House Democrat Eric Swalwell Teams With Showbiz Insiders to Craft Meme-Friendly Political Ads: ‘This Election Is About Freedom Over Fear’
The final scoring session was done in under 30 minutes. The only question to be sorted out: Should the first ominous note hit just before or after the reveal of Trump?
On Aug. 5, writer-producer David Grae, editor Michael Lim and composer W.G. Snuffy Walden gathered via Zoom with Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., to study a cut of a pointed political ad created as part of a larger campaign to keep former President Donald Trump from retaking the White House.
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The Hollywood production veterans realized that the timing of a key moment in Walden’s score for the 30-second spot needed adjusting. Swalwell acknowledged that Walden, an Emmy winner for his work on “The West Wing,” had a tough assignment.
“You’re being asked to go from ‘Here Comes the Sun’ to ‘Jaws,’” he observed with a laugh. The video being dissected features a Trump impersonator at the wheel of a school bus.
Walden had no trouble with the fix. “Sometimes, if you go too early, you jump the moment,” he explained.
Jaunty music invoking a bucolic setting plays as a mother walks her daughter to the bus stop on the first day of school. As soon as the school-bus door opens, the driver is revealed to be Trump, raving about “Being a dictator on day one” and “Roe v. Wade overturned.” The mother looks at him in shock and then back at her daughter. “You know what, honey? I’m going to drive you today,” she says. The spot closes with Trump slamming the bus into trash cans while he taps out an X post declaring himself “A Very Stable Genius!!!!!” The final tagline: “You wouldn’t trust him with your kid. Why would you trust him with our country?”
The spot is expected to be released on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and other high-profile platforms a few days before the Democratic Party gathers in Chicago for its national convention on Aug. 19-22. It’s part of an information ground war spearheaded for several years by Swalwell and other congressional Democrats who feel the party has not been effective at framing core political issues and Democratic Party values in ways that matter to younger voters. Swalwell, 43, and other members of the Dem’s Future Forum caucus, established in 2015 by the wave of millennials who have joined the chamber in the past decade, know there’s a sharper, funnier and more meme-friendly way to reach
the TikTok and Instagram demographics.
This Future Forum-inspired drive is also reflected in organizations that function outside Republican and Democratic party hierarchy — like the centrist-right Lincoln Project — which are taking the reins of the all-important media spin game. They understand that loading up TV spots on the evening news won’t cut it anymore as a media strategy.
“We’re electing people, not policies. And so we really need to humanize this race as much as we can with stories,” Swalwell says. “We have 30 seconds, not 120 minutes.”
The nonstop tumult of this year’s presidential race has made the work of Swalwell’s team that much more urgent. The hasty handoff from President Joe Biden, who withdrew his candidacy on July 21, to Vice President Kamala Harris means that Democrats have no time to lose in motivating Americans to vote blue in November.
The spots aim to jolt viewers into realizing the true stakes of Harris v. Trump, as well as what
the agenda of a Republican-controlled Congress under a second Trump administration might look like. They’re designed to be hipper than a traditional flag-laden political ad, and they’re engineered to reach younger voters where they live — on online social platforms.
Some of the spots have and will continue to air on local TV stations in battleground states including Michigan. None of the blurbs explicitly support a specific candidate or issue. Instead, they’re laser-focused on hammering a simple message: Trump is a danger to your basic freedoms. The hope is to scare recalcitrant voters into casting a ballot.
“That’s the overriding strategy — keep the focus on Trump,” Swalwell says. “That’s what this
ad seeks to accomplish in the bigger narrative of why he is so dangerous and why Kamala Harris is the future,” even though there is no mention of her in the spot.
Swalwell, who joined Congress in 2013, and represents one of the bluest of blue districts
just outside of San Francisco, has used his own campaign coffers to fund the production of this series of spots. Swalwell is married to a small business owner, Brittany Swalwell, with whom he has three kids — Nelson, Cricket and Hank — all under the age of 8.
The push to pick up the pace of Democratic messaging in peak campaign periods was an outgrowth of Future Forum activity. The outreach to Hollywood writers, directors and others came after Swalwell had a blunt conversation with screenwriter Billy Ray at a fundraising event.
“Billy told me, ‘Eric, I’m happy to make a contribution. I’ll introduce you to my friends,’” Swalwell recalls. “‘But if you’re walking away from this meeting and you’re not taking ideas from people like me and the best storytellers in the world, you’re really leaving something on the table.’” Swalwell adds, “He’s told the same thing to dozens of my colleagues, and most of them just don’t take him up on it.”
Swalwell has found plenty of top creatives who are eager to help. Among those who have contributed to the spots are writers Ray, Nasim Pedrad and Jon Schroeder as well as producers Doug Robinson, Tracy Falco, Hilary Shor and UTA partner Shani Rosenzweig. Robert De Niro and Sean Penn have weighed in to help with themes and tone, Swalwell says.
The ads, produced for modest five-figure budgets, are purposefully done as a skunkworks operation outside the apparatus of larger political action committees or the Democratic Party itself. The focus has been on presenting a clear point of view on headline issues to highlight the far-right agenda of enacting a national ban on abortion, restricting birth control, ending no-fault divorce, repealing the Affordable Care Act and more. They’re plainspoken and unabashedly pugnacious.
In the process of working the spots, the congressman who likes to note that he was “raised by Republicans” in the East Bay city of Dublin, Calif., has learned something that he didn’t know early on: Producing high-quality video is hard.
For example, he couldn’t figure out what was missing from one of the earlier spots until Grae pointed to the lack of a soundtrack. For the school bus ad, the right music would be crucial to making the point.
“The score is supporting the shock we want when we see it’s Trump,” Grae pointed out during the scoring session.
Swalwell, who followed in Harris’ footsteps as a prosecutor for the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office before heading to Washington, leans on his training as a litigator to guide his approach to the blood sport of winning elections. He thinks many Democrats have been too timid around difficult issues. He argues that sounding the alarm on “abortion” is more effective than using the words “reproductive rights.” That’s why one of the first spots produced earlier this year was a chilling depiction of a future in which a pregnant woman and her husband have to confront a police officer before going to a hospital.
According to Swalwell, Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn Democrat and minority leader of the House, has expressed a clear vision about the differences in the political messaging of Democrats versus Republicans. “His theory is that Republicans govern in headlines and Democrats govern in fine print,” Swalwell says.
Now, the congressman wants to change the font size.
Swalwell is deeply motivated by Harris’ candidacy — and not just because she predated him as an Alameda County prosecutor. Harris, with the help of her newly minted running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has a chance to break new ground for the country and at the same time protect it from the political turbulence of Trump’s MAGA movement.
“To me, this election is about freedom over fear,” he says. “We’ve never, as Democrats, leaned in on freedoms before because they’ve never been so at risk. I think freedom is the overriding message. Vote your freedom.”
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