I thought often during the latter Trump years about the contrast with Barack Obama's "stray voltage" strategy, which involved saying provocative and often flatly untrue things to prompt discussion of Obama's preferred topics for political gain.
The idea behind stray voltage was that injecting your preferred narratives into national discussion was the goal. As long as people were talking about your issue - even if they were calling you out for lying about it - you could profit politically.
The prime example was Obama and his administration endlessly repeating easily debunked falsehoods about the "pay gap" and women earning 70 cents on the dollar compared to men. It wasn't true, and it was EASY to debunk, but they just kept repeating it like parrots.
The Obama team reasoned that as long as people were talking about pay disparity, even if much of the talk involved endlessly explaining why women don't get paid 70% for apples-to-apples equivalent jobs, they could leverage the atmosphere of grievance to make policy demands.
Of course, stray voltage is MUCH easier to pull off with friendly media that doesn't fact-check your claims into oblivion and gives you limitless credit for good intentions. Media praised Obama for Caring So Much about Really Important Issues when it grudgingly fact-checked him.
But besides having media in your pocket, the other key to making stray voltage work is discipline. Obama always had his entire administration singing from the same playbook, repeating the same distortions and factoids, pushing for the same policies.
One advantage to having a high-powered policy shop constantly pushing your agenda is that when the conversation shifts to your preferred topics, your demands and "solutions" are already on the table, and opposition to them can be portrayed as bad faith.
Those who oppose your agenda, or even correctly point out that you're not being truthful about the issue, can immediately be accused of not caring enough about the problem, or even of hating the people you're trying to "help." It's all about playing offense constantly.
Trump was very good at holding media attention and driving the conversation, but rarely had the disciplined follow-up required to benefit from stray voltage. He played offense alone while the rest of his team struggled to catch up to him. He threw passes with no receivers.
There are many reasons for this, beginning with Trump's shoot-from-the-hip style but also including tensions with his party in Congress, his problems with getting and keeping people who could run his plays, and the sheer unrelenting hostility of the media.
Look at the difference between Trump constantly fighting Deep State saboteurs and Obama holdovers, vs. Biden's people methodically purging every Trump supporter out of D.C. in a matter of days. Trump's administration had few transmission lines to capitalize on stray voltage.
But Trump really was great at generating that voltage - far better than other GOP leaders of recent memory. It's the explicit reason so many voted for him. They loved that he was at least talking about issues that were neglected or suppressed by the ruling class.
The lesson is that you need follow-up, discipline, a whole team ready to put political goods on the table while you're still unwinding your sales pitch. It's always going to be easier for Dems because they have a titanic system in academia, media, and DC ready to go on Day One.
Repubs, ESPECIALLY populist outsiders, will need to work harder to build that power grid for harnessing political voltage, and they really shouldn't wait until after Inauguration Day of the next GOP president. They should be building it right now, should have started years ago.
Unfortunately, the GOP leadership is historically bad at understanding which ideas have real electricity with the public. They lay their power lines around dim donor-approved ideas that don't fire up the public or spark energetic conversation. They were taught to loathe populism.
Isn't that really what the stray voltage theory is all about? Generating populist energy and harnessing it to disciplined engines of policy. Get people talking and get policy moving. In truth, the movement starts BEFORE the talking, but it looks like the other way around. /end
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