Rick Wilson is a friend and has been a regular quest on my radio shows over the years. The News Service of Florida spent time with him.
By DARA KAM
THE NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA
Republican political strategist and media consultant Rick Wilson has been throwing bombs — of the political kind — for almost three decades. Since making his foray into politics on former U.S. Sen. Connie Mack’s campaign in 1988, Wilson has worked for candidates and political committees across the country.
While he was already well-known for his efforts on gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, congressional and legislative campaigns, Wilson has skyrocketed to national fame this election cycle as one of the sharpest critics of GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. The prolific and razor-tongued tweeter has captured more than 35,000 followers, and, as one of the founders of the #NeverTrump movement, frequently skewers the candidate, often with obscure references to history and pop culture. On his aboutme.com profile, Wilson, who lives in Tallahassee, had this to say about himself: “I say things on television you write about later.”
The News Service of Florida has five questions for Rick Wilson:
Q: Donald Trump has won primaries and caucuses all over the country — including in Florida, where he won in 66 of 67 counties. Polls consistently show him as the GOP favorite in the presidential race. Yet some Republicans are questioning his appeal to GOP base voters. Who are Republican base voters now, and are they different than in previous election cycles?
WILSON: Here’s what’s happening in the GOP base right now. There’s been a change in the last couple of years because the entertainment wing of the Republican Party has become very much more powerful than it was ever envisioned it was capable of becoming. The entertainment wing is talk radio and Breitbart and all these online, basically conspiracy sites that think there’s one main enemy in American politics and that’s the Republican establishment. They’re the people that think that John Boehner is just as bad as Nancy Pelosi or Mitt Romney is just as bad as Barack Obama. The entertainment wing became very, very powerful over the last few years. That’s a combination of talk radio, places like Breitbart and all of these grafter political action committees that realize they can send out the most absurd emails and get granny to send a $25 check. There’s a Muslim in the White House and that sort of thing. That confluence of events convinced a large part of the Republican base, not all of it, but a large fraction of it, around 25 percent, that the real enemy wasn’t liberals or Democrats, the real enemy was the Republican Party. So they were ripe for the picking. These people of the Republican base tend to be the less educated and less sophisticated and less aware part of our base, so they become very energized by what they think is a secret handshake they’ve finally been given. They think they’ve been given this insight into the inner workings of the real story. … So this relatively uninformed, relatively uneducated, low-information part of the Republican base was sort of primed for the Trump effect by the post-Palin era of the entertainment wing of the Republican Party. They were looking for their non-politically correct hero because they were convinced by the entertainment guys that the only thing we were really lacking was enough crazy. So Donald Trump comes along, who is demonstrably insane, who is an obvious fraud on every ideological front that you can imagine, but he’s crazy enough and he seems like he’s the uncompromising guy who is going to stick it to the establishment, stick it to the media, stick it to everybody that they think has done them wrong. That part of the Republican base has had an outsized voice in this election so far. They’ve been very influential. They’ve managed to put Donald Trump over the top, never by a majority, but always by enough. There is a baseline of people to whom his message appeals who are primed and who are less informed voters. … They hear these phrases that they’ve been taught by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity like “establishment” and “gang of eight” and they bellow them out, thinking they know what they mean, and they don’t. It doesn’t matter that they don’t because the defining characteristic is this anger that they’ve been primed and trained to have against people like me, basically. At this point, roughly 65 percent of all people who have voted in Republican primaries have voted against Donald Trump. The majority is against Trump. The majority of the GOP base is against Trump. But a plurality is all it takes to win in a field that is crowded with 15 candidates.
Q: What are Florida Republicans who don’t want Trump to get elected doing?
WILSON: There is a broad strategy right now, and that is deny Trump the nomination. Which you have to do. You have to deny Trump the nomination. You cannot let him be the nominee. And right now, we’ve reached the point where nobody’s going to get to the convention with 1,237. It’s essential at the convention to break that. It’s essential at the convention that we stop his momentum, that we get into the second ballot, because on the second ballot he starts to lose. And once he starts to lose, he’s done. … There’s no scenario where you come in and you lose the first ballot and you have more delegates coming to you on the second ballot. It doesn’t work that way. It’s just human psychology. We know that, right now, there are at least 200 delegates right that, the minute he’s done with the first ballot, are off Trump. … It will probably end up being a Cruz nomination at that point, which will be ugly. I’m not going to lie. It will be ugly. And the Trump people will lose their s—. But the sooner we get him off of our brand, and the sooner we get him off of our backs, the better off Republican candidates are, up and down the ticket, everywhere. And I have to keep reminding people, especially Trump fans, this is not about democracy. It’s not about the will of the people or popularity or any of that other s—. This is about the rules of the Republican Party. They work a certain way. You may not like it. It’s like gravity. It’s not optional. And if we get him onto the floor at the convention, and he loses the first ballot, then it becomes a slaughterhouse. And I’ve got my cleaver and apron handy.
Q: While a contested convention might appeal to “anybody-but-Trump” Republicans, is it worth the risk to the brand?
WILSON: Here’s the deal. No matter how much damage a contested convention does for the party — and we all agree it’s going to be ugly, we all agree nobody’s going to be happy about it, we all agree it’s going to get nasty as s—, we all admit this — the bigger risk of having Trump as our nominee is cataclysmic. If you have Trump as the nominee, we are going to lose and lose everything. We are going to lose the Senate. We are going to lose the House. … There is going to be a generational cataclysm. If we have Ted Cruz, it may not be a whole hell of a lot better, but it ain’t Donald Trump. It’s harder to elect a Ted Cruz than it would be a Jeb or a Marco, but it’s not impossible. With Trump, it is not possible. He will be destroyed in the general election. He will be absolutely slaughtered. … Of course, Trump people imagine he’s going to bring out all these white, working-class voters that haven’t been voting. They’re not wrong. The white, working-class voters like Donald Trump. Here’s the problem. He repels women. Republican women, college-educated Republican women, when they’re voting 70-20 Democratic this year, that would be because of Donald Trump. These are people that should be our voters. If they’re running to Donald Trump, there’s something we’re doing really wrong. … Putting Trump on as our nominee would be like saying let’s put Hannibal Lecter in charge of the commission to stop cannibalism. It’s an absurdity. It’s insanity, what we’re doing right now. It’s utterly insane.
