The Lincoln Project was formed from members of the Republican Party, who came together to prevent Donald Trump from being re-elected president of the United States. Their work on this campaign was intense political communication and focused on Hispanic and non-Hispanic Republicans. Two of its members explained to Plan V how their successful campaign was in key states where they turned the tables on Joe Biden and why Trump did not represent the values of the Republican Party.

We've never endorsed a Democratic candidate for president. But Trump must be defeated. That was the central and founding message of The Lincoln Project, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, December 17, 2019. They were four founders, prominent Republicans who, paradoxically, sent messages to their country's Republican voters not to vote for President Donald Trump's re-election.

On their website they explained their reasons: "We do not undertake this task lightly or out of ideological preference. There are still many political differences with the national Democrats. But the priority for all patriotic Americans must be a shared loyalty to the Constitution and a commitment to defeat candidates who have abandoned their constitutional oaths, regardless of party. Choosing Democrats who support the Constitution over Republicans who do not is a worthy effort.

His messages, especially on social networking sites, hit Trump and his supporters very hard. They believe that Trump and Trumpism are a danger to America's democracy. Plan V spoke with two Hispanic spokespersons for the organization. Cesar Martinez, political consultant, director of MAS Consulting and member of The LincolnProject, from Los Angeles, California. César is an expert in political communication and participated actively in this electoral campaign and has been a political consultant for many campaigns in the United States. Marco Antonio Valera, from Hawaii, General Director for the West Coast of The LincolnProject, also participated in this dialogue.

It is paradoxical that there are Republicans who are against the re-election of an incumbent Republican president and even call for a vote for his Democratic rival. How do you explain that?

MARCO VALERA: The answer is simple. When the Republican primary for the presidency was held in 2016, there were 17 pre-candidates. It showed the variety of what it is to be a Republican: very right-wing people, people more from the center... What happened there is that the Republican vote was so divided and the extreme right stayed with Donald Trump. So people from the center and center right were fighting for the same votes and Trump was very comfortable with his ultra-right votes. Many Republicans were not and were not in favor of Donald Trump before he was overpowered. Because he created a division within the Republicans themselves; then there were many, like me, who at no time agreed with or supported Trump. But he was nominated, he became president, and many Republicans were left with that surprise: that the party had chosen such a man. We continued to support the party, but during the four years of Trump's presidency the party began to change and a political system began to be created in which a candidate creates a party, not the other way around. Historically, presidential candidates in the United States are part of a party. And Trump says he is a Republican, but the vast majority of those who have not supported him to date are convinced that he was never a Republican. In fact, all his life he was a Democrat, and his own children could not even vote for him in the primaries, because they were Democrats.

CESAR MARTINEZ: I worked on the 2000 presidential campaign with President Bush, then the re-election campaign, then John McCain, then Mitt Romney, and in 2016 with Jeff Bush. The latter was an affable person, seeking inclusion and Latinos to participate in the process, and when we had strategy meetings we saw that the opponents to beat in those Republican primaries were Romney, in the long run, or maybe a Ted Cruz. But Donald Trump was not seen as a possibility, then he began to insult and to insult and to make his style work, and people wanted red meat, and the ultra-conservative wing that was going to go for the side of Ted Cruz took over. And you had this dilemma with a candidate who wasn't really a Republican, he was buying a party; from there we saw "trumpism" coming. The Republican party wasn't the solid party, it was the party of one person. Why is that so strong? Because the Republican national platform decision this year was: whatever President Trump says. There was literally no platform and the party repeated what the president said. And that's dangerous for a democracy as old and as strong as the United States - to see a party stop having a platform of its own and become just the platform of one person and his or her family.

When we talk about Trump or Trumpism, what are we talking about?

MARCO: There are certain values and principles that are very common in the Republican Party. For example, that the U.S. has a strategic position in the world economically, militarily and politically. What we've seen with President Trump, is that he's reducing the military. He's increasing the national debt, something the Republicans have never done. Trump has done the opposite of what the Republicans are doing. Another example: the Republican Party has had a religious slant, but he doesn't even believe in God. He represents a party that focuses only on him in his family. When you talk about Trumpism, you are talking about a non-Republican way of governing, because it does not represent the party.

How did the work of The Lincoln Project fall to America? Did the Republicans see it as a betrayal?

MARCO: I'm 33 years old and I joined the Republican Party at 18. I'm 15 years old as a Republican, but we are against Trump and the people who support him because we see that he is destroying the party. If Trump continues, the party will no longer exist. This is not only a rejection of Donald Trump as a person and as a political failure, but a rejection of what he has done to the party.

How did the game get hit?

MARCO: It's very easy: 66% of new voters supported Joe Biden. In other words, the youth of the United States are already convinced that they have no space within the Republican Party. This is not going to be felt tomorrow, but for an entire generation.

CESAR: The main function of the parties is to have members and to win elections. And if you have a party that clings to one person, it's going to stop attracting young people, new voters, and it's going to lose the function of what a party is. The function of a party is not to carry out the will of one person.

MARCO: I think, very black and white, that what President Trum is saying is that he doesn't want the votes that are against him to be counted. Because his message is not even clear: in certain states he wants the votes to continue to be counted, like in Arizona, but he doesn't want them to be counted in Pennsylvania, where he's losing. What Trump wants, at the end of the day, is for the result to look like he won the election. But neither he nor his team have a clear message to combat the notion that he lost. I don't agree with these court cases that the president's group has brought. That is damaging democracy, damaging institutions that have been serving democracy in the United States for 250 years.

