GOP ad maker Rick Wilson was one of the first prominent Republican voices to oppose Donald Trump all the way back in 2015. He's now part of the Lincoln project, a right leaning pro democracy group. It's raised the alarm about the stakes of the 2024 presidential election, when Trump will likely be on the ballot. Once again. I'm Kansas reflect your opinion editor, Clay wire stone, and Wilson joins me on the podcast today to talk about that upcoming election, how the Kansas abortion vote shaped national perceptions and what we all should be looking for in the months ahead. Thank you so much for being on the Kansas reflector podcast.
I am delighted to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.
I'm going to start with the most obvious question. I just read your essay, comparing this election to a rocket sled barreling along out in the desert, I'd encourage all of our listeners to read it. But it's going to be Joe Biden versus Donald Trump in 2024. Right? Why are so many folks resistance to understanding that?
Look, I think there are two things here. The first is that that there's a natural desire to want to have a political horse race, there's a natural desire to want to have a contest, even where one doesn't really exist. That's just a sort of feature of the American political media ecosystem. We all know how this is going to turn out. We knew from the beginning, there wasn't going to be a big Democratic primary. We knew from the beginning, that Donald Trump had a dominant position inside the Republican Party at every single level that mattered. And so as much as people would like for there to be another, another situation, there's not as much as they would love to have, you know, a big, messy Democratic primary or big, messy Republican primary. You know, the Democratic primaries is not existent. Because he's an incumbent president, and the Republican primary, you know, if you've got Donald Trump out there with 50 55% of the vote already, and everyone else hovering in the single digits are the high single digits. That's the ballgame. This is this is the, you know, it's one thing to want something politically, but it's another thing to acknowledge the realities of where we stand in the country. And the reality is, it's going to be a Trump and Biden shootout. I mean, short of some massive externality where one of them drops dead, or, that's, that's where we're at, as, at this moment.
I also wonder if people misunderstand aggressive alpha male guys, which, frankly, both Trump and Biden are in their own ways, right? I think they're not going to say I can't do this. They're not gonna say I'm taking myself out of this. They want to run. They want to win.
Yeah, they do. And look, if you were an ordinary candidate driven by ordinary impulses, and you were under four indictments with 91 separate charges, state and federal, you would think maybe I should take a breather, maybe I should take a break on this. Maybe I should do something else this year. maybe now's a good time to look at real estate in Portugal. But you know, we're not there. He doesn't see he's not driven in that way. It's not motivated that way. And so we're going to end up with a, a, you know, an inevitable desire for him to retain office or to require office rather, because he wants the legal protection, the political protection, the the the adulation, the financial opportunities that brings them and with President Biden, you're gonna have a guy who believes, I think correctly, he's doing a good job. And he was who was, you know, driven to serve in at that, at that level? And so I you know, I don't I don't, the motivations are not inexplicable, there are explicable motivations on both for both candidates.
Sure. So looking nationally, then going into 2024. What is concerning you right now?