(But so many Republicans dislike Hillary Clinton. Won’t that help the Republican nominee, even if it’s Trump?)
There’s absolutely no doubt that Hillary Clinton is a mixed bag. But she is a known quantity. She is the devil they know. And there are a lot of Republicans who are thinking, the worst case scenario with Hillary is we have to deal with Hillary for four years. The worst case scenario with Trump is you still end up with Hillary, but you also end up with Chuck Schumer as Senate majority leader. You also end up with Steny Hoyer as the House speaker. And you probably end up with a permanent new Democratic majority. That is not a good outcome for Republicans. They do not like this possibility. So there’s a little bit of a tactical question here. Is it worth destroying the party for a generation and losing everything, or do you fight Hillary Clinton tooth and nail for four years? There are no good options here. Nobody’s happy with any of these possibilities. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says yeah, let’s have Hillary Clinton name a Supreme Court justice or three.
Q: Given the enthusiasm Donald Trump has engendered in a certain portion of the Republican base, how do consultants like you get a GOP candidate out of a primary who is able to win the general?
WILSON: That is increasingly an issue, the damage Trump is doing down ballot. Because unless you have some daylight between yourself and Trump, the Democrats are going to say, just like Donald Trump, Congressman John Smith is a Republican. Now, Donald Trump is the leading Republican candidate, and Republicans believe in putting women in jail if they get an abortion. It doesn’t have to be true. The Democrats aren’t worried about that. They just have to be inflammatory enough, and the damage Trump is doing to the party is going to be very painful. If you’re running as a Trump-style candidate, you’re going to get smashed this year. Anywhere. Because if women and Hispanics are running away from Donald Trump in the way that they are, you can expect a very bad outcome if you’re a candidate without Donald Trump’s celebrity-name ID and all the other hoo-ha. There’s only one Donald Trump. And Republicans who think they’re going to run as the Donald Trump-type candidate are out of their damn minds. The general electorate is much less activated by the issues that activate the Trump voters. The general electorate doesn’t look at immigration as a panic, oh my God, hair on fire, issue. The general electorate doesn’t think we have to build a wall right now that’s 5,000 feet tall, etc. The general electorate is 53 percent women. And everybody who’s looked at the Donald Trump behavior this year, all these groups that have abandoned him in the public and private polling, those are people in the general election, that if you’re a Republican deemed Donald Trump-like, you’re going to get crushed. You’re going to get slaughtered. You can’t be an imitation of anybody, but if you’re an imitation of a guy this unpopular without any of his assets, or without any of his upsides. … He has a couple of upsides. He’s a national celebrity. People know Donald Trump. And so he gets to do this wild man act, saying s— like Mexicans are rapists and women need to be punished for having abortions. An ordinary candidate doesn’t get to do that. They’re not going to be in the same position to be able to get away with the wild s— as Trump. And nothing about Trump is normal. Nothing about Trump is standard candidate. And because of that, there’s a sense that he’s not vulnerable to things that would kill other candidates. Let me give you a hypothetical. If Brad Herold, working for (U.S. Senate candidate) Ron DeSantis, ran up and grabbed a reporter and bruised her arm, almost knocked her down, he would be in jail. And the campaign would be answering questions every single day — when are you firing your abusive, disgusting, violent, campaign thug? And because it’s Trump, Corey Lewandowski still has a job. Ordinary candidates are not Trump. They don’t get all the goodies that Trump gets. Because of that, you can’t run ideologically like Trump, because he’s all over the board. And the backlash that’s coming on him is so enormous, and it should be petrifying people.
Q: Does the new redistricting process under Fair Districts give Democrats the possibility of regaining a majority in the Legislature and within the congressional delegation?
WILSON: Republicans got rolled on redistricting. We lost in court over and over again. The folks that had the resources to fight back never took it seriously until it was too late. Now we’ve got what we deserved. There is going to be a meaningful possibility that we lose more seats in the Legislature. We’re still better at campaigning. We’re still better at candidate recruitment. We’re still better at fundraising. That might not last, though, if they start to get traction. And the reason they might start to get traction is very simple — it’s all Trump. It goes back to that again. The Democrats in this state haven’t really had anything major around which to hang their campaigns. Unless you’ve got a Barack Obama to come out for, there just hasn’t been anyone exciting to them. Well now, they’ve got somebody that lights up their base voters, African-American voters and Hispanic voters in particular, in this state. They’re hearing all the same stuff about Donald Trump that everyone else is. They’re hearing all the same horror stories and all the same awful stuff about Trump, and they’re going to have the same kind of reaction. It’s going to help the Democrats whip up turnout in the fall of 2016 unless Republicans get this a—— off of our ticket as quick as humanly possible. … I think Democrats have a meaningful chance to improve their numbers in the state Senate, but I think their ability to run campaigns and candidates has sort of atrophied over the years because we’ve beaten them so many times. Right now, we’re performing way above where we should be. Right now, we own a lot of districts in places where we shouldn’t necessarily be as competitive, but we have them. There may be a time where the numbers are a little closer just because the Democrats are able to start putting together some serious fundraising operations and serious campaign operations that make them more competitive.
