Welcome
Some of you signed up two years ago, most likely after reading one of my comments on Persuasion. You trusted I would eventually get this project started. So here we are.
I’ve been working hard the whole time, but wanted to have the book nearly ready to go before I started serializing it. It will be published on Amazon — print and Kindle — with a target date of August 15. Subscribers get the entire book free, serialized here before and after publication.
A few things before we begin.. Everything is free and will stay that way. Share this with friends; they won't be pestered or paywalled.
The About page explains the project and a bit about me — worth a look before we dive in. Now, without further ado …
Prologue
Offense sells tickets, defense wins championships.
—Paul “Bear” Bryant, Legendary American football coach
To win, play defense. Democrats played offense, but added some defense in 2020—just barely. That tipped the balance for us. In 2024, Trump added some defense, while Kamala Harris had none. You know what happened.
But here’s what everyone’s missing. Offensive strategies polarize the country, while winning with defense depolarizes us. It’s that simple. So why don’t we play defense and win? The full answer takes a book — the one you’re reading.
First, what do “offense” and “defense” mean in politics? If the Republicans say things like, “Those crazy Democrats want to defund your police,” they’re playing offense — they’re attacking. Blocking an attack is playing defense, as Joe Biden did when he said “The answer is to fund the police. Fund them!”
The far-left hates it when we reject their ideas as Biden did in this case, and they put enormous pressure on those who do, unless their name is Biden—and even that is not full protection. That creates the trap the Democrats are in—the same trap that caught Harris. And it will take both clarity and courage to break free.
The right wing faces similar pressures from its extremists. So both sides are playing almost pure offense. That’s why America is polarized.
Defense takes more courage than offense, but the double benefit is worth it. It lets us win, and it helps depolarize the other side. Perhaps unexpectedly, it works because it provides reassurance to swing voters. They are truly afraid of our extreme left taking over. And a newsworthy rejection of their ideas proves we mean it, especially when it draws a backlash from the far left.
But why on earth would we want to reassure the other side? First, being afraid of us fires up their base, and they turn out to vote against us in droves. No, it does not help us to let extreme left ideas frighten them into voting against us! Second, it’s recently been shown that polarization based on fear is what leads to political violence. No, it does not help us to frighten anyone into approving of political violence.
I’ve always been a Democrat, except for the first time I voted—for Dick Gregory, a Black comedian aligned with Malcolm X. So when I say “our,” “us,” or “we,” I mean Democrats. Because my goal is to help the Democrats dominate, many will expect me to spend my time attacking Trump or his base. But the Party, the liberal media, and the Resistance have been doing that for a decade, with the volume turned up to 11—and it hasn’t worked. That’s because we’ve barely played defense. But don’t we need to know how bad “they” are to play defense? Not really. They’re predictable; they will attack where we’re weakest. And we’re weakest when we back unpopular issues. We can’t find those by criticizing them.
That’s why, despite clearly taking sides, this is not a very partisan book. In fact, I hope Republicans will read this and apply the same strategy. If both sides do this, it creates a virtuous cycle that would return the country to healthy political competition.
To win in politics, you need to raise an army of voters—that’s playing offense. In 2020, both sides played maximum offense, turning out 21 million more voters than expected. But few noticed: Biden also played some defense while Trump didn’t. The result? Biden won by 4 million votes. In 2024, Trump played defense, taking 8 million of Biden’s votes from Harris. All of this happened because of negative partisanship.
What’s negative partisanship? If you see your candidate as pretty good and the opposing candidate as mediocre, you’ll probably vote—unless it’s raining. That’s old-fashioned (positive) partisanship; you’re voting for a candidate you like. But if your side convinces you that the other guy is truly dangerous—a threat to everything you value, then you’ll vote come hell or high water—against the other guy. Voting against is negative partisanship.
Although Biden got 12.5 million of the 21 million extra votes—all of which were negative votes—that means those 12.5 million were actually not voting for Biden.
They were voting against Trump.
You can’t tell the difference in the voting booth, but the psychology is very different. And it’s the swing-vote psychology that makes a defense strategy work.
Most of Biden’s voters were, of course, solid Democratic voters, not fickle swing voters. They were positive partisanship voters, the ones we send postcards to. That’s not the kind of offense I’ll be discussing, which is mostly attack ads.
