I took a look back at what the past decade tells us about lessons drawn after the 2012 primaries.
I took a look back at what the past decade tells us about lessons drawn after the 2012 primaries.
T oday’s South Carolina primary is likely to confirm what was already obvious after Iowa and New Hampshire: Donald Trump has won the Republican presidential primaries. It appears that Nikki Haley may remain in the race for a while as a protest candidate, but a defeat in her home state would confirm that she’s no longer contesting for the nomination. Trump will be the nominee unless death, grave illness, or some other deus ex machina factor intervenes.
What can we learn about the Republican presidential process going forward? Maybe less than some people think; maybe Donald Trump is just unique, and he was running this time as a de facto incumbent. We won’t truly know how to assess how things have changed after Trump until we reach the stage of “after Trump,” which the voters are not ready to do. But we can surely do some reassessment.
* * *
Since exiting the race, Ron DeSantis has taken up the practice of recording short, frequent, direct-to-camera video messages uploaded to social media, ranging from discussing the Texas border standoff to talking football with his son to proposing state constitutional reforms. These have left erstwhile supporters of his presidential campaign wondering why he didn’t try this earlier. They present DeSantis at his blunt, wonky best, unfiltered by the press, and even allow him to show a personal side that rarely came through to voters. And they can circulate widely at little cost. Fred Thompson created a sensation with well-produced video statements when he launched his 2008 campaign, but as with everything else in his campaign, the 66-year-old Thompson lacked the vigor to churn them out on a regular schedule.
The idea of doing these sorts of videos was one of the suggestions for Republican presidential candidates that I incorporated in a list of “73 Rules for Running for President as a Republican” back in 2013. The list reflects its origins in the dispiriting aftermath of the 2012 presidential election and the faux “severely conservative” Mitt Romney campaigns of 2008 and 2012.
I thought it would be interesting to revisit these rules a decade later. All of them still reflect my thinking about the best approach to Republican presidential campaigning, but I must acknowledge that Donald Trump broke about a dozen of these in 2016, lived to tell the tale, and has continued to do so.
(1) Run because you think your ideas are right and you believe you would be the best president. Don’t stay out because your chances are slim, and don’t get in because someone else wants you to. Candidates who don’t have a good reason for running or don’t want to be there are a fraud on their supporters.
This is certainly the advice DeSantis followed in refusing to wait for 2028. I’m more skeptical now of candidates who run when their chances are slim, but that’s largely a function of having lived through multiple cycles of conservatives dividing their forces against Romney and then against Trump.
(2) Ask yourself what you’re willing to sacrifice or compromise on to win. If there’s nothing important you’d sacrifice, don’t run; you will lose. If there’s nothing important you wouldn’t, don’t run; you deserve to lose.
(3) If you don’t like Republican voters, don’t run.
The third rule was aimed in particular at the John Weaver–advised campaigns such as Jon Huntsman’s in 2012 and John Kasich’s in 2016, which won media plaudits with their conspicuous disdain for the majority of Republican voters. Neither Haley nor Chris Christie, in spite of running to appeal to the same faction of the party, has made that mistake.
As a writer, I can make a living talking to an audience, whether or not it amounts to a majority. Politicians don’t have that luxury. If you don’t like the voters, they will figure it out. Whatever else you may say about Trump, he grasped something important when he was panned for pandering to the poorly educated and declared, “I love the poorly educated!” They loved him back in return.
(4) Don’t start a campaign if you’re not prepared for the possibility that you might become the frontrunner. Stranger things have happened.
More than a few campaigns over the years, such as those of Herman Cain and Ben Carson, were not really prepared for the glare of the spotlight that comes from taking the lead; others have proven organizationally unready to be a frontrunner. There was always a lingering suspicion in 2016 that Trump himself had planned on making a splash and leveraging it to help his brand, and hadn’t really thought through what would happen if he ended up as the president.
(5) If you’ve never won an election before, go win one first. This won’t be the first one you win.
