Inhaltsangabe
Popular radio host and bestselling author Clay Travis offers a unique playbook approach to politics, outlining how Republicans can win elections and win back the country through the lens of sports metaphors.
Republicans are in a losing period. The last election should have been a wake-up call for the current moment. If the GOP wants to turn its luck around, it’s time to toss the old playbook and find new ways to win elections and attract enthusiastic voters.
Like a well-timed coaching hire, Clay Travis is here to break down exactly how the Republican party can turn a few losing seasons into a championship run. Whether it’s advice on how to exploit the weakest link on the opposing team, or how to capitalize on fast break opportunities in the press, Travis provides a surefire gameplan inspired by winning strategies in sports that will finally give conservatives an edge over the competition.
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Clay Travis is the cohost of The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. He is the founder and president of OutKick, and is also a podcast host, TV anchor, columnist, editor, and the author of Republicans Buy Sneakers Too, On Rocky Top, and Dixieland Delight. Follow him on Twitter @ClayTravis.
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Chapter 1: When You’re Losing, Change the Playbook CHAPTER 1 WHEN YOU’RE LOSING, CHANGE THE PLAYBOOK
When you are losing just about every game, your first goal is this: stop getting your ass kicked. And the way you stop getting your ass kicked is by first acknowledging everything that you’ve been doing is wrong. For much of the past thirty years Republicans have been the huge losers. You can’t win until you acknowledge that you’re losing, and that’s what Republicans have been doing, pretty much, since 1992.
My playbook is designed to end the ass kickings. There are many issues that Republicans are concerned about—tax policy, the national debt, things that I have strong opinions on, too—but they aren’t landslide issues, issues that 60 percent or more of the American public will agree with going forward. What I’m focused on in this book is creating a landslide. I don’t want to win in 2024 by a proverbial last-second field goal. I want a complete and total evisceration, a rout, a beatdown that leaves Democrats crying in the corner clutching their Dr. Anthony Fauci pillows. But before you can win, you have to eliminate the ass kickings. The Republican program is not, right now, a successful team. It’s Alabama before Nick Saban arrived, the New England Patriots before Bill Belichick (and Tom Brady). It’s a freaking dumpster fire of presidential election incompetence. Hell, we just lost to Joe Fucking Biden… and now Democrats are so cocky they are going to run Joe Biden again, planning on a presidential sequel election, Weekend at Bernie’s II!
Since 1992 the Democratic Party has won seven of the eight presidential elections in the popular vote. The only Republican to win the popular vote and the presidency in the past thirty years was George W. Bush in 2004.
In more than two hundred years of American presidential politics no political party has had a stretch of dominance that has run for this long. Whatever you think of Donald Trump’s presidency—I happen to think it was pretty fantastic—he lost the popular vote in 2016 and in 2020. He won a very close race in 2016 and lost a very close election in 2020. If Trump is the nominee in 2024, it is likely that the election will again come down to a tiny difference.
I’m not going to spend a ton of time in this book discussing the 2020 election because the 2022 midterm election showed us that whatever you think about the 2020 election’s outcome, just about every major candidate who spent substantial time talking about 2020 lost in the 2022 midterms. In battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada, and Arizona, places that Republicans absolutely, positively have to win in 2024, all the candidates who focused most aggressively on the 2020 election being stolen lost. That’s because independent voters—and also many Republican voters in these states—overwhelmingly reject the idea that the 2020 election was stolen, and even Republican voters won’t support people who deny the 2020 election results. In 2022, Kari Lake, who I think was an absolutely phenomenal candidate, lost the Arizona governor’s race by 17,000 votes. Katie Hobbs, who is a joke of a candidate, even for a Democrat, got 50.3 percent of the vote and Kari Lake got 49.7 percent. That loss—and I know, I know, there are always arguments that elections are stolen, trust me, I get all your emails and Facebook messages, but the courts have rejected those claims in 2020 and in 2022—featured independents turning against Lake, but many Republicans didn’t vote for her, either. Lake got 40,000 fewer Republican votes than down-ballot Republican candidates did in Maricopa County, where the majority of Arizonans live. While people can fume about Democrats and independent voters, if Republicans had voted for Lake, she would have won comfortably. Indeed, the overall turnout of voters was Republican +9 in Arizona—PLUS NINE—yet both Lake and Senate candidate Blake Masters lost their statewide races.
And it wasn’t just in Arizona.
Despite the fact that I am a University of Tennessee football fan, I campaigned heavily for former University of Georgia running back Herschel Walker in his Senate run in Georgia. Herschel narrowly lost on November 8, 2022, and then narrowly lost again in the runoff in December. (Georgia requires runoffs when neither statewide candidate for office receives over 50 percent of the vote.) Significantly, Walker lost despite the fact that every other Republican running for statewide office in Georgia, the other seven Republicans, won comfortably, including Georgia governor Brian Kemp, who smoked Stacey Abrams by nearly eight full points.
The numbers on election night were stark. Kemp beat Abrams 2,111,572 to 1,813,673 in the Georgia governor’s race, a margin of 297,899. Compare that with Walker, who lost to Democrat Raphael Warnock, 1,946,117 to 1,908,442, on election night, a margin of 37,675 in favor of Warnock. That margin increased to nearly 100,000 for Warnock in the runoff. That’s because voters, many of them Republicans, split their tickets for Georgia governor and US Senate races. Walker got roughly 200,000 fewer votes on election night in 2022 than Kemp and the rest of the Republicans on the statewide ticket did.
Now, Walker was, I believe, unfairly attacked throughout the 2022 race for past issues, but he was also directly connected to Trump’s allegations of 2020 election fraud, which also cost Republicans two Senate seats in 2020. (Democrats won both Georgia US Senate seats in runoff elections in 2020.) Walker didn’t lose, however, because of Democrats; he lost because Republicans didn’t support him the same way they supported the other seven statewide candidates in 2022.
You can argue that Warnock was simply a good candidate and that’s why Walker lost. But the numbers don’t bear that out. Warnock won with substantially less voting support in 2022 than he received in 2020. Warnock was ripe to be beaten. Republicans just didn’t manage to do it. Because Republicans split their tickets. The Georgia US Senate race, in my opinion, wasn’t won by Democrats, it was lost by Republicans.
You may still be furious about 2020—heck, I’m still furious about 2020, too, because the result has been Joe Biden’s disastrous tenure—but the data on independent voters and many Republicans reflects that they don’t want to look back. They want a vision for the future. So if Donald Trump is the nominee in 2024 and he focuses backward on 2020, he’s going to lose.
Period.
I don’t want to lose, which is why I’m going to be sure Trump and his team, along with every other Republican running for president, get early copies of this book!
This book is a game plan for winning a substantial majority in 2024. If the Republican nominee adopts my suggestions, he or she will win comfortably. If they don’t, I think they’ll lose.
Again.
And Democrats will have won the popular vote for eight of the past nine elections.
Full disclosure: I don’t want this book to be overwhelmed by Donald Trump and his politics. I voted for Trump in 2020. He should have won that election because Joe Biden was an awful candidate with bad policy ideas. The past several years have proven that Biden is a disaster, the worst president in any of our lives. But just pointing out how bad Biden has been isn’t enough. That was the game plan in 2022 and it...
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