you are a grassroots campaign, you can't afford to do that
[00:16:32] and it creates mistrust. So in summary, you win the primary and experience political types not exactly of your persuasion are likely to come around. There are pluses and minuses that come with this development. You have to add voters to your column. You have to spend more
[00:16:57] money in less time but at the end of the day you are a grassroots base campaign. So you know you have to stay authentic. Furthermore, some of those suggestions you'll get from these newcomers, these influential people will almost certainly relate to what
[00:17:24] kind of staff you will hire after you win. This is important folks at all levels whether we're talking about somebody running for the state legislature or President Trump. In reality even hiring a single secretary in a clerical role to work for a state legislator
[00:17:49] is putting someone in the middle of the game. Our people need this experience and so even that hire needs to be thought through, it's important. So now I will tell you a story. I was involved in electing a very non-establishment figure to Congress in 1994.
[00:18:12] Those of us key to this effort wanted to go back with him to Washington D.C. or serve in the district and some internal discussions occurred about what the staff would look like. Right after we won, in a Democrat district I might add and by 10 points
[00:18:33] I might add, some establishment types who had joined our campaign after the primary and donated significantly after the primary put a full court press on the congressman-elect to get their people hired to key positions for chief of staff, district director,
[00:18:56] for press secretary etc. And they wanted to get rid of the loyalist staff who helped win the election. It was all set up, it was all a set up, it was orchestrated. Powerful lobbyists
[00:19:13] in the state were enlisted to make calls to our guy. The replacement staff was ready to go. Calls were being made to our key volunteers about the terrible staff congressman-elect Metcalfe had. Oh my goodness, we got to get rid of those people.
[00:19:33] And we were very aware that we had just won a seat that had been and still was in many ways a Democrat seat going back years. So to finish this story the congressman-elect very patiently listened to all this and told all these smart people how great they were
[00:19:56] and then he hired the folks he had intended to hire including me. I was at that time just an adjunct college instructor with not great GOP connections who had never been a staffer
[00:20:11] and after a few months he made me his chief of staff and in fact he didn't hire anyone who had experience as a congressional staffer and all of the people he did hire were from
[00:20:23] our state if not our congressional district and all that brings me back to the presidential race and to Donald Trump who is looking to hire several thousand key people to run the country assuming he wins in November. And I must now report if you don't already know
[00:20:47] there is a war going on behind the scenes as there almost always is to decide who will be in a position to advise Trump on key picks and run the transition that actually makes hundreds of hires hiring people so critical to our future
[00:21:11] that are hired during this transition. Which brings me to project 2025. Sure you've heard of project 2025. It was created by Trump loyalists working with the heritage foundation and several other credible conservative groups. Most of the talk about project 2025 has been about the 900 page document created by the project. That
[00:21:42] document the left has been trying to use against Trump but it's the same document that he has disavowed. But this is really not the important part. The much more important part about project 2025 is the database of future staffers they have screened
[00:22:07] who could hit the ground running with Trump this time. And that's the biggest weakness folks that he had in 2016 and it always is when an outsider becomes an insider. That staffing is tough and it's critical. I believe there's about 5,000 vetted individuals in this database
[00:22:29] that the project has created to be ready to roll on inauguration day. This is potentially a very powerful tool for a very important task. It must be said here that running the transition is a coveted assignment. Those in charge of it
[00:22:55] are wielding immediate power and there are powerful and likely power hungry people with questionable motives who don't want the heritage foundation and other conservative groups staffed by Trump loyalists to have this big of role in determining White House
[00:23:18] and agency hiring. Specifically when I say powerful people, I am talking about the former lobbyist and DeSantis supporter Susie Wiles who appears at the moment to be running the Trump campaign and Chris LaCivita a longtime GOP operative and insider who is