I have never liked amateur candidates, and aside from Trump (who had run only briefly in the Reform Party primary in 2000), their track record has been poor. Many more have failed than succeeded, and the Vivek Ramaswamy campaign this year was yet another object lesson in why that is. Trump was the sixth president who had never been elected to office before, the others being Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight Eisenhower (that’s five Republicans and one Whig). Four of the six were conquering generals or other career public servants, and three of them (Taylor, Taft, and Hoover) proved disastrous at managing a political party in office. Eisenhower, despite being a personal political success and a good administrator and commander in chief, presided over the collapse of the Republican Party in Congress. Only Grant and Eisenhower were reelected.
Still, what Trump had in common with Ike, Grant, Taylor, and Hoover is that he was one of the most famous men in the country, associated in the public mind with a particular kind of success. He had been nationally famous for much longer than any of those men. Hoover and Taft also ran as the heirs to popular incumbent administrations. It’s still a bad idea for an untested candidate to try entering politics at the presidential level if the candidate isn’t already universally known.
(6) Winning is what counts. Your primary and general election opponents will go negative, play wedge issues that work for them, and raise money wherever it can be found. If you aren’t willing to do all three enthusiastically, you’re going to be a high-minded loser. Nobody who listens to the campaign-trail scolds wins. In the general election, if you don’t convey to voters that you believe in your heart that your opponent is a dangerously misguided choice, you will lose.
Trump, of course, has never suffered from an unwillingness to go negative. DeSantis and Haley have each faced the problem of how to criticize Trump effectively, but neither of them has shown any instinct for the “moral high road” approach; they’ve just struggled, as Trump’s opponents did in 2016, to figure out what works in denting Trump’s armor.
(7) Pick your battles, or they will be picked for you. You can choose a few unpopular stances on principle, but even the most principled candidates need to spend most of their time holding defensible ground. If you have positions you can’t explain or defend without shooting yourself in the foot, drop them.
This is another way of saying: Yes, you can run on a six-week abortion ban, or you can run on raising the retirement age, or you can run on some other stance that is a lightning rod or not broadly popular. But you can’t run on too many of them, and you have to be willing to explain why you picked this one.
(8) Don’t be surprised when people who liked you before you ran don’t like you anymore. Prepare for it.
One of several variations in these rules on “don’t run to please people in the press who hate Republicans.”
(9) Be sure before you run that your family is on board with you running. They need to be completely committed, because it will be harder than they can imagine. Related: Think of the worst possible thing anyone could say about the woman in your life you care about the most, and understand that it will be said.
(10) You will be called a racist, regardless of your actual life history, behavior, beliefs, or platform. Any effort to deny that you’re a racist will be taken as proof that you are one. Accept it as the price of admission.
(11) Have opposition research done on yourself. Have others you trust review the file. Be prepared to answer for anything that comes up in that research. If there’s anything that you think will sink you, don’t run.
Other than Trump, who simply didn’t care, we actually haven’t had a ton of credible stories come out of their pasts that really damaged any of the 2016 or 2024 presidential candidates, so score that one as a lesson learned. The George Santos experience is an extreme example of how some other Republican campaigns did not do this.
(12) Ask yourself if there’s anything people will demand to know about you, and get it out there early. If your tax returns or your business partnerships are too important to disclose, don’t run. (We might call this the Bain Capital Rule).
Trump, obviously, flouted this rule with impunity and survived.
(13) Realize that your record, and all the favors you’ve done, will mean nothing if your primary opponent appears better funded.
This might be updated for the Trump era, in which it wasn’t Trump’s fundraising prowess but his fame and free media coverage (in 2016) and his quasi-incumbent status (in 2024) that left many of his challengers without the support of people who should normally have owed them favors or gratitude for their records.
(14) Run as who you are, not who you think the voters want. There’s no substitute for authenticity.
Trump, as I’ve noted repeatedly, manages the unique feat of being seen as authentic in spite of being a notorious liar who sells out his own prior stances and former allies without hesitation. But that’s who Trump is, and he doesn’t hide it. What you see with Trump is the real Trump, with all that means.
