The Lincoln Project Sells Revenge Rather Than Results (full series)
What You Get for Your Money | Unburdened | Who Are These People?
Unforced Errors | Will Never Trump Survive Trump?
Unburdened
At this point we were racing toward the June debate that would brutally expose Biden with every single one of those problems. When Biden was replaced, Democrats were hoping Americans would forget this problem and look ahead to Harris.
But the Lincoln Project wouldn’t let it go. On October 9 they let loose “Cognitive Test,” challenging Trump “the old man in the race” to take the test and prove he was “all there.”
It was a month before the election, and the Lincoln Project was reminding America that it had been eight years since Democrats had nominated a presidential candidate with the verbal competence to staff a McDonald’s drive-thru window.
Eleven days after “Cognitive Test” posted, Trump worked his iconic shift at a McDonald’s.
While Kamala Harris can walk more than 30 feet without staring down danger, she has her own communications difficulties.
“What can be, unburdened by what has been,” was her most iconic and damaging babble-speak phrase. She said this a lot, at least until the Trumpy types began using it to remind people she and words were a challenge.
While Harris surely wanted to forget she ever said that line, the Lincoln Project just as surely did not. In a development that should surprise nobody who has read this far, they tried to turn it into a profit center!
They began selling $30 t-shirts, and three different versions of $35 ball caps that featured the slogan.
Even during the election campaign, it wouldn’t have been shocking to see Trump and his supporters sarcastically wearing the Lincoln Project’s camouflage hats with the word “Unburdened” emblazoned across the front. More difficult to explain is how all that stuff was still for sale on the Lincoln Project merchandise page in March 2025—45 days after the Trump inaugural.
The Lincoln Project’s lack of effectiveness in 2024 is self-evident. The 2020 race also turned out far weaker than the hype they sold to donors.
After the 2020 race, Priorities USA, a conventional Democratic Party super PAC, set out to measure the effectiveness of their own advertising. In the process, they looked at the relationship between the virality of Lincoln Project videos on social media versus the effectiveness of the messages.
“They took five ads produced by a fellow occupant in the Super PAC domain—the Lincoln Project—and attempted to measure their persuasiveness among persuadable swing state voters; i.e. the ability of an ad to move Trump voters towards Joe Biden,” reported the Daily Beast of the Priorities USA research.
It didn’t go well: “The most viral of the Lincoln Project’s ads—a spot called Bounty, which was RTed [retweeted] 116,000 times and liked more than 210,000 times—turned out to be the least persuasive of those Priorities tested.”
The Priorities USA analytics director claimed there was even a slight negative correlation between the social media popularity of Lincoln videos and their effectiveness. He told the Daily Beast that “the better the ad did on Twitter, the less it persuaded battleground state voters.”
Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen didn’t even dispute the report and claimed instead that Lincoln had a two-track strategy. He said Lincoln’s “audience of one” videos that “made the most noise” were meant to get into the head of Trump and family, while lower-key work in swing states was aimed at persuasion of actual voters.
According to a Showtime documentary shot during the campaign, a major target of the Lincoln Project’s battleground state work in 2020 was Latino voters in Arizona and Black voters in Georgia. Co-founder Mike Madrid claimed Lincoln was deploying a “New Southern Strategy,” using the supposed “racial dog whistling” of Trump to snag more of those voters for Biden.
Exit polls showed Trump won 31 percent of Arizona’s “Hispanic/Latino” voters in 2016, the last race without Lincoln Project involvement. Exit polls for Arizona in 2020 showed Trump’s Latino support had jumped to 37 percent. In Georgia, Trump’s 9 percent among Black voters in 2016 crept up to 11 percent in 2020.
“Everyone has been noticing this long-term trend of Black and Latino voters just skyrocketing in the South and that’s going to have a transformational effect for the next . . . forever,” Madrid predicted to Showtime.
In the previously referenced “Stewardship Report,” the Lincoln Project’s after-action report on the 2020 race, they brazenly claimed: “No Super PAC in US history was attacked like The Lincoln Project for one simple reason: no Super PAC had been as effective.”
Tellingly, the report didn’t mention how Madrid’s Arizona and Georgia work had coincided with exactly the opposite of what he told Showtime they were trying to accomplish. In fact, it doesn’t even mention Georgia as one of the states they targeted and doesn’t mention Latinos or Blacks as the target audience for any of their work in the six states they did claim to be working.
Similarly, the Lincoln Project spent a combined total of $9.5 million in 2024 trying to knock out four Republican senators: Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Steve Daines of Montana. All three won by margins of at least 10 percentage points.
“We didn’t get Alaska. We didn’t get Montana. We didn’t get South Carolina—all of them,” griped a Lincoln Project digital strategist in the Showtime documentary.
“That’s uncomfortable to sit with,” he said. “It’s not what we tell ourselves about ourselves.”
If “stop Trump, break MAGA, and save America” is really the Lincoln Project brand, then by their own standards they’re executing as if they’re O.J. Simpson trying to sell steak knives.
In the next installment, the New Southern Strategy was an abysmal failure.
