Synopsis
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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À propos de l?auteur
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.
Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.
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 didn’t work to win the Senate and it barely won the House. We need to provide an argument about what we will do that’s better than what Biden has done.
This probably won’t surprise you, but I humbly believe that if we could go back in time and I could be inside Donald Trump’s body for the 2020 presidential debates against Joe Biden and answer every question for him, Trump would have won comfortably in 2020. I really do. Especially in the first debate against Biden, Trump was the worst advocate possible for all of his policies.
But the reason I’m writing a book to guarantee a landslide is to eliminate the funny business, the fickle hand of fate that can swing elections one way or the other based on how many floods hit Atlanta precincts while they’re still counting ballots.
I don’t want 2024 to be close.
I want to go to bed on election night in 2024, probably drunk, without having to worry about absentee ballots in Wisconsin or to wait for weeklong tallies in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. I want Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, and Joy Reid to be crying live on-air by 11 p.m. eastern.
I want a landslide because if you lose a close election—or a close game—you convince yourself you could have won if only you’d just executed a bit better.
But do you know what happens when you get your ass kicked?
You don’t blame the play calling or the officiating or a single play for your loss. You recognize that your playbook is fundamentally flawed. And let’s be clear, the Democrat playbook is broken. They are running the Wing T in an era of the spread offense. (For those of you who aren’t football zealots, the Wing T was a football offense that existed before passing overtook football. That’s the Democrat playbook; it’s antediluvian.) But Republicans haven’t taken advantage of this.
Nor have they won a transformative electoral victory that ends all the suspense.
At least not yet.
That’s because the Republican playbook has been even worse than the Democrat playbook for most of the twenty-first century. We don’t run good plays, and even when we do, we turn the ball over and let Democrats run out the clock.
Hell, Joe Biden won in 2020 barely leaving his basement.
But it’s not just Republican ineptitude. For most of this century neither party has really been able to win a massive, transformative victory.
Think about it. Every presidential race in the twenty-first century, with the exception of one—Barack Obama’s triumph over John McCain in 2008—has left every American, whether Democrat, Republican, or independent, convinced their side could have won if only some small issue had been altered. Squint your eyes tightly enough and Al Gore wins in 2000—heck, maybe Gore really did win in 2000—John Kerry triumphs in 2004, Mitt Romney is president in 2012, Hillary Clinton in 2016, and Donald Trump, I know, I know, wins reelection in 2020. All of these outcomes are eminently reasonable potential results of our elections if only a tiny difference in electoral math had occurred.
Yes, they didn’t happen, but they could have happened with a subtle alteration of the electoral math. If it sometimes feels to you as if we’ve fine-tuned our election to such an extent that we might as well walk up to the front porch of a midsize home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and ask the fifty-six-year-old husband and wife living in that house to tell us whether they are voting for the Democrat or Republican candidate for president this year, you’re not that far from the truth.
There simply aren’t very many swing voters in swing states.
Change just 20,000 votes in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia out of the 156 million cast for president in 2020 and Donald Trump and Joe Biden would have tied 269–269 in the electoral count, tossing the election to the House of Representatives, where Trump would have won the election after the state congressional members broke the tie in his favor. And if you think Democrats wouldn’t have stormed the Capitol and fomented their own “insurrection” if that tiebreak scenario happened, you didn’t pay attention to the entirety of the 2020 “mostly peaceful” protests for “social justice.”
Remember, they didn’t board up cities all over America because they were worried Biden would win; they boarded up all American cities in case Trump won reelection. Democrats would have 100 percent stormed the Capitol, in my opinion, if Trump had flipped 20,000 more votes in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia and won a tiebreaker in the Electoral College in the House of Representatives.
My point is that each party is committed to an ironclad electoral strategy that leaves us all bleary-eyed the night after an election because we stayed up all night to see what a couple of people in Scranton decided to do with their presidential vote. That’s how fine-tuned the electoral calculus has become. Each side, essentially, is committed to an election plan that offers the narrowest possible path to victory. And when defeat comes, that defeat isn’t, generally speaking, accepted with magnanimity, it’s immediately believed to be rooted in cheating. The same Democrats lecturing us today about Republicans threatening the sanctity of our democracy with their 2020 election denials spent four years saying Trump’s 2016 election was the product of Russian collusion and conspiracy.