Look, what concerns me the most right now is a couple of of, I think the media right now across the country would really, really, really, really love a Republican horse race. They're not getting it. And because they're not getting that horse race, they are beginning to try to to make a race between Biden and Trump about Biden's age and Hunter Biden. And and, and, and, and with with that narrative, it once again brings it away from talking about the accomplishments policy, the governing philosophy, and puts it back into that into that, you know, sort of yelling, screaming Fox media mold, that that frankly, empowers the the Trump side of the equation I think a lot more than people really under really estimate
And you've also been vocal in talking about the the potential threat posed by this no label third, this third party, no labels, branded effort. Can you talk a little bit about backer
and I think it's important we say that it's a branded effort. Because the reality is that no labels is now staffed and manned largely by people who came from the NRC, the Republican Senate committee, Mitch McConnell's world, the Republican National Committee, and a variety of financial people that are backing it are all major donor Republicans. People like Harlan Crowe, who is the Clarence Thomas, who is funded Clarence Thomas, his lifestyle and others. And so it's a it's a staff by Republicans. It's funded by Republicans. It's run by, you know, Nancy Jacobson, and Mark Penn, who famously word Democrats, but in Mark's case, you know, he spent the last he spent the Trump administration on Fox News as a contributor, praising Donald Trump every day. And and so, you know, people who have looked at their effort, understand using their own math using their own statistics that they that they're promoting, this will almost certainly split the vote in such a way that it if reelected, Donald Trump, so I'm not I don't pull any punches, as I'm sort of famously not a guy who pulls a lot of punches. And, and I can tell you right now, that they're, they're the outcome that they will achieve in this is to reelect Donald Trump, if they mount the candidate. They're only putting their candidates in swing states, where Joe Biden can't lose a single vote. They're not trying to they're not they're not getting on the ballot and a bunch of red states where it could harm Trump. They're getting on the ballot in purple states and blue states. Where were they know that if they put a conservative leaning Democrat on their ticket, like Joe Manchin, who is their number one guy right now, they could end up healing away between three and 7%, from Joe Biden. And that doesn't mean that no labels candidate wins, there's no path for an a liberal candidate to win. But they what it does mean is that they will like Donald Trump.
And it's tough, you know, because I feel like third party candidates, their eternal problem is they're largely a luxury good. They're not something that ever really has a serious shot. And yet, at the same time, there's people in Kansas, my husband is from Alabama. You know, when I talk to folks in states like Alabama, in Kansas that are red, there's always a lot of interest in third party candidates, because liberals, moderate Republicans, Libertarians, whoever, they don't feel like they're being heard. But of course, these also aren't the states where presidential elections are decided,
you know, it's a really good point. And it's something that, you know, look, I tried to, I tried to help Evan McMullen in 2016 as an independent, but I will tell you, the failure mode of third parties in this country is very simple. Yes, I believe. And I have no objection to third parties in a broad sense. I believe that, that more voices are better. I don't believe however, when you're facing an existential crisis, where you've got a single choice between Trump and Biden, and one of those men will win, that you can take any chances in this year, there's a big failure mode of third parties, of course, they always try to start at the top. And they always try to start at the pinnacle. And that model doesn't work. If you wanted to have the No Labels party go out there. And and start electing people at for county school boards and for state government offices. That's one thing. That's that's something where you would build up from the state house or county commission or sheriff or winning any other position. And you slowly build up a farm team of people who are credible at governing. And then they get elected to the US Senate or to the US House representatives, then they run for president. That's the way you would do this, where you're building an actual grassroots democratic movement, small d democratic, but what they're doing, and they've said this outright, at no labels, they're going to pick the candidate in secret, then they're going to go to their suppose Id convention and tell the people at the convention who the secretly selected candidate is. That doesn't sound to me very much like an American or any other democracy. That sounds like Iraq, in the in the Saddam era. That sounds like you know, Eastern European kleptocracy is in the in the in the old days. It sounds to me like like something that is going to be selected in private by Nancy Jacobson, Mark Penn and their major Republican donors. Without giving the people who who, who may sincerely believe in no labels the opportunity Need to go out there and actually, and actually vote for and select the candidate. The problem with their party is it's not actually a moving along democratic small d again, lines. They're moving in this way, where they're secretly selecting someone that they focus grouped and pulled tested, who, frankly, will end up doing the most damage to Joe Biden?
Let's talk about Joe Biden for a minute. You know, I think the position he's in is really interesting, because you have someone who essentially put the country back together again, after COVID-19, he passed a bundle of bipartisan legislation, a really solid foreign policy president in a lot of ways. But he's facing so much static at the moment. What could turn that around? Or is the static kind of a mirage?