To demonstrate the power of this negative concept, let’s look at the last two presidential elections. This will completely change your understanding of what happened.
Biden’s Defense Wins. Democrats remembered their shock from the 2016 election and could not bear the thought of a repeat. They voted against Trump—56% (45 million) said they voted for Biden “because he wasn’t Trump.” Much of that was true negative partisanship. And Republicans felt almost the same about returning to Democratic rule—but only 19% came out to vote for Trump “because he wasn’t Biden.” The difference? The Democrats chose to play some defense, cutting into Trump’s negative partisanship vote.
Who were the Democrats with the foresight to push for defense? Only a few understood the need for two strategies—offense and defense. South Carolina Representative James Clyburn was one of them.
Socialist Bernie Sanders had beaten Biden badly in the first three state primaries and was closing in on South Carolina, Biden’s firewall state. Then Clyburn, the most revered Black politician in South Carolina, gave Biden his strongest endorsement. Biden beat Sanders 49% to 20% and swept Super Tuesday three days later, ending the race.
The Democrats had chosen defense. Biden’s moderate history was built-in armor against Trump’s attacks. He could say “don’t defund police” and “I’m no socialist.” Sanders couldn’t. He’s a lifelong socialist, who sang the Soviet national anthem while living in a Kibbutz and who spent his 1988 honeymoon in Moscow.
The result for Biden was that 12.5 million of the 21 million negative-partisanship voters voted for him, but only 8.5 million went for Trump. Because of Biden’s defense, Trump’s offense—calling him a “helpless puppet of the radical left”—didn’t land. That saved the day.
Harris’s Missing Defense in 2024. Eight million of Biden’s 12.5 million negative-partisanship voters vanished in 2024. About six million of these just didn’t vote, and the other two million switched to Trump. Many blame Harris for the fact that her attack ads failed. But could Trump have been playing defense?
Politico’s Capitol Bureau Chief, Rachael Bade, interviewed Jason Miller, who was implementing the campaign’s strategy of “humanizing” Trump. Humanizing Trump, that’s about as defensive as you can get—Hey, guys, I’m actually human! The point, as Bade explained, was to erode his social stigma of being seen as a “danger to democracy,” “a fascist,” and “unfit to serve.”
Miller secured Trump’s appearance on a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan that got 46 million views on YouTube and 17 million on X during the week before the election. According to Newsweek, that was the first time Trump’s approval tracker registered a net positive since they launched it in June 2020.
Newsweek said Rogan’s Podcast showed him as “personable and showcased his humor.” It concluded that for Rogan’s audience, that “shattered the perception that Harris’s campaign is trying to promote—that he is a fascist who poses a dire threat to the U.S.”
This made Harris’s fair-weather voters comfortable enough that they stayed home and didn’t vote.
They had lost some fear of Trump being fascist. David Shor, the leading Democratic pollster and advertising strategist, identifies these voters as being “politically disengaged.” This explains why they would be easily switched by Trump’s defense.
Trump’s personal humanizing defense is not a model for how Democrats should play defense. Ezra Klein asked Shor, “What do you do about the reality of the Democratic brand? It’s toxic.” Shor thought we would need to “spend the next two or four years changing the party’s brand — especially among working-class voters.”
Our brand didn’t become toxic because we failed to have good ideas; that would only make it uninteresting. It’s toxic because of extreme far-left ideas and our failure to keep our distance from them and to stop making excuses for them. This apparent complicity left us wide open to partly justified attacks by MAGA. They’ve been playing offense; we have not distanced ourselves from far-left extremism, and now the party itself needs to play defense for two to four years. So we’d better learn how, as quickly as possible.
Next: The Super PAC that Got “They/Them” Backward — and what Charlamagne Tha God had to do with it.
Interesting choice of Bear Bryant for the quote that leads a book with Martin Luther King in the title. Bryant’s need to win games gave him first place over George Wallace in the pantheon of Alabama icons by changing the complexion of his teams. You can stand in the hallway but you don’t try to block the Crimson Tide.
Congratulations on a wonderful first chapter.
Thanks, Guy. Glad to be associated with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. I need to read The Vital Center, our troubles today are not nearly as different from those of his time as they seem on the surface.