The only way to change this paradigm is with an electoral victory that’s seismic in nature, one that both sides have to accept, a victory so substantial that no shenanigans can alter the outcome.
This is why coming to politics from the world of sports is helpful.
I’ve seen all of this before. Frankly, it’s what happens in any sporting event that comes down to the final couple of plays when an official is forced to make a controversial call that determines the outcome of a game. Our political elections come down to field goal kicks, and those field goal opportunities often come down to whether an official does or does not call pass interference on the final drive of the game.
Every presidential election is the 2019 NFC Championship Game between the Los Angeles Rams and New Orleans Saints—sorry, Saints fans—all over again. One call makes the difference because the margin is so tight. (I’m still bitter over this outcome because I lost, and I’m ashamed to admit this, $30,000 betting alongside my friend cousin Sal for the Saints to win this game. Yes, thirty thousand dollars because an official blew a readily apparent pass-interference call that anyone with functional eyesight clearly saw. Forgive me, this one still stings.)
It’s Super Bowl LVII, where every Philadelphia Eagles fan reading this right now is screaming that the final holding penalty on their defensive back—which allowed the Kansas City Chiefs to run out the clock and kick a field goal—was wrongly made. Every Cincinnati Bengals fan is also screaming that they were screwed in the AFC Championship Game.
My point: no one argues about officiating calls in blowouts!
So how do you break this election cycle of close wins and close losses and end all the complaining about rigged elections? It requires taking a risk, and following a game plan that might look risky in the short term but is brilliant in the long term. You have to disrupt the existing political calculus, and you have to do it in a way where the vast majority of the voters are being served. And I believe it’s actually not that difficult to do.
It just requires bravery and clarity of purpose.
In fact, Donald Trump started to do it, but he didn’t do it enough; Trump wasn’t enough of a disrupter to actually create a landslide victory for Republicans. To be fair, he might have won a landslide in 2020 without Covid, which I’ll discuss later, but Covid was the wild card that made 2020 winnable for Democrats. Otherwise, I believe, Trump would have won reelection based on a great economy. But even Trump, who remade the Republican Party with his win in 2016, didn’t go far enough to create a lasting political legacy. It takes blowout wins to change the country for generations.
In theory, either political party could commit to winning a landslide victory, but everyone is so afraid of losing the voters they already have that they aren’t willing to take a risk to gain far more voters than they have today. And why would Democrats change considering they’ve won seven of the last eight elections? The disruptive party is almost always the loser, the team that hasn’t executed a win yet.
It’s not a coincidence that most football ingenuity comes from the upstarts, the challengers, the underdogs. The teams that have been losing develop a new style of offense or defense. The incumbent powers evolve the slowest, which is why the biggest American businesses eventually become obsolete.
The fear of change is commonplace in all facets of life. It’s called risk aversion. Most people fear losing what they already have more than they crave attaining more. I might have a screw loose in my head, but I’ve worked to try to eliminate fear from my life. I was an incredibly fearful kid. I could never fall asleep at night because I was always convinced people were going to break into our house and murder us. I spent years expecting to be murdered, every night. The fact that my bedroom was the first one you passed in our family’s hallway meant I was doomed to die first. No one would hear me scream.
Overcome with terror in the middle of the night, I would leap out of bed and sprint into my parents’ bedroom, where I would climb up between the two of them. I did this for years, until I was twelve years old. My parents even started joking with me about how often I jumped into their bed, asking where we were all going to go on our honeymoon when I got married. Sometimes—and this is even funnier now that I have kids of my own—I even used to crawl in bed with other people’s parents when I got scared sleeping over at friends’ houses. (Some of those other people’s parents are even reading this book right now—hi, Pam; hi, Tim; hi, Susan! Yes, I really grew up and now do TV and radio and write books. America’s amazing!)