Authenticity has been a struggle at times for his opponents. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio undercut their own brands by shifting their approaches to attacking Trump over the course of their campaigns, and by later endorsing him. Haley and DeSantis both debuted as Tea Party conservatives, so watching Haley rally the party’s moderates while DeSantis pandered to MAGA voters is often an exercise in visibly trying too hard. DeSantis, apparently fearful of making mistakes in a campaign with a narrow margin for error, almost certainly played it too cautiously, and was much more relaxed late in the campaign (and since its conclusion) when he accepted that his chances had dwindled and the advice of consultants hadn’t worked.
(15) Each morning, before you read the polls or the newspapers, ask yourself what you want to talk about today. Talk about that.
Trump, again, is a master of driving rather than reacting to the news cycle, to the point where even the current occupant of the Oval Office often seems like a supporting character in a drama about Trump. Haley and DeSantis both pursued message-disciplined campaigns, but getting that noticed is another story.
(16) If you never give the media new things to talk about, they’ll talk about things you don’t like.
This is one of the reasons why DeSantis erred by not talking earlier to the mainstream press.
(17) Never assume the voters are stupid or foolish, but also don’t assume they are well-informed. Talk to them the way you’d explain something to your boss for the first time.
I confess that I’m out of step with many voters in this way: I was always a big fan of Dick Cheney’s approach to public speaking, in which he always sounded like he was briefing a board of directors. DeSantis has some of that, often at the cost of charisma. Trump is a different story, but he at least doesn’t sound condescending when he starts telling voters about some thing in American history that he just learned yesterday, like who Frederick Douglass was.
(18) Handwrite the parts of your platform you want voters to remember on a 3×5 index card. If it doesn’t fit, your message is too complicated. If you can’t think of what to start with, don’t run.
This is one thing Trump got right in 2016, and which really none of the 2024 candidates (Trump included) have managed to do. DeSantis basically shorthanded his message as “do what I did in Florida.” Trump’s elevator pitch is “retribution” for his personal grievances.
(19) Voters may be motivated by hope, fear, resentment, greed, [altruism] or any number of other emotions, but they want to believe they are voting for something, not against someone. Give them some positive cause to rally around beyond defeating the other guy.
(20) Optimism wins. If you are going to be a warrior, be a happy warrior. Anger turns people off, so laugh at yourself and the other side whenever possible, even in a heated argument.
Tim Scott, the happiest of warriors, wasn’t the mood Republicans wanted this year, but neither was the bulldog determination of DeSantis. Trump, for his part, managed to use humor as a substitute for optimism in 2016. He has mostly lost that by now.
(21) Ideas don’t run for president; people do. If people don’t like you, they won’t listen to you.
(22) Your biography is the opening act. Your policy proposals and principles are the headliner. Never confuse the two. The voters know the difference.
I won’t repeat here what I said in my DeSantis postmortem, the gist of which is that he needed a cleaner nutshell message about his platform. DeSantis, at least, didn’t dwell unduly on his biography, in the way that Scott did.
(23) Show, don’t tell. Proclaiming your conservatism is meaningless, and it’s harder to sell to the unconverted than policy proposals and accomplishments that are based on conservative thinking.
This was aimed at Romney, at the time. Trump has gone to the opposite extreme: Instead of nodding toward the buzzwords and intellectual idols of conservatism, he has never even bothered to learn the language. He’d rather be Archie Bunker than Bill Buckley. It has worked only because Republican voters had grown so cynical about promises to the ideals that they were willing to take a flier on a man who knew he had to run on how he felt rather than what he claimed to believe.
(24) Being a consistent conservative will help you more than pandering to nuts on the Right. If you can’t tell the difference between the two, don’t run.
(25) Winning campaigns attract crazy and stupid people as supporters; you can’t get a majority without them. This does not mean you should have crazy or stupid people as your advisers or spokespeople.
Normal people are still crucial to the voting base of Republicans who win elections to be governors or senators. The inability to tell the difference between conservatives and weird right-wing loons has plagued a lot of MAGA candidates (think of Blake Masters and Kari Lake). It has even, at times, done political damage to Trump, who routinely obliterates the line. The side of the DeSantis campaign that got too online was plainly driven by a failure to grasp the distinction, confusing the “energy” of “based” young men on the internet with representation among voters.
