“To succeed in 2020, a Democrat will need to have the skill and discipline to deftly pivot from Trump’s BS to the issues that matter,” Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, told The Daily Beast. “If you are trying to get retweets and social engagement, you are going to optimize for all things Trump and in doing so, you are playing his game.”…

“When Donald Trump in 2020 has somebody to caricature every day and is lobbing attacks that are strewn with falsehoods every day, it becomes a lot harder to maintain that similar level of discipline,” Brian Fallon, a former aide to Hillary Clinton, told The Daily Beast. “So what I think that puts a premium on is having somebody that is compelling unto themselves.”

Besides the strict message discipline that accompanied most of the Democratic campaigns going into the midterm elections, the party sought and got a number of candidates whose personal biographies appealed to voters and who used these personal narratives to great effect both in their on-the-ground pitches and in viral videos.