“History will prove us right.”
It was New Year’s Eve 2007, and one of Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign strategists, Brent Seaborn, emailed supporters an upbeat memo promising they were “looking good” heading into the Republican early state primaries.
History, as it would turn out, proved them wrong. Giuliani’s harebrained decision to essentially skip the first states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — in favor of putting all his eggs in Florida’s basket was a fatal one.
New York’s former mayor, then a heroic figure in Republican and American politics post-9/11, and not the crazed conspiracy theorist Trump lackey of today, squandered a huge early lead in the polls — 20 points over his nearest rival — and finished an embarrassing third place in Florida, behind John McCain and Mitt Romney. He quit the race the next day.
It’s a cautionary tale for any would-be presidential contender: Take nothing for granted. Giuliani was popular in Florida, where a lot of New Yorkers had retired or spent winters, and his team assumed they’d pull out a big win there. They were wrong.
President Joe Biden and the Democratic National Committee are eyeing a risky strategy. Last December, Biden surprised many Democrats by pushing for major changes to the primary calendar, making South Carolina first, ahead of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire could still decide to hold their contests earlier, which might mean Biden wouldn’t be on the ballots there. That opens a huge door for his primary challengers, namely a surging Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to gain some early momentum in a race in which they would otherwise be considered also-rans.
Undoubtedly, Biden’s expected to win the nomination, but are Democrats taking this inevitability for granted?
Yes, he’s an incumbent, and most incumbents have gone on to be reelected. But not all. Ten presidential incumbents have lost. And Biden’s poll numbers — among Democrats — leave much to be desired.
A 2016 loss that still haunts Dems
Team Biden doesn’t have to look as far back as 2008 to learn some important lessons.
More recently, in 2016, Hillary Clinton took some Midwest states for granted — and it cost her. She became the first Democrat nominee to lose Wisconsin since 1984, and Donald Trump won Michigan with fewer votes than George W. Bush when he lost that state in 2004.
Decisions not to campaign more (or at all, in some cases) in Wisconsin and Michigan, despite urging on the ground by Democrats there, sparked all kinds of Monday-morning quarterbacking — and anger.
“They believed they were more experienced, which they were,” said Donnie Fowler, a DNC consultant who’d worked on the campaign in its final months. “They believed they were smarter, which they weren’t. They believed they had better information, which they didn’t.”
It spawned headlines like “How Clinton Lost Michigan — and Blew the Election,” and academic articles, like one from the University of Dayton titled “What if Hillary Clinton Had Gone to Wisconsin?”
Even the candidate herself has expressed some begrudging regret … sort of.
“Some critics have said that everything hinged on me not campaigning enough in the Midwest,” Clinton wrote in her book, aptly titled “What Happened?” “And I suppose it is possible that a few more trips to Saginaw or a few more ads on the air in Waukesha could have tipped a couple of thousand votes here and there.”
Now, it’s important to point out that Clinton still would not have won the Electoral College in 2016 even with Michigan and Wisconsin. But we’ll never know what gains she could have made had she not decided to virtually ignore them. And it clearly still haunts some Democrats.
A few years later, in 2019, former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, banking on his name recognition and personal fortune, announced his late entry into the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. He skipped the first four contests and instead dumped hundreds of millions into national ads and direct mail. He dropped out just over three months later, having won just one primary — American Samoa. Money well spent.
When pressed on Biden’s risky move, some Democrats are worried, while others are confident in the strategy. Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager somewhat smugly defended it last week, saying, “Even if a candidate is going to win the first mythical first states of Iowa and New Hampshire, it’s not going to matter.”
While I’m sure Iowa and New Hampshire won’t appreciate being called “mythical” — or irrelevant — he may turn out to be right.
Or he may end up sounding a lot like Brent Seaborn, promising in 2008 that history would prove the Giuliani strategy right.
Remember, take nothing for granted.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