(26) Principles inspire; overly complex, specific plans are a pinata that can get picked to death. If you’re tied down defending Point 7 of a 52-point plan that will never survive contact with the Congress anyway, you lose. Complex plans need to be able to be boiled down to the principles and incentives they will operate on. The boiling is the key part.
(27) Be ready and able to explain how your plans benefit individual voters. Self-interest is a powerful thing in a democracy.
(28) If you haven’t worked out the necessary details of a policy, don’t be rushed into releasing it just because Ezra Klein thinks you don’t have a plan. Nobody will care that you didn’t have a new tax plan ready 14 months before Election Day.
(29) Don’t say things that are false just because the CBO thinks they’re true.
These are all variations on the same theme: Campaigns don’t need highly detailed policy papers, they need general outlines of policy and a simple way of explaining to voters how they will work and how they benefit voters.
(30) If you don’t have a position on an issue, say that you’re still studying the issue. Nobody needs an opinion on everything at the drop of a hat, and you’ll get in less trouble.
DeSantis suffered from a timing problem, in that Trump and his allies in the center-left and left-wing media were pounding at him for months before he formally announced. Most campaigns don’t start off facing an opponent so entrenched, and can afford to ramp up a bit more slowly.
(31) When in doubt, go on the attack against the Democratic front-runner rather than your primary opponents. Never forget that you are auditioning to run the general election against the Democrat, not just trying to be the least-bad Republican.
(32) Attacking your opponents from the left, or using left-wing language, is a mistake no matter how tempting the opportunity. It makes Republican voters associate you with people they don’t like. This is how both Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry ended up fumbling the Bain Capital attack.
Clearly, this doesn’t apply to Trump, who picked up and ran with every left-wing assault on DeSantis.
(33) Be prepared to defend every attack you make, no matter where your campaign made it. Nobody likes a rabbit puncher. Tim Pawlenty’s attack on Romneycare dissolved the instant he refused to repeat it to Romney’s face, and so did his campaign.
None of Trump’s opponents ever did get to face him on the debate stage. DeSantis never backed off an attack when asked about it, but he also missed some major opportunities to make cases against Trump in debates and ads that he was willing to personally press in interviews and stump speeches. Haley, of course, became a breakout star after going mercilessly after Ramaswamy in debates.
(34) If your position has changed, explain why the old one was wrong. People want to know how you learn. If you don’t think the old one was wrong, just inconvenient, the voters will figure that out.
Again, this doesn’t apply to Trump.
(35) If a debate or interview question is biased or ridiculous, point that out. Voters want to know you can smell a trap. This worked for Newt Gingrich every single time he did it. It worked when George H. W. Bush did it to Dan Rather. It will work for you.
It still works, and DeSantis in particular should have taken more opportunities to show how good he is at doing this. Trump prefers to just attack the press generally, but at least when he doesn’t like the premise underlying a question, he will talk about it his own way.
(36) Cultivate sympathetic media, from explicitly conservative outlets to fair-minded local media. But even in the primaries, you need to engage periodically with hostile mainstream-media outlets to stay in practice and prove to primary voters that you can hold your ground outside the bubble.
See above re DeSantis.
(37) Refuse to answer horserace questions, and never refer to “the base.” Leave polls to the pollsters and punditry to the pundits. Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remark was a textbook example of why candidates should not play pundit.
(38) Hecklers are an opportunity, not a nuisance. If you can’t win an exchange with a heckler, how are you going to win one with a presidential candidate? If you’re not sure how it’s done, go watch some of Chris Christie’s YouTube collection.
DeSantis and Ramaswamy had the most success this cycle in mixing it up with hecklers, such as DeSantis sparring with one left-wing protestor who called him a “fascist” and global-warming protestors in, of all places, New Hampshire in January.
(39) Everywhere you go, assume a Democrat is recording what you say. This is probably the case.