Overcoming risk aversion in my own life was an incredible battle. And it didn’t end when I hit adulthood. I was in my twenties when I really, seriously conquered fear in my own life and started to become comfortable analyzing risk and taking chances.
But once I did, I saw opportunity everywhere. Conquering fear in my own life helped me see how much fear there was everywhere and how many people, even successful ones, were totally paralyzed by fear. Indeed, sometimes success is a great paralyzer. Because once you have some measure of success, it can make you even more risk-averse than before. When you don’t have much, it’s easier to take risks because you don’t have a lot to lose. But what about once you have a house and a good job? Then taking that next risky step can be virtually impossible. Young lawyers experience this early in our careers. We even have a name for it: the golden handcuffs. Yes, you’re making good money, often for the first time in your life—aka the golden handcuffs, but that good money can keep you from taking the risks that you otherwise would to find a more fulfilling career. It’s why every lawyer in the country, including all of you reading this right now, has a fantasy job, one they would actually prefer to be doing if they could.
That’s why back in the fall of 2006 I left the full-time practice of law to write a book about traveling around to every Southeastern Conference (SEC) football stadium.
Do you know how many people have ever made that career change, going from practicing law to writing a book about a college football road trip?
Zero.
Literally I am the only one.
If I’d been worried about what other people thought or had been worried about losing what I already had, I would have never taken this risk. But I wasn’t excited about practicing law and I was excited about writing the book on Southeastern Conference football. (The book is still out there, Dixieland Delight, and it’s still a fun read; you should check it out if you haven’t already.)
So I wrote the book and now I’m a hundred-millionaire. (Again, I say humbly.)
I would have never taken this risk if I feared failure. And guess what? What if I had failed? What if I’d been wrong about being able to make a living in sports media and gone back to practicing law? At least I would have taken the chance. Once I had the law degree, “failure” just meant I’d keep doing what I was already doing. There actually wasn’t very much risk at all.
If you’re reading this book right now and you’re not doing something because you’re afraid you’re going to fail—especially if you’re young and don’t have kids—what in the world are you afraid of? Don’t be a pussy, #dbap, go for it.
I’ll give you another quick story that makes this point as well. When I first started working on sports radio in Nashville, our local sports station was successful. But it wasn’t as successful, in my mind, as it could be.
But no one wanted to rock the boat. They didn’t really want to risk losing the audience that we already had. The overall mindset was to just avoid making a mistake and leave well enough alone. We were constantly warned about how losing listeners for any reason would lead to our ratings tanking. (Advertising rates are based on the number of listeners you have, so losing listeners would be destructive to the business of sports talk radio.) That fear of failure stifled creativity in my mind and, even worse than that, it created really boring programming.
Early in my sports radio tenure, in the summer of 2009 legendary Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre came out of retirement and decided he was going to play for the Minnesota Vikings. This was a huge story in sports, as you can well imagine and may recall. Soon after this return, Favre was accused, unfortunately, of sending unsolicited penis pics to a female employee of the New York Jets, where Favre had played for one season in 2008. Right after that story broke, Favre, an aging quarterback at this point, did a press conference where he talked about how many different body parts he had that were hurting.
But he tried to avoid addressing the penis pics allegation, even as he discussed the health of his other body parts in great detail.
We played the live audio of that Favre press conference, and then I had our radio producer stop every few seconds and instead of talking about his injured body part, I would talk about how Favre’s penis felt instead of whatever body part he was addressing. I probably did it for a couple of minutes. The point was to satirize that while everyone was talking about the penis pics scandal, Favre was talking about every other body part.
As sports talk radio bits go, it was pretty funny. The great thing about live radio, in general, is that it isn’t planned. It’s live. There’s no script. You just have to trust your instincts about what makes good radio. Joking about Brett Favre’s penis during an otherwise boring radio press conference was, in my opinion, good radio.
