RICK WILSON'S GOOD ADVICE

There are 25 days left to the election and the start of the real fight.

Rick Wilson has some good advice for us all:

Don’t Drink The Poison

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received was a simple phrase: don’t drink the poison. Toxic people in our lives depend in part on our cooperation with their toxicity. They expect us to take the bait, engage with their arguments, and drink the poison they offer. It’s always the wrong move, but sometimes it takes a while to figure this out. This goes double in politics.

Don’t drink the poison.

In the next 20+ days, you’ll be offered poison many, many times. It will come from the Trump campaign, the mainstream media, fellow Democrats, and friends and family.

The poison, in this case, will be that of electoral despair. The purpose of negative campaigning is never to change of mind or to alter a vote. The purpose of negative campaigning is to suppress votes and force you into a cognitive frame where staying home seems like a valuable and viable alternative to political engagement.

Don’t drink the poison.

They’ll try to convince you that the campaign is over and that Trump is already victorious. They’ll spin 100 scenarios of why Harris can’t win even as her numbers improve.

Don’t drink the poison.

This race will be a hard fight until the very last. It will be ugly and loud. You will want to switch it off. That’s by design.

There will be revelations and surprises in the next three weeks. Some polls will show Trump up, some will show him down. Media prognosticators who’ve never been in a campaign will declare this poll is the decisive end to the campaign or this model shows Trump will inevitably win.

Don’t drink the poison.

The reality is simple: there are two campaigns being run right now. One Campaign is to motivate a new coalition of voters from the left to the center-right, from Bernie Sanders to Liz Cheney. That Campaign is pragmatic, professional, has fuel in the tank to win, and calls out to your better angels.

The other campaign is Trump. You’ll hear lies, hideous distortions, and grotesque interpretations of reality. You’ll see them characterize Harris in ways that are false at every level, desperate in every way, and repulsive to anyone of conscience. You’ll be fed a belly full of lies, conspiracy theories, garbage polls, ahistorical analogies, and ludicrous bank-shot theories of the electoral case for Trump.

Please keep your eyes clear, stay focused on the fight, and never, ever, ever let them convince you that all is lost. The lies are all Trump has left, and he only wins if we believe them.

Don’t drink the poison.

And whatever else you do, stop reading cynics who are past their sell-by date, like the guy I won’t name over at Esquire, who really needs to pull his cynical head out of his cynical ass before I pull the plug on my subscription there.

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