Eighteen years after “macaca,” twelve years after “47 percent,” and eight after the Access Hollywood tape, Most Republican campaigns have internalized this.
(40) Never whine about negative campaigning. If it’s false, fight back; if not, just keep telling your own story. Candidates who are complaining about negative campaigning smell like losing.
(41) “You did too” and “you started it” get old in a hurry. Use them sparingly.
This latter rule, again, doesn’t apply to Trump, who whines about everything and boasts about whining.
(42) If you find yourself explaining how the Senate works, stop talking. If you find yourself doing this regularly, stop running.
This was a more relevant consideration when the Senate worked at all.
(43) Never say, “The only poll that matters is on Election Day” because only losers say that, and anyway even Election Day starts a month early now. But never forget that polls can and do change.
(44) Voters do not like obviously insincere pandering, but you cannot win an election by refusing on principle to meet the voters where they are. That includes, yes, addressing Hispanic and other identity groups with a plan for sustained outreach and an explanation of how they benefit from your agenda. Build your outreach team, including liaisons and advertising in Spanish-language media, early and stay engaged as if this was the only way to reach the voters. For some voters, it is.
Shamelessness is a Trump superpower, as witnessed when he posed with a taco bowl in a tweet about Cinco de Mayo.
(45) Post something as close to daily as possible on YouTube featuring yourself — daily message, clips of your best moments campaigning, vignettes from the trail. You can’t visit every voter, but you can visit every voter’s computer or phone.
This is the daily-video rule. More candidates should try it.
(46) Never suggest that anybody would not make a good vice president. Whatever they may say, everyone wants to believe they could be offered the job.
Again, this doesn’t apply to Trump, who alternately talks about opposing candidates as running mates in order to suggest that he will defeat them, and trashes or humiliates them in ways that make it hard to paper over with the voters.
(47) If you’re not making enemies among liberals, you’re doing it wrong.
(48) If you don’t have a plausible strategy for winning conservative support, you’re in the wrong party’s primary.
(49) The goal is to win the election, not just the primary. Never box yourself in to win a primary in a way that will cause you to lose the election.
(50) Don’t bother making friends in the primary who won’t support you in the general. Good press for being the reasonable Republican will evaporate when the choice is between you and a Democrat.
(51) Some Republicans can be persuaded to vote for you in the general, but not in the primary. Some will threaten to sit out the general. Ignore them. You can’t make everyone happy. Run a strong general-election campaign and enough of them will come your way.
(52) Don’t actively work to alienate your base during the primary. Everyone expects you to do it in the general, and you gain nothing for it in the primary.
These are all variations on the point that Republicans need to nail down their own base of support, then work out from there to the general electorate — not try to trade off one for the other, or be extorted by people who may not be persuadable.
(53) Don’t save cash; it’s easier to raise money after a win than to win with cash you saved while losing. But make sure your organization can run on fumes now and then during dry spells.
This remains true, although campaigns that burn a lot of money to no effect and don’t win — as DeSantis’s SuperPAC did — don’t live to raise money again.
(54) If you’re not prepared for a debate, don’t go. Nobody ever had their campaign sunk by skipping a primary debate. But looking unprepared for a debate can, as Rick Perry learned, create a bad impression that even a decade-long record can’t overcome.
Trump this time skipped the debates entirely, which only a de facto incumbent can do. Skipping debates is bad, but imploding at a debate is worse.
(55) The Iowa Straw Poll is a trap with no upside. Avoid it. Michele Bachmann won the Straw Poll and still finished last in Iowa.
The Iowa Straw Poll did not survive after the fiasco of the 2012 cycle.
(56) Ballot-access rules are important. Devote resources early to learning, complying with them in every state. Mitt Romney didn’t have to face Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum in Virginia — even though both of them live in Virginia — because they didn’t do their homework gathering signatures.
We didn’t have major ballot-access failures this cycle, or at least they were not mistakes, although Trump wasn’t on the Nevada primary ballot and, on the other side, Joe Biden wasn’t on the New Hampshire ballot, in both cases due to power struggles.