CÉSAR: And what Trump does doesn't help. The tradition is that if you've already lost, you've lost, and we're going forward. But these actions can do a great deal of damage to democratic institutions. Even with the vote recounts that Trump wants to force, it's no longer enough. If it were the problem in one state, like Florida in 2000, it could be, but he has defeats in several states. He may have a technical right in some of them, but he can no longer change the outcome.

MARCO: And maybe they will find a dozen cases where there have been some irregularities, but we are talking about Trum losing in these states by thousands of votes, not by a dozen.

What is a legal vote and an illegal vote?

MARCO: President Trump believes that any vote that has not been counted on election day is illegal. And that's not true. Because a lot of votes come in after the election from Americans living abroad, who are in the military, and they send them in the mail. Another thing is that many states by their local legislatures voted against counting the votes before election day and voted in favor of counting them after those that were recorded on election day. But those votes were legally entered days or weeks before election day. All the votes that were submitted before election day I think are legal. That they are not counted on the same day is another matter, but that does not mean that they are illegal. The historical laws of the United States were used for this, but Trump believes that because they were not counted on election day they are illegal, and that is not true.

Why did Trump lose?

CÉSAR: This was a referendum on Donald Trump. Within the grain of sand that The Lincoln Project put, in the Hispanic aspect, we made certain messages in which we reminded the readers of certain things. One of them, the bad handling of the pandemic. We did some focus groups about it. Marco and I were with a focus group of Venezuelans in Florida and they told us: we may not agree on political issues, but what we agree on is the poor management of Covid-19. We are the first country in the world to die. That's an issue that Trump politicized. In this country there are states where if you wear a mask they tell you you are a socialist. To that degree he became polarized. And we also did a lot of messages to remind people that this is a potential dictator, literally linking him to the Chavez, the Maduros, the Castros, the Ortega, because they are the ones who want to end the institutions and stay in power, who use public force to hurt people, who put their family in public office. That is what Donald Trump wanted, that his sons, his daughter be the successors and run the country as if it were their own company. And the insults, moreover, to our Hispanic community is something that was strategically used to seek Donald Trump's non-reelection.

MARCO: Add to that the relationship he has with the North Korean dictator and Putin. The United States has been against these people; they have been enemies of the United States. And this man takes Putin's word over the word of our own intelligence services as true; something that has never been seen before.

What is left for the Republican Party now, what is its challenge?

MARCO: I think the Democrats were expecting an arrow to the heart of the Republican Party and there wasn't one. Most likely, the Republicans can keep the Senate, and they didn't lose a single member of the House of Representatives. But Joe Biden did win and he is going to be the president of the United States. That is exactly what The Lincoln Project did: it focused on those who were supporting President Trump and only on the president. You can say that The Lincoln Project was very effective because the vast majority of Republicans stayed, but the number one pseudo-Republican left.

CÉSAR: This is precisely the level of sophistication, of targeting that we apply. The Latino voter in the United States is made up of almost twenty nationalities. It is not the same for the Mexican voter in Arizona, who had a very important participation, as talking to a Cuban American voter in Florida, or a Puerto Rican voter in Florida in the Orlando and Tampa area; because with the same Puerto Ricans we did specific targeting so that they would realize how Donald Trump had such a bad handling of Hurricane Maria. To the Cuban Americans to remind them that Trump could be a potential Castro; to the Venezuelans about Chavez, to tell them that we could be electing our own dictator. In Latin America, candidates, parties, can learn from this kind of specific level of targeting. Because sometimes they want to reach everybody and they don't reach anybody. You have to find where the niches are, and The Lincoln Project looked for that niche of Republicans, conservative people to whom we said: not this time, this time erase that little piece that is called Trump, you can continue with your values, your way of thinking, the candidates that you like in Congress, but not Trump, because of what Trumpism represents.

MARCO: And in light of the results, it was proven that this was effective.

Where precisely can successes be attributed?

MARCO: The most successful outcome was to have President Trump out. But we also saw that it was necessary to fulfill a goal that we had set ourselves: to convince the 3% to 5% of Republicans to vote against President Trump, a Republican candidate. And those margins were exactly what Vice President Biden won, in states like Arizona, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, states in which Trump won four years ago with the same margins. What we did is we turned them upside down, and we succeeded.

CESAR: It's very simple, you don't have to make it so specific. You had to tell people that the message was always against Donald Trump and ask people if he represented their values. There was a video whose message was spoken by Reagan, Bush, Obama, Clinton, George W. Bush... all the presidents who had spoken well about Latinos. And all this was in reference to Hispanic Heritage Month, which is between September 15 and October 12. There we focused and showed the messages saying that there were Republican presidents who recognized the Hispanic contribution to this country until Trump came along and did the opposite. Now, President Trump also invested good efforts for Latinos in Florida, in Texas, but we made efforts in Arizona, which was key. In the messages people can discern, realize. We didn't give them messages about how to vote, but messages to make them aware and decide who to vote for.

How divided is America?

MARCO: I think it's going to be a little bit divided. But with this election for Biden, I've seen Republicans say they feel better and believe they're going to start healing the wounds in America.

More than voting for Biden, people wanted Trump gone?

Exactly.

Did President Bush congratulate Biden?

MARCO: Yes, that has always been the tradition. There are even very few occasions in which an ex-president gets involved in a campaign. The tradition has been that they stay out of it. But it was interesting that President Obama got involved in the end. I guess because Joe Biden asked him to, and I think Obama realized that the campaign was getting complicated.