Book “2024: How Trump Retook The White House and The Democrats Lost America” shows how then -candidate Donald Trump changed his strategy to win over male voters
A postponement of abortion. A major change in the participation strategy. A reversal in the early vote.
President Donald Trump and his team made a series of political calculations impregnated with cynicism months before the November 2024 elections, according to a new book by a trio of reporters who accompanied the elections – which eventually released the foundations for their victory. The book portrays a candidate more focused on winning than firm convictions.
CNN has solely obtained a passage from the book “2024: How Trump Retook The White House and The Democrats Lost America” by Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf. The chapter shows how the then candidate changed his strategy to win over male voters, rejected the pressure to support the ban on abortion across the country and was convinced to support early voting efforts – sudden changes in relation to their positions by 2020.
Abortion: “Only electoral mathematics matters”
The book describes in detail the way Trump dealt with what the authors describe as “contradictory advice” on the issue of abortion. He was struggling to determine his campaign position on an issue that was at the forefront of politics – thanks in part to the decisions he made in his first term – to which “his own position had long been moving.”
Trump was perfectly aware of the political implications of the Supreme Court’s decision to nullify ROE v. Wade report the authors, having told his campaign code Chris Lacivita: “Oh Sh*T. This is going to be a problem,” when the June 2022 news alert arrived. And when the Democrats got gains from the 2022 middle term elections, Trump would have told an anti-aborted activist: “I have to find a way to get out of this question.”
Trump obtained perspectives from a wide range of counselors – South Carolina Republican Party Senator Lindsey Graham, evangelical leader Ralph Reed and 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, among others – while evaluating a position on the national abortion ban after a certain number of weeks.
Trump’s team compiled a presentation, delivered by campaign codirer Susie Wiles in March 2024, entitled: “As a national abortion policy will cost the election to Trump.” The presentation showed the most moderate abortion policies in the so -called states of the Blue Wall – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – and argued, the book says that “if Trump supported a national ban, he would be campaigning based on a more rigorous rule than that was currently in force on the Midwest battlefields.”
“Only electoral mathematics matters,” says the presentation – obtained by the authors and analyzed by CNN. “In short, declare any number of weeks would play directly in Joe Biden’s hands on his simplest way to electoral victory.”
During the campaign, Trump hesitated about abortion, but eventually said in a recorded video that he was committed to leaving restrictions on states and would see a federal ban – a position that turned out to be popular among moderate voters.
US President Donald Trump takes the stage for his latest election year in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 5, 2024. Somodevilla chip/Getty Images
A “surprising discovery” about men
Trump’s third and last attempt to reach the presidency represented a dramatic change in the way his team used his resources across the country, as well as the targets of these resources. Advisers James Blair and Tim Saler plunged into data from the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaign voters, Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf, and “made a surprising discovery.”
“The conventional wisdom was that Trump lost in 2020 because of his erosion among women, particularly suburbans horrified by the way he dealt with the covid-19 pandemic and tired of provocations and insults. But Saler and Blair concluded that Trump’s problem in 2020 was the fact that he fell among men,” they write.
Blair and Saler presented a memorandum to the senior team detailing the 2020 campaign slide among white men, compared to 2016 – a copy of this memorandum obtained by the authors and analyzed by CNN said that this was “the most significant factor” in Trump’s defeat in 2020 (the memorandum described it as a “scarcity of raw votes”.
The team proposed to stop aiming at indecisive voters and began to motivate the low -prone voters who would vote for Trump if they appeared at the polls. This included white men from rural areas, as well as young men, male, non -white who “tended not to follow politics closely or receive news from the traditional media,” written Dawsey, Pager and Arnsdorf.
This has become the basis of Trump’s unique strategy to reach irregular voters. CNN reported, a month before the elections, that the campaign recognized internally that it was a bet, but insisted that it had been built on data collected over almost a decade and tested in the previous months.
And this strategy, which was based on base networks and appearances of the candidate in men’s podcasts such as “The Joe Rogan Experience” and “This Past Weekend W/ Theo von,” Trump led to a more diverse coalition – and an advantage with voters who did not attend 2020.
“Dangerous” to “too big to manipulate”
Trump’s most significant turnaround between 2020 and 2024 occurred in the matter of early vote.
Trump falsely allegedly claimed a massive fraud in the 2020 elections due to the vows by mail, which he classified as “dangerous” and “corrupt.” At the time, his campaign filed a court action to prevent the changes introduced by states to facilitate correspondence vote. Together, these measures fostered distrust among Republican voters, inadvertently encouraging them not to vote before election day.
The authors write that Trump was pressured by several counselors to fail to deny the early vote – from Sean Hannity to Florida Brian Ballard lobbyist and Conway. But, according to the authors, the first person to talk about it was Rob Gleason, former president of the Pennsylvania Republican Party.
“Trump began to talk again about how much I didn’t like the early vote and the vote for correspondence, and Gleason asked him to think as follows: When a Trump supporter receives a correspondence voting report, he argued, was so enthusiastic about voting for him immediately. Why would he not want them to show his enthusiasm for him?”
Trump was urged by Wiles and others to use the slogan “Too Big to Rig”, actively promoting the early vote and correspondence.
At the same time, Trump’s allies were not compatible with those who said former President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 was legitimate. After Ronna McDaniel left his position as president of the Republican National Committee, Lacivita was installed to direct the party’s day -to -day operations and supervised a purge of hiring while Trump’s advisers asked RNC officials if they believed the 2020 election was stolen, reporters write.
This was only interrupted, says the book, when an RNC employee warned Lacivita that “he would call a mass dismissal warning in accordance with DC labor laws.” Wiles later intervened to remedy the dysfunction.
“Wiles stayed at RNC, answering calls, and complaining about the confusion it had to resolve. Some of the staff faced would be readmitted. Lacivita fired an employee, John Seravalli, assuming he was someone else. He agreed to hire him and gave him an increase. increase, “details the book.
