Regardless of who wins in November, Donald Trump has permanently changed the political landscape. From the day he rode down that escalator like an orange conquistador, Trump effortlessly upended half a century of common wisdom about modern presidential campaigning. Just as the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the President in 1960 gave way to The Selling of the President in 1968, we are now witnessing The Tweeting of the President. (Hard to imagine there was once a time when it was considered gauche to campaign publicly at all!)
Here are the five things Donald Trump has changed about political campaigns:
The Campaign: Welcome to The Truman Show. Trump has created a new kind of reality television. Instead of episodes in a series, there will now be 24-hour coverage of the campaigns with their own pre-planned (and even scripted) story lines playing out over days. Unlike Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show, future candidates will know they are being watched, but the show will otherwise have many of the same qualities: more cameras, more characters, more dramatic moments.
Apparatuses once thought fundamental—ground game, rapid response capabilities, policy white papers—will all take a back seat in favor of campaigns that can feed content-hungry cable news producers and build near universal name ID while offering viewers a compelling story. The Bachelor isn’t about the person who is best qualified to be a husband or has the right temperament for taking out the trash. It’s about good TV and compelling characters. In short, Jeff Zucker and Roger Ailes now have a better handle on who will win the Republican nomination in 2020 than you do.
The Candidate: Authenticity as Performance Art. Authenticity (or the appearance of it) will be foremost for a reality television candidate. Nuance will not be. As it turns out, sociopaths and narcissists have a much easier time appearing entirely authentic on television. Normal people, on the other hand, can appear stiff on camera because they have the ability to feel self-conscious. Method acting will be the new media training now that Trump has finally proven what so many failed candidates couldn’t grasp: You don’t need to be authentic, you need to act authentic. And if you don’t understand the difference, you should just go ahead and cast your 2020 vote for Kanye West. Post-Trump, candidates will need to create a compelling character for their reality TV campaign. And that character better act authentic!
The Team: Door Knocking Gone the Way of the Typewriter. Hillary Clinton is closing in on 1,000 paid staff. Donald Trump hasn’t hired 100. And of those, few Trump staffers seem capable of tying their shoelaces without creating opposition intent on preventing other campaign staff from wearing any shoes at all. Yet Trump was able to beat 16 other candidates more or less single-handedly, and he is heading into the general election without a communications or political director. Even if he loses, Trump has killed off an entire generation of Republican political operatives who won’t have the chance to gain experience on a general election presidential campaign. While this may strike some voters as actually a good thing, the hundreds of young people who fill junior positions across the country on a presidential campaign are also the future party loyalists, some day filling roles in county and state parties, running for town councils, and serving as surrogates every time they talk to their neighbors. If Hillary wins in November, the 2020 campaign just got that much more difficult for Republicans to take down an incumbent president. And if Trump wins, it may herald the end of becoming a GOP campaign aide as we know it—or the rise of the political television producer who scripts story arcs the way communications directors used to make message calendars.
The Issues: Think Tanks? Think Again. Before Trump, the policy experts at Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute populated our political debates with statistics and appeals to authority. These are the wonks who explained why your tax, immigration, or minimum wage plan was better than their tax, immigration, or minimum wage plan. But when it turns out the correct answer to “But who will pay for it?” is “Mexico,” a country whose per capita GDP is just above Botswana, I think the policy experts can pack it in.
The Events: The Death of Retail Politics. Candidates never liked retail stops in the first place. These are the eye-roll inducing campaign events at the local hardware store where an exhausted candidate spontaneously drops by after sending out a media advisory to 700 reporters and then fakes an interest in their artisan wind chimes. In a world before cable news, this made for a good photo in the local paper, but today you are more likely to see television pundits agonize over whether the candidate can eat a slice of Casey’s pizza in a way befitting the leader of the free world. 16 candidates did retail stops. The other guy won. Thus endeth the retail stop.
Sarah Isgur Flores is a Republican strategist who has worked on three Republican presidential campaigns, including most recently as the Deputy Campaign Manager for Carly Fiorina. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and Harvard Law School.