Look, we live in a country now where where no president is likely to get above 50%. And ever again, that's how divided we are as a nation. And, again, I do I get it. The difficulty he faces is that there's a massive media machine on the other side that everyday declares that the world is burning. The economy is terrible. And has this sort of fantasy vision that doesn't match up to the realities or the numbers. I mean, look, when Joe Biden was elected in 2020, I believed, even as someone who supported his election 2020, as a choice between Trump and Biden, I believed that in 2020, he would end up essentially being a placeholder, he would essentially end up being a transitional president, he has turned out to have had a tremendous amount of success on the domestic front with things like the chips act, with a the infrastructure bill, inflation reduction, all of those things have come together to present a different economic model for the country. That that that is having a positive impact already. And I think that no one expected this. On the foreign policy front, what we've seen as someone who has rebuilt NATO, after the former president treated it like a an extortion racket. We've seen him as a president who has has strengthened our relationships in the Pacific, at a level that was unimaginable. He has rebuilt the US Australian, Japanese South Korean Alliance, in a way that is that is profoundly strengthened Western leaning and, and, and democracy leaning countries against a resurgent China. And India, he's built a personal relationship with Modi, that has started to reset the balance of power in, in, in the east, and and in NATO. He's back to Ukraine against any illegal and brutal Russian invasion. And and by doing so has strengthened NATO in a profound way. He's expanded, it helped expand the NATO alliance. So all these things on the foreign policy front are tremendous successes. And if, if a Republican president had accomplished any of those, he would be trumpeted in that space as the most successful foreign policy president in a generation. So we It really isn't interesting. And it was an interesting and and sort of, a little a little a little ironic, to see how well he's done and how badly he's portrayed.
That's a whole series of podcasts on its own. So here in Kansas, just last year, we had a statewide referendum on a constitutional amendment that would have allowed for the state legislature to ban abortion. And that amendment, much to everyone's surprise, failed by nearly 20 percentage points. It's been less surprising, I guess, in the months and the year since then, as we've seen other measures like that fail in other states. So how important is this Roe vs. Wade environment? Right now? Do you see abortion rights as being really politically critical in the presidential race and other places down the ballot?
Well, let me say this, I think I think that is going to be, as we've now seen in Kansas, of course, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Ohio. We are now seeing the impact of Dobbs on on on electoral outcomes, and I think it will have an effect on for several reasons. The first is that one of the dirty little secrets of the Republican Party is between 22 and 25% of the Republican base of women are either pro choice Like white pro choice or moderately, so, and or just like leave me alone is sort of a more libertarian streak. So about a quarter of the female base, the Republican Party is pro choice 50 to 80% of Republican men fall in this category. And so you end up with this quite significant overhang of, of, of people who look at the the way, the Republicans have now overshot since jobs, because look, if you were a smart party governed from the government, you know, from for electoral outcomes at that point, you would have said, you know, this is really unpopular with people across the board, it's activating the other side, maybe we should pull the throttle back, maybe we shouldn't try to pass six and 15 week bans, but they couldn't make themselves Stop being stupid. They had to stick with it, they had to keep touching the hot stove. And so you've ended up with a frame that has worked very effectively in the Kansas model and the Ohio model in particular, where when people are talking about this, not as a matter of abortion, qua abortion. It has become much more difficult for the Republicans to defend it when it becomes an argument about individual freedom and government overreach. And that is something that the Republicans are very deeply wired into believing is that, you know, government overreach is a bad thing. I think we all agree government overreach is a bad thing. And so the moment they find themselves in is where is that a part of the Party and the Republican Senate is very dedicated to this issue. That still thinks it hasn't won enough on this issue is pushing for more restrictions, more limitations, more, whatever. And that's not where the American people are right now. It is not where the voters are. It's not where the it's not where it's not where even Republican voters are at the moment. So it's, it's I mean, I can tell you one quick story. I know for a fact that when Ron DeSantis was going to sign the 15 week abortion bill in Florida, every single member of his senior political staff went to him and said, Please don't do this. This will kill you. This polls like this, this polls, like, should we serve radioactive wastes for lunch? In preschools? It's a bad idea. But he persisted in it anyway. Because there's a perverse set of incentives inside the Republican Party that that drive toward that.
