What Republicans Know
Description
This is an excerpt from “What Republicans Know: How the Far Right Changed Politics and Left Democrats Behind.” The complete book will be available for $15 by November 30, 2025 to all purchasers. Help protect democracy with your pre-order.
For decades, public opinion polling has shown that core Republican policy positions are less popular than Democratic ones, yet since 2000 Republicans have won more presidential elections and have more often held unified control of Congress. The public doesn’t back their agenda, but they still win.
Obviously, a lot of Republicans’ victories are due to the fact that rural states are over-represented in the US political system. But that rationalization doesn’t hold when you consider that Donald Trump won the popular vote in 2024.
“We don’t have billionaires showering cash upon us” is another reply I receive when I talk about recent Republican electoral victories.
And it’s certainly true that there are more than a few reactionary oligarchs like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreesen that have spent big on elections and media. But what you may not realize is that Democrats actually raise more money than Republicans. It’s an undeniable reality of American politics that is far less known than it should be.
In the 2024 presidential race, the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaigns and their related political action committees raised $2.9 billion. Donald Trump and his allies (including Musk) raised $1.8 billion. The so-called “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors also favored Democrats, according to the Brennan Center, which found that organizations allied with Biden or Harris spent $1.2 billion compared to $664 million by pro-Trump groups. On the congressional side, Democratic-aligned groups spent $197 million while groups associated with Republicans spent $192 million.
Last year’s numbers reflect a long-standing trend. Dark money has favored Democrats since 2018, according to the Brennan Center. And on the campaign side, as NPR has reported, in the 2020 presidential cycle, Biden raised just over $1 billion while Trump raised about $800 million. In 2016, Hillary Clinton raised about $500 million while Trump raised just over $200 million. In 2012, Barack Obama raised nearly $700 million while Mitt Romney raised nearly $400 million.
Despite often being drastically outspent in recent campaigns, Republicans have managed to win more elections than Democrats, while also having more unpopular policy viewpoints. How is this possible? Because Republicans are better at politics than Democrats. They have to be. Instead of changing their extremist policies of slashing healthcare, science, and education, Republicans have developed such effective campaign strategies that they can still win.
The Republican political class allocates resources more efficiently, systematizes tactics—and most importantly—learns from the opposition.
Every time that Democrats win, Republicans pay attention. After Barack Obama won big in 2008, Republican elites devoured Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory Lab, which chronicled how Obama did it. As part of its 2020 strategy, the Republican National Committee required organizers to read and pass a 22-question exam about Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han’s Groundbreakers, which profiled the 2012 Obama campaign’s ground game successes.
Republicans read the other side’s playbooks and operationalize them; Democrats rarely do the same. Instead of learning after losing, far too often, left-of-center leaders tend to blame opposing factions, electoral maps, external circumstances, and gerrymandering.
All of these complaints have truth to them. Republicans cheat and the American political system favors rural states over urban ones. Unfortunately, you can’t change the system until you can change your strategies. Far-right Republicans did this. After being shut out of Congress in the decades following the New Deal, they noticed how the Constitution skewed toward rural voters and began targeting them heavily. Now, they’ve amassed the power to do the slashing and burning they’ve always wanted.
Democrats need to get serious about winning, and that begins by learning Republican strategies. Please help spread the word about this post.
If Democrats want to roll back the damage and build something better, they’ll have to start learning from the opposition as seriously as the opposition learns from them.
So what do Republicans know that Democrats don’t?
I think I’m a good person to answer that question. While today I am a progressive writer and podcaster, in a past life, I was a right-wing media and marketing consultant after leading the blogger corps that forced Dan Rather out of his CBS anchor chair, a scandal that played a big role in the 2004 presidential election. I started two of the right’s most popular websites and worked with several successful campaigns.
I learned a lot about what Republicans know during my former career, but I couldn’t take the corruption, hatred, and anti-intellectualism so I changed sides—before Trump.
Since leaving the right, I’ve become deeply concerned that the people atop the Democratic campaign and media establishments haven’t learned how Republicans managed to take control of the American political system. This must change if we want to protect our country and each other.
Obviously there are some Republican techniques (such as blatant lying) that Democrats shouldn’t pick up, but there are a lot of things they can do better. Below is a list of ten things Republicans know—habits, structures, and heuristics—that Democrats either don’t know, don’t believe, or won’t practice consistently. That needs to change to protect the future of American democracy.
1. Ecosystems matter more than money.
Despite being regularly outspent by Democrats, Republicans have been able to win more recent elections because they’ve created a sustainable ecosystem that stretches the money that they have much further. Right-wing donors, large and small, get more for their dollars because Republicans have built an incredibly efficient political economy.
The Republican secret is that party officials, campaigns, and donors spend a very hefty amount on advocacy media outlets. Beyond the
United States
