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ARTICLE VIEW:
Exclusive: Inside the cynical choices on abortion, women and early
voting that drove Trump’s third campaign
By Betsy Klein, CNN
Updated:
4:00 AM EDT, Thu July 3, 2025
Source: CNN
A deferral on abortion. A major shift in turnout strategy. A reversal
on early voting.
President Donald Trump and his team made a series of political
calculations steeped in cynicism months before the November 2024
election, according to a new book from a trio of reporters who
chronicled the election – which ultimately laid the groundwork for
his victory. It depicts a candidate more focused on winning than
steadfast beliefs.
CNN has exclusively obtained a passage from Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager,
and Isaac Arnsdorf’s “2024: How Trump Retook the White House and
the Democrats Lost America.” The chapter lays out how the
then-candidate shifted his perspective on targeting male voters,
dismissed pressure to back a nationwide abortion ban and was convinced
to support early voting efforts – sharp pivots from his positions in
2020.
Abortion: ‘Only electoral math matters’
The book details how Trump sorted through what the authors describe as
“conflicting advice” on handling the issue of abortion. He was
struggling to determine his campaign stance on an issue that was at the
forefront of politics – thanks in part to decisions he made in his
first term – for which “.”
Trump was acutely aware of the political implications of the Supreme
Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the authors report, telling
his co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita: “Oh sh*t. This is going to be
a problem,” when the June 2022 news alert came. And when Democrats
made gains in the 2022 midterm elections, Trump reportedly told an
anti-abortion activist, “I have to find a way out of this issue.
It’s killing us.”
Trump fielded perspectives from a wide range of advisers – GOP Sen.
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, evangelical leader Ralph Reed, and
his 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, among others – as he
weighed a position on a national ban on abortion after a certain number
of weeks.
Trump’s team compiled a presentation, delivered by co-campaign
manager Susie Wiles in March 2024, titled: “How a national abortion
policy will cost Trump the