But complaints immediately flooded into the radio station because I’d said the word penis too many times. Our phone lines were on fire and everyone wanted to weigh in with an opinion. Some people in this scenario would run from controversy, but I know good radio and knew that taking angry calls about my use of the word penis was radio gold. (I’ve always said the number one test for good radio is whether someone will stay in their car when they reach their destination. If you’ve been at work all day and you pull into your garage and don’t want to leave the car because you want to know what’s going to happen next? That’s great radio. I still believe the best radio segment I’ve ever done was when we had two girls who got in a catfight at a Nashville horse race call in, and I interviewed them like it was 60 Minutes. I should have gotten a Pulitzer for that interview. Most of you right now are thinking, I’d like to hear that interview. Of course you would. Because it was great radio.)
Anyway, some callers were furious that I would use the word penis on the radio, but almost all of them were using the word penis in their calls to complain about me using the word penis. Eventually an older man with an impeccable southern accent called in to question my use of the word penis on the radio because his wife was in the car with him and she had been scandalized by my behavior.
I told this gentleman that I respected his opinion and wanted to ensure that I would never use a word that would offend him on the radio again. I told him I had a list of words for body parts in front of me and would go through them one by one to decide what the appropriate line for radio behavior was. (I didn’t actually have a list, but I’m pretty good on the fly.)
So I started with the word bottom.
“Sir,” I said, “what if I used the word bottom on the radio. Would that be okay?”
There was a long pause.
Finally our southern gentleman responded in his long drawl, “That would be borderline.”
And just like that, to the extent anyone had disagreed with me, I had them all back on my side. Because no one could really say the word bottom was unacceptable to say on the radio in 2009. Whatever the standard was for acceptable vocabulary, this caller had missed his mark.
I always liked taking calls on sports radio because most of the people who were upset about something I had said would tell on themselves if you let them talk with you long enough on the radio. That’s because the overwhelming majority of people in the country are reasonable. And, significantly, they also recognize reasonableness when they hear it. Just about everyone, as we’ll discuss in a bit, hates cancel culture, and when you actually force the people who want to cancel things to make their case these people generally lose the argument.
But the old man’s call didn’t mean the story was over.
Back in 2009, we had a new people meter in the market—this meter measured actual listener behavior as opposed to doing ratings based on a paper diary, which was the old way of tallying listeners. The number of people who had these people meters was tiny, so only a few people in each market would determine what the entire city’s radio ratings were. It turned out that with an actual meter on, people listened to classical music way less than they claimed in a paper diary. Who knew?
Our boss, whom I loved working for, emailed me after the penis radio incident.
And I swear to God, this is the actual email I received on Wednesday, August 10, 2009. I still have it in my inbox.
The subject line:
Penis feedback
And this was the entire email:
You know how I feel about it. It’s not overtly offensive, but you’ve got to understand the total audience.
I was just in a meeting that showed me that on average, 5 listeners represent your entire audience. 5 TOTAL PEOPLE.
If those 5 people are put off, you lose your entire audience.
In a month, I’m going to show you what it did to your listening audience.
Here’s what I’m getting…
I know you have been bombarded with comments about the Three Hour Lunch program but I would be regretful if I too didn’t comment. The continuous use of “Penis” was childish but not the real issue. The real issue is the disrespect to listeners who were bold enough to complain, especially the 70 year old man. Mrs. Grissoms can’t be happy. Always been a proud listener of the shows but today I lost some respect for The Zone.
YOUR ENDLESS PENIS COMMENTS WILL COST YOU MANY MANY LISTENERS YOU WILL BEFIRED! [sic]
You have lost a 3 hour lunch listener. I know penis is not a foul word but I don’t want to hear it repeated several times during the Brent [sic] Farve [sic] press conference with my young kids in the car with me. It was rude of the 3 hour lunch crew to talk over the press confrence [sic] and say what they did during it.
I quote “how my penis feels good” who wants to hear that on the radio.