I remember, it was really interesting last summer, looking at the amendment, because as media folks, me and other folks, I think our natural inclination was to believe that the ballot measure would be a 5050 proposition, it was going to be really close. And then we saw these added dots that were coming out from the folks fighting the amendment. And they really centered that individual liberty fears of government overreach message. And my reaction, our reaction was like, Is this being too tricky? Is this kind of a galaxy bank brain approach to this? And yet, I think arguably looking at how this has unspooled and continued, it's really been the whole ballgame.
Right? David Ellison, I can tell you from our testing, and our and our polling and research, Democrats would if you if you ask a random democratic consultant, Hey, what are the big issues? They would tell you? The economy, climate guns, me, cat and dog, everything's right. None of those things break out of the lowest possible tier compared to dogs. Dogs is the killer app. Dogs is the thing that has that has a wildly disproportionate impact on voter behavior. As of right now, the other thing that has been underscored is that Americans now understand that our democracy is under threat. And between jobs and democracy, I think you have there's a much different political climate in the country than anybody anticipated two years ago. And certainly that anyone anticipated after the 2020 election.
The other thing that we're seeing, at least here in Kansas, is that regardless of how these political winds are shifting, we're seeing that Trumpian ethos seep down, right. I'm sure you've heard about this in terms of school board elections, and other kinds of races where folks are running for office, local offices, and, frankly, they have some positions that you could charitably define as crazy.
There's a set of perverse incentives in the political climate in this country right now, particularly on the right to be more transgressive, more, more A conspiratorial, more crazy, and I'll tell you why. It's called the hamster wheel. So if you're a Republican candidate, you're on what we call the hamster wheel. The hamster gets in the wheel, and it starts to run because they think it's gonna get a treat. But you give it a treat, and it runs harder. So eventually, the hamster gets full, and it stops running. So they're always having to feed the hamster different food, more treats more craziness to make the wheel Keep turning. And when they saw a Republican, a generic Republican candidate at any level might come out and say something crazy. Like, George Soros wants to eat babies. And they know it's not true. But then they'll put that statement out there on social media or in an email or in a speech or what have you and people react, they go, are you insane? Why would you say that? And then that person will call Sean Hannity, or somebody at Fox and say, Oh, my God, the liberals say, I'm insane. They're trying to cancel me, and then they'll go on Fox, then they'll, you know, say that the I'm the one under attack, oh, the liberals are trying to cancel me and take me out of the political dialogue. They want to hurt my free speech. All these things have a process that goes on and on and on. It's a loop that they run through. And when they when the when the news dies down and the email stops producing money, they'll go on to the next crazy issue. So right now in Washington, Republicans are like, it's impeachment, we must impeach Joe Biden, he's the most corrupt President blah, blah, blah. And, and they know it's not true. But when they're when they've exhausted it, when they've beaten the horse to death, they will come back again, with something new, they will come back again and say, Well, now it's not an impeachment. Now we've got to investigate, you know, Kamala Harris, or whatever it is, and they'll all go, they'll go through all these things. They'll loop these things around over and over again, these things don't apply to the minds of normal people. But they work in the minds of a lot of the Maga voters, Trump broke the party, he made it post ideological post truth. And, and we're now in a situation where a lot of people not only believe things that aren't real, but they have a political incentive to say them as well.
And the incentives aren't just political and right. I mean, you bring up Fox News, and there's a whole we'll have a whole array of ways to make money based on monetization of conservative outrage. Right. So as we near the close here, I was curious for you, personally, you were an early voice, opposing Trump back in 2015, after having been in the GOP trenches for a long time, what changed? Like what changed for you back then what what did you see at that point, that sets you off on this new direction?
