Why 2016 Presidential Campaign Will Be Most Interesting Ever Media Training

Is 2016 set to be the most interesting presidential campaign in the last half century? Okay, folks, for the last half century, political pundits every four years say that this is the time we're finally going to have a brokered convention, and everything is going to be going back to the way that used to be, behind closed doors. And every single time, those pundits have been wrong. So I'm going to stick my neck out a little bit here, and I won't necessarily claim it's going to be a brokered convention, but I do think 2016 is going to be very different for Republicans. Now let me step back in a minute and give you some of my assumptions. Political campaigns are primarily about communication. You have to communicate as a candidate, reasons to voters as to why they should vote for you. You have to communicate what you're going to do for them to make the future better. You have to communicate to them where to vote, what day to vote. So when you look at the billions of dollars spent on campaigns, it is primarily about communication. So I look at campaigns through the lens of communication. So what's going to be different about 2016? I'm not talking about the general election. I actually don't think it's going to be a particularly interesting general election. What does intrigue me is the Republican primary. Because of the Citizens United and other Supreme Court decisions, it has never been easier to have a viable campaign for a party nomination. Now the Democrats have basically decided Hillary is going to be the nominee, but the Republicans are as undecided as they have ever been on who the nominee will be. Here's what's different. I mean, in traditional campaigns, Certainly the last 40 years, the cycle has been you have a handful of serious candidates, a couple of fringe candidates, and after the first primary or two after Iowa, after New Hampshire, one candidate starts to win. Excuse me, I'll pull up Marco Rubio here. One candidate starts to pull ahead, and all the others can't raise any more money because people don't want to give money to a loser. It becomes too hard. So candidates are faced with the choice of either drop out or go into millions of dollars of debt, have to spend the next 10 years trying to raise money, beg money to get out of debt, possibly mortgaging their house. That's not a very attractive proposition to most politicians. So that's why they quit relatively quickly once primaries start. My prediction is all of that is going to change in 2016 because it only takes one or two or three or sometimes just one funder in a Super PAC to write a check for 16 million and you can run indefinitely. Now the super PACs can take money, unlimited amounts of money from wealthy individuals, they can't technically communicate and be in cahoots with the candidate. But let's say you're Ted Cruz, for example, and you've lost the first three primaries, you haven't gotten a single vote, but you think of yourself as being the next generation leader in the world for conservative values and you have super PACs that have $50 million on hand. What you can do is simply travel around, give speeches, have your super PACs watch your speech on TV and amplify that with TV ads and continue to run and run and run. Why would you stop? I mean, Ted Cruz already has a salary, he's a senator, he doesn't have to give that up. And he could travel on frequent flyer points. So you could literally run a so called serious campaign for nothing as the candidate, frequent flyer points on your plane, in your hotel, and then just have your super PACs do all the spending on advertising, get out the vote efforts and other things. So I think we're in a situation where you could have maybe even a dozen serious candidates. Now the other thing that could happen is let's say Jeb Bush wins a caucus, New Hampshire starts to pull away. You could have a situation where 10 other candidates and all their super PACs are all of a sudden spending hundreds of millions of dollars attacking, pummeling, punishing Bush. It's hard to imagine you can't bring him back down and someone else leapfrog over over him in South Carolina, for example. Now we had a situation four years ago where different candidates popped up, emerged. Herman Cain did well, Michele Bachmann. There were different flavors of the month in the Republican primaries. The problem is none of them could really sustain it because they didn't have money. Mitt Romney had all the money, with a couple of exceptions with Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich getting super PAC money. But it's hard for me to imagine that Mike Huckabee, that Ted Cruz, that Rick Perry, that Bobby Jindal, that Chris Christie, that John Kasich of Ohio. It's hard for me to imagine that any of these people couldn't find one or two people write a check for $10 million for a super PAC. If that happens, there's no real reason for them to drop out of the race. So if you have 10 plus candidates continuing to run state after state after state, continuing to show up for the primary debates in those states, it's going to be an extraordinarily interesting campaign season and it's going to be much tougher for any one Republican to pull away quickly. That's always been the way it has worked in the last 40, 50 years. I think that's about to change. The other thing that has to motivate Canada, let's say you're a Newt Gingrich and you've lost your talk show on cnn. Why not run for president again? You get to be famous, you get to be in the spotlight, you boost your lecture fees, you generate more interest in your memoirs. The other thing I believe that candidates are going to be thinking is this may be a one time window. Hillary Clinton, others are talking about major campaign finance reform, perhaps even a constitutional amendment banning these super PACs, banning the donations of huge sums from individuals. So if you're an ambitious politician, you may think to yourself, this is my one shot at true, true national prominence where I can permanently inject myself as a strong national voice. Whether you're Rick Santorum, whether you're Ted Cruz, this could be your one shot at really altering the debate in America. Why not grab it? So that's why I for one is a political junkie. And as a media junkie, 2,016 promises certainly to be the best campaign ever. So far it may be the best campaign ever, period, as far as sheer numbers of messages and candidates and jostling about in the media. So stay tuned.