(57) If you can’t fire, don’t hire. In fact, don’t run.
The DeSantis campaign and SuperPAC did fire people, albeit in some cases perhaps later than they should. The Trump campaign, at least this time, didn’t need to fire people.
(58) Hire people who are loyal to your message and agenda, and you won’t have to worry about their loyalty to your campaign.
Of the GOP campaigns, DeSantis had the worst problem with leaks, and that was mostly late in the game.
(59) Don’t put off doing thorough opposition research on your opponents. By the time you know who they are, the voters may have decided they’re somebody else.
(60) You can afford to effectively skip one early primary. You can’t skip more than that. You are running for a nomination that will require you to compete nationally. (Call this the Rudy Giuliani Rule.)
Haley didn’t skip Iowa, but she did take a soft approach and focus on New Hampshire. It’s unlikely that a different approach to Iowa would have helped her in New Hampshire. DeSantis did the same in reverse and did poorly enough in Iowa that he didn’t make it to the Granite State.
(61) Use polling properly. Good polling will not tell you what to believe, but will tell you how to sell what you already believe.
(62) Data and GOTV are not a secret sauce for victory. But ignoring them is a great way to get blindsided.
The DeSantis operation often seemed imprisoned by what polls and data were telling them about the persuadability of Trump supporters, and this made them timid in advertising that carried the anti-Trump themes that DeSantis was willing to deliver personally. The campaign put a ton of faith in voter mobilization, and this probably earned them a few points in Iowa, but it was not a secret sauce.
(63) Don’t plan to match the Democrats’ operations and technology, because then you’re just trying to win the last election. Plan to beat it.
(64) Political consultants are like leeches. Small numbers, carefully applied, can be good for you. Large numbers will suck you dry, kill you, and move on to another host without a backward look.
(65) Never hire consultants who want to use you to remake the party. They’re not Republicans and you’re not a laboratory rat.
(66) This is the 21st century. If you wouldn’t want it in a TV ad, don’t put it in a robocall or a mailer. Nothing’s under the radar anymore.
This is similar to the point about being recorded.
(67) Always thank your friends when they back you up. Gratitude is currency.
(68) Every leak from your campaign should help your campaign. Treat staffers who leak unfavorable things to the press the way you would treat staffers who embezzle your money. Money’s easier to replace.
(69) Getting distance from your base in the general on ancillary issues won’t hurt you; they’ll suck it up and independents will like it. Attacking your base on core issues will alienate your most loyal voters and confuse independents.
We’ll see once we get to the general election if Trump continues to throw core groups such as pro-lifers under the bus.
(70) If you are convinced that a particular running mate will save you from losing, resign yourself to losing because you’ve already lost.
(71) Don’t pick a VP who has never served in Congress or run for president in his or her own right. Even the best governors have a learning curve with national politics, and even the best foreign-policy minds have a learning curve with electoral politics. And never steal from the future to pay for the present. Your running mate should not be a Republican star in the making who isn’t ready for prime time. In retrospect, Sarah Palin’s career was irreparably damaged by being elevated too quickly to the national level.
It remains to be seen who Trump picks as his vice-presidential nominee. Mike Pence was a good choice both in the sense of being prepared for the national stage and in the sense that he fortified Trump’s support with the voters who were most apt to be skeptical of him. Everything we have heard thus far suggests that Trump now sees the Pence pick as a mistake because Pence wouldn’t go along with his election challenge on January 6, and that Trump will be looking for a loyalist who brings little else to the table.
(72) Never, ever, ever take anything for granted. Every election, people lose primary or general elections because they were complacent.
Where I’ve argued (in my postmortem column) that DeSantis was complacent was both in taking for granted the Reaganite and moderate voters who ended up deserting him for Haley. He may also have underestimated how much damage Trump could do to his reputation with no-holds-barred attacks from the left.
(73) Make a few rules of your own. Losing campaigns imitate; winning campaigns innovate.
We didn’t get much innovation this time around; Trump is trying to recreate 2016. But the next new nominee of the party will have to get there by doing new things.