Well, I was the first national Republican consultant in 2015. To say, I can't do this. I have never written two books about this. So I've, I've thought this through very, very many, very thoroughly, very many times. What I realized was that there was a an element of the party that was driven by a sort of desire for an authoritarian world that was driven by racial and ethnic animus that was post ideological. And that most importantly, wasn't conservative. It wasn't. It wasn't based on any kind of principle of limited government, or fiscal restraint, or personal responsibility, or anything else that could have even vaguely resembled the Republican and conservative movement I grew up in, this wasn't Bill Buckley or Hobbes, you know, or for Russell Kirk, or anyone else. This was an assertively authoritarian movement, they wanted to use the power of government to achieve their ideological ends. That's not conservative. They wanted to use the power of government to punish their enemies that's not conservative. And so the degree to which the party transformed itself into statism, authoritarianism, and a willingness to, to, to turn on its head institutions, traditions, that I believe had shaped the country for the better, was a shocking departure. And look, if you want to live in a place where there is a strong man personality called move to the Middle East, move, move, move to some third world country, because there's no tradition of that in America. And that was exactly what he was offering what Trump was offering in 2016. And so I opposed it from the very beginning. And I became I look, I and I, you know, all candor, I gave up a very, very, very successful lucrative political consulting business. And because I couldn't go with that I couldn't stick with him, I couldn't, I couldn't morally do it. And, and I gave up 30 years of friendships, and I, you know, between lost, lost every person I was friends with from that from that world. And, you know, had lived with death threats and threats against my children ever since then. And it's been a very long is a very long run. I never regret my decision. But it was based on a fundamental departure that he was demanding the party make from, from any form of conservatism and towards authoritarian statism.
For me, I know, it really changed my perspective on certain folks who are in the party, you know, people who became profiles and courage, who you would never have expected. And yet folks who totally accepted it, who I would say, Oh, my goodness, like Lindsey Graham, what became of you,
I mean, I was low on the liberal people, I was low on the list of people you would have expected to do this. I was a guy who was a who was a very stern, hard edge, I was a guy you call them on political campaigns, when it was time to start blowing stuff up. I was I was a guy who was the guy who called in for the negative ad making, when at when you when you needed to really, you know, make people want to go in the witness protection program. And, you know, for all that, I ended up in a position that, you know, where, where I sleep a lot better, I'm a lot happier as a person. Because I'm not trying to pretend that any of this is normal.
Just wrapping up here for the last question, what would you advise our listeners to look for and pay attention to in the months ahead, as we head towards this election, you know, people always say they're the biggest election for the future of democracy. But might this one actually be that
this one actually has the advantage or disadvantage or reality of being the most important, and I will say that I think people need to be looking very carefully at how the media is portraying the race in terms of pretending it's a horse race, when it's not on the Republican primary, they're gonna there's gonna be a lot of distractions in the next few months. I would also advise people not to engage in magical thinking, not to, not to believe that somehow you're going to get a an outcome where Oh, a Donald Trump magically goes to jail, that's not going to happen. People who believe that are going to be disappointed. And people who, and people who do a lot of do a lot of of Magical Thinking and wish casting in that regard, are going to find out that he's not going to jail. And even if he's found guilty, he's not going to be in jail by election day. 2024. And so I encourage people not to not to chase fantasies about the campaign but to instead engage in the in the realities, which are tough, there's nothing there's never going to be an easy day between now and Election Day. It's all hard work from here on out. And also try to keep themselves clear that that that so far, the Biden economy is not getting the credit it deserves or or the or the bills he's passed, getting the credit they deserve. Watch for how those things start to really kick in at in a favorable way as we go forward. And the more the Republicans either ignore them or or say that that's not true. We'll tell you how much they're working.
Oh, Rick Wilson, thank you so much for appearing on the Kansas reflected Podcast.
I'm delighted to be with you let me know. Happy to come back anytime. Talk to you soon.
