What every liberal needs to understand in order to win
In politics, the liberals hold all the cards when it comes to facts, virtue, and truth. So why do the conservatives so often win? They don’t have to worry about things like facts, virtue, and truth, so they can spend their time focusing on things like strategy, leverage, and winning. It’s time for liberals to start winning more often. Liberals don’t need to become the bad guys to start winning more often. They just need to spend a little more time studying up on how politics works. Here are twenty winning lessons for every liberal out there:
Lesson #1: Everything in politics is about leverage. You want to force someone on the other side to bend to your will? You figure out what they care about most, and you use it to your advantage. Being right should be enough, but in politics, it isn’t.
Lesson #2: Very few people in the highest reaches of politics are mustache twirling cartoon villains who are just looking for mischief. Even the most corrupt politicians in the House and Senate care about things like money and donors, not about random acts of villainy. If you want to defeat them, you have to understand what makes them tick. Stop thinking of them as cartoon characters.
Lesson #3: You can never take any politician’s words at face value. The good guys and bad guys are always posturing, trying to use their words to set things in motion. If you want to figure out what’s about to happen, start by ignoring what the politicians say is about to happen.
Lesson #4: There are two kinds of wins. The first is when something good happens, such as passing a good law that helps people. The second kind of win is when something “bad” happens to your side that doesn’t actually do any harm, and it gives your side better odds in the next election. Liberals are rarely able to spot the second kind of win, even when it drops right in their lap.
Lesson #5: Conservatives always think they’re going to win. Liberals always think they’re going to lose. It’s why conservatives win often, even though liberals have all the facts and virtue and intelligence and truth on their side. A winning mindset is contagious. So is a losing mindset. To win any election, you have to put in the work. No one was ever motivated to work harder by being told they’re going to lose anyway.
Lesson #6: Voters in the middle generally know the Democrats are the good guys, and the Republicans are creepy wackos, so they hold Democrats to a higher standard. So if they decide the Democratic and Republican candidates are roughly equal in a given election, or that both candidates are terrible, they paradoxically tend to vote for the Republican.
Lesson #7: Liberals have the moral high ground, but that can work against them. There’s a tendency for each liberal to want to prove they’re the “best” liberal, as if it’s a competition. One of the most common ways of doing this is to obsessively smear the Democratic frontrunner, to “prove” you’re better than all the liberals who find the frontrunner acceptable. This borders on sociopathy. Knock it off.
Lesson #8: Your vote isn’t precious. It’s not a sentimentality contest. You’re not picking a spouse. You’re just picking a candidate who can do your dirty work and steer the country in your direction. Then you turn out and vote for that candidate in droves. Conservatives get this. Liberals often don’t.
Lesson #9: A president who only moderately leans to the left, but is effective at governing and making deals, will be able to steer the country significantly to the left. A president who’s far-left, but isn’t effective at governing or making deals, won’t be able to move the country one inch to the left. Every inch of American presidential history proves this to be the case. Go study it.
Lesson #10: Most people think politics is done by magic wand. Someone in office waves the wand and gets what they want, and then just gets away with it. But that’s never how it works. Every time a politician or party makes a move, there’s pushback, consequences, fallout. Every single time. The consequences can be asymmetrical and delayed, which is why you don’t always spot them. But the consequences always come. No one ever has a magic wand in politics. If it appears to you that someone in politics just waved a magic wand, it means you misunderstood what just happened. Go back and study it more closely.
Lesson #11: Fairness doesn’t exist in politics. It just doesn’t. And it never will. Whining about the lack of fairness in politics will never get you anywhere. But if you’re a liberal, you’re already fighting for what’s right and what’s fair in general. So whenever you win a battle, you’re making the world better. If you stop to whine how the battles aren’t being fought fairly, no one will care. You’re wasting your time when you could be putting your effort into winning.
Lesson #12: Politics is (metaphorically) war. Both sides suffer losses every day. The losses are never acceptable. But just because your side is suffering losses, it doesn’t mean your side is losing. The war is won by the side that’s still standing after both sides take losses.
Lesson #13: The only scandals that have any impact are the ones that the mainstream media is willing to run with, and that cause the voters in the middle to perk up. When your side hits on a scandal that’s resonating beyond, you should focus heavily on it. Keep repeating it. The point is to win voters over. If a certain scandal or talking point plays well with your side, but is having no impact on anyone in the middle, either revise it or ditch it.
Lesson #14: Liberals are the good guys, so we always want to play up the Republican scandals that we think are the most objectively evil. But no matter how important you think any given scandal is, if it doesn’t win any support or votes for your side, you’re not going to win an election by playing up that scandal.
Lesson #15: Once you find a scandal that’s resonating with the middle, you don’t let up. Look what the Republicans did with email and Benghazi, and those weren’t even real. Trump’s (very real) Ukraine scandal is resonating across the board, so keep pushing it. Not exclusively, but heavily.
Lesson #16: When the Republicans cheat in an election, it’s not done by simply pulling a magic lever and getting the desired result. It takes a ton of cheating effort just to move the needle a tiny fraction. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, hacking, etc, only ever gets them 2-3 points at most. Massive turnout can always overcome cheating. If you run around saying “They’re just going to cheat anyway,” you’re telling people on your side not to bother voting. Stop it.
Lesson #17: Republican politicians always vote based on what they think gives them the best shot at keeping their seat. Sometimes the vulnerable ones can be pushed into voting with us on something. Sometimes not. But it’s never about whether they’re going to “do the right thing” or “grow a spine.” It’s about the reelection math they’re doing in their heads. Think of them as pawns to be manipulated, not as people to be believed in or not be believed in. Whining about how flaky they are is a total waste of your time.
Lesson #18: No amount of whining will ever put you any closer to winning. Lamar Alexander just proved he’s a coward. So what? He’s irrelevant. Don’t waste time obsessing over him. He’s retiring anyway. Move on and fight meaningful battles. You can whine, or you can win. There are only so many hours in a day, and you can’t focus on both.
Lesson #19: Nothing has ever been sacred in politics. Andrew Johnson bribed a senator to acquit him. Reagan conspired with Iran in the 1980 election. Trump’s crimes are nothing new. American politics has always been a cesspool. Stop acting like your centuries old porcelain is suddenly breaking. Acknowledge that you’re fighting the same old battles that liberals have been fighting for as long as this country has existed, and that you’ll continue fighting these same old battles until you get better at winning them.
Lesson #20: Liberals are so worried about heartbreak, they convince themselves that the very worst will happen, so they’re not let down in case it does happen. But that kind of fatalism becomes toxic and contagious, and pretty soon, liberals are so convinced they’re going to lose, they give up trying to win. Conservatives almost never suffer from this kind of thing, so they have an advantage. For liberals, knocking off the fatalism is the most important step in winning every battle.