These were representative samples of the deluge of emails my boss was getting. If you think these are bad, you should have seen what happened when I went on local Birmingham radio back in 2007 and suggested the University of Alabama should replace fired football coach Mike Shula with the disinterred remains of Bear Bryant, the only person who could satisfy the Alabama faithful. (I really did this. My buddy Lance Taylor, still doing shows in Alabama, says people still talk about this. The joke ended up being on me, however, because Alabama hired Nick Saban and my Tennessee Vols went on to lose for fifteen straight years to him until last year’s glorious win in Knoxville.)
I responded to my boss’s email about the anger over my use of the word penis by guaranteeing that our audience would go up and asking a question: Why do we only talk about losing the audience we already have? Why don’t we spend more time talking about getting an audience we don’t already have?
Now, this was in 2009, early in my radio career, but what do you think happened? Our radio show ratings skyrocketed. Everyone was talking about our segment and the penis controversy. We couldn’t have bought the free advertising. And the people who claimed they were offended? They were the most likely to keep listening, because they wanted to know what I might say next.
To his credit, my boss at the station, Brad Willis, who had hired me and was a big fan of my content, never complained about any other segment I ever did in local radio once he got the ratings data back. He understood good radio and he saw that we were expanding the audience in ways that we never had before.
He’d just been doing what most people do in business, politics, or sports—when you have success, protect it. Don’t risk the dollar that’s already in your pocket.
Now, I was young at this point in my radio career and didn’t have many dollars in my pocket, but one lesson I’ve learned in media, and already suspected back then, is this: as long as you aren’t facing jail time, all publicity is good publicity. (And Donald Trump might even prove this wrong with the charges being brought against him.)
It’s difficult to cut through the daily noise and make people care about your opinion on anything. Having people talking about something they heard, read, or saw, whether good or bad, is the best free advertising that exists anywhere.
I’ve never set out to intentionally create controversy, but honesty is so rare that if you truly say what you think every single day, people seek you out.
By the next year we had the highest ratings for a sports talk radio show anywhere in the country. Our audience surged to levels it had never attained before, to levels our bosses didn’t even think were possible. Why? Because if you’re trying to protect what you’ve already got, you’re going to lose. You have to always be advancing, never retreating.
Otherwise you will never grow.
If you are making arguments about 2020, you aren’t advancing, you’re fighting a rearguard action. Elections are about the future. You don’t win by continuing to fight a race you already lost. That game’s over.
Forever.
Which brings us back to my election strategy. There’s too much fear in politics. It reminds me of my early radio career: success breeds inertia. Everyone is afraid of losing the voters they do have. That’s loser thinking.
Sure, you may lose some voters by changing your strategy, but guess what? You will gain far more than you lose. And most of the people who claim they’re leaving? They stay with you, too. Where else are they going to go?
But the best part of it all is, you end up with a better product.
Our radio show was better after the fear was gone. When you give people the freedom to take risks, you benefit. I think the same lesson of me saying “penis” on the radio can apply to politics, too. In fact, it applies even better.
I was already at a successful radio station, so the fear there was that they would blow up something that worked; they were already winning, I was just trying to get them to win bigger. But, let’s be honest, Republicans have lost seven of the last eight national elections when it comes to the popular vote. What in the world are you afraid of? You’re already losing elections. You’re the group that should be challenging the existing paradigm, disrupting the existing game plan, trying something new. The Democrats are locked in. The team that’s winning never changes strategy. They just keep running the same plays until one day they get their ass kicked by the insurgency.
Which brings me to a lesson I’ve learned about politics in a relatively short period of time. Most politicians are incredibly fearful people. They’re terrified of losing an election so badly that they hope no one notices them while they’re in office.
I just don’t get this at all.
Again, maybe I’m just a weird unicorn here, but if I lost a political election, do you know how much different my life would be from what it was before?
There would be zero difference!
I’d still have a pretty good life. As I wrote earlier, I’m not doing these jobs because I have to do them. I’m doing them because I enjoy them and think I can make a difference in a positive way in this country.
I tell my wife all the time that at some point I’m going to take my phone and throw it as far as I can into the ocean and be unreachable.
She doesn’t think I’ll ever do it.