[00:23:43] Trump's current campaign manager. They want to be in charge of the hires with no competition. They are the ones who have convinced Trump to disavow Project 2025. They are the ones currently running the campaign and they would like to be the ones in the most senior positions
[00:24:06] on the White House staff running the show after Trump wins and having a huge say on who gets hired or the next Trump administration. FDR famously said, personnel is policy. Folks we have to get this right. I'm not against seasoned pros being at the center
[00:24:32] of Trump's campaign and I personally know many GOP insider types who are currently lobbyists that would still be loyal to this kind of a program. But many in this category I would
[00:24:49] not be so sure about and how many Trump loyalists would be pushed aside if these folks are successful in becoming the people who run the transition. I think of Trump's first term where
[00:25:05] this happened a lot. People being pushed aside who were actually the ones that were loyal to Trump. I also think about Reagan's terms and the dominance of the Bush people in those terms
[00:25:19] of Ronald Reagan. Reagan beat Bush. Bush had a huge Rolodex and Reagan did not have the infrastructure loyal to him to competently fill thousands of positions. So Bush people were coming in right away and when Bush torpedoed James Baker III became Reagan's chief of staff
[00:25:47] it became a flood of new hires more loyal to Bush, more establishment than not who to a great degree staffed the Reagan administration. And then Bush ran in 88. He was greatly aided in the primaries by Reagan's support. After the primaries
[00:26:11] Reagan people by and large worked hard to get Bush elected and then Bush won and all of the Reagan people who were in staff positions were ruthlessly purged. So back to the present if we don't get the right people in behind Trump what will happen to Trump's agenda?
[00:26:35] It must be a very aggressive agenda. Prosecuted not in the best of times if you look at the world today. So Trump's task will be very difficult. The Project 2025 people have done a great thing.
[00:26:54] Conservatives are usually never ahead of the curve on things like this and if Trump wins the fight will really begin just as it did in 2016. As a nation we need major reforms and a drastic reduction of corporate and left-wing influence. All of our institutions
[00:27:19] must be purged. It's going to be a very heavy lift. So on the question of staffing I hope Trump and his family are playing this right. So back to my question. My question when we win the primary then what I've tried to explain the practical
[00:27:43] importance of this subject. Whether you are electing a state legislator or you are worrying over every twist and turn of the presidential campaign. And so to sum it up a generalization. MAGA Patriot campaigns are resource starved and lack experience.
[00:28:05] Your likely primary opponents will be experienced and have resources. If they lose they just might want to get right to work against you but they might act something like the scenario I described and want to join in become part of your campaign.
[00:28:26] You need to be open to unity for the general election and you need to find new voters to support you. Having money for TV ads, a seasoned campaign team and support from influential people can be a beautiful thing. Or, or new money the establishment adjusts.
[00:28:54] The establishment adjacent money can be what caused you to lose your way and squander what the blood sweat and tears of your real supporters gave you. A chance to hold office and serve them
[00:29:09] in this hour of crisis, this hour of decision for America. I can't tell you how many times this has happened. The establishment calls this quote growing and maturing in office unquote. And I can't tell you how important the staff decisions are for Patriots entering office
[00:29:33] who want to be true and effective. So a candidate for state legislature, for Congress, for a governorship can be in this predicament between winning the nomination at the between the time they win the nomination and the time of the general election.
[00:29:54] Or we could just go back to talking about Trump because he's in exactly the same situation navigating exactly the same issues. Please pray for President Trump for his safety and for him to have wisdom, particularly in this matter of staffing his next term.
[00:30:19] May we all be protected and wise in our efforts to defeat the evil casting that menacing shadow over all of us. The time for delay has passed. Our noble ancestors are looking down
[00:30:36] upon us waiting to see if we will act as they did because it's midnight in America and this is the hour of decision. And may we all decide that we are all in for this fight.
[00:30:55] My name is Lou Moore. Hour of Decision is a production of News for America and on Rumble on several podcast providers and at newsforamerica.org. You can follow Election Integrity News and find resources for activists in this area
[00:31:15] at securevote.news. Again, my name is Lou Moore. Thank you for listening. See you later.