But if I could make the country sane again, I’d step out of the political arena in a heartbeat and go back to doing sports full-time. Hell, I’d retire and just travel the world and you guys would never hear from me again. But I keep looking around waiting for people to say the things I’m saying and almost no one is saying them. Every now and then I wonder if I’m the crazy person.
I just don’t see how anything I’m saying is remotely controversial.
I think it’s all just basic, common sense.
One of the real problems we have in this country is we have a ton of politicians who literally could do no other job except for being a politician. I mean, think about it for a minute. There is not one job at our Outkick website that Joe Biden could do.
As a bare minimum, shouldn’t we require success in some part of life other than politics before we get people involved in politics? If you haven’t succeeded in anything in life, why do I want you making decisions for the country?
There needs to be less fear of failure in politics. Yes, you could run for elective office and lose. That’s a consequence of every election, just like there’s a consequence of every sporting event: one person wins and the other loses.
But so what?
Losing isn’t the worst thing that can happen to you. The worst thing that can happen to you is to be so afraid of losing that you take no risks. Trust me, I know—I used to run and jump into bed with my parents because I was convinced I was going to get murdered every night while I was sleeping.
And it was no way to live!
Especially not for my parents.
Side note one: I totally thought all my kids would be terrified to sleep by themselves, too, but none of them had any issues with sleep at all.
Side note two: Not only was I terrified that I would get murdered while sleeping, but I also was a big sleepwalker. In fact, to this day I regularly get out of bed and sleepwalk. I’ll even open doors and run outside sometimes, convinced that someone is chasing me.
Just the other day I ran outside my house, just in my boxer shorts, and woke up only because it was so cold outside. Once, in law school, I slept-ran outside into the parking lot, where I crouched behind my car because I was convinced someone was chasing me.
It was the middle of the night and for some reason the maintenance guy was out walking around, too. It would have been really funny if he’d been sleepwalking, too, but instead he just said, “You okay, man?”
And I just sort of nodded and walked back to my apartment, nearly naked, shivering in the Nashville night.
I also have regular nightmares that there are snakes in our bed. I’m not sure anyone hates snakes more than me. I’m a total snakist. On the old radio show we used to debate whether there was any woman hot enough to date who had snakes as pets. My answer was no. If a woman has a pet snake, I’m turning around and walking right out of the house.
To this day, my wife will regularly roll over and say, when she sees me sprinting out of our bed and yelling uproariously in fear, “There are no snakes in the bed, Clay. You are sleepwalking.”
Imagine how used to me she is if in the middle of the night I scream out there are snakes in the bed and she’s totally calm and telling me we’ll all be fine.
But also, what happens if one day there really are snakes in the bed?!
It’s a total boy-who-cried-wolf scenario.
My sleep issues notwithstanding, I’m here to win landslide elections.
And Republicans are the only party that can win by a landslide in 2024 because Democrats aren’t willing to take any real risks. Democrats have won seven of the last eight elections. They just sit back and run the same game plan: call Republicans racist and run up the votes.
Democrats are so cocky now it feels like they just trot out crazy-ass things to say to see what they can get away with. I mean, good Lord, Democrats are actually arguing that men can get pregnant now. Why are they making that argument? Because they are terrified of the transgender community turning on them. Their identity-politics-focused party is unable to disrupt their election calculus. Plus, let’s be honest, it’s fair for Democrats to argue that they don’t need to change anything. After all, they’re the ones who are winning.
But just as Bill Clinton looked around in 1992 and realized that a new Democratic Party had to ascend (remember, at that point Democrats had lost the popular vote in 1968, 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988—their only win was Jimmy Carter in the Watergate-fueled 1976 election) Republicans now need to embrace a new party platform. Republicans, increasingly, are becoming the party of sanity. But in order to win a landslide election, a Ronald Reagan–like destruction of their opponents, the modern-day Republican Party tent has to become even broader than it is today.
The Democrats are still winning, but they have a gargantuan branding problem. Namely, most Americans of all races hate woke politics. Which is why the moment is ripe for a Republican breakthrough. So how do Republicans brand themselves in a way that helps win an election landslide in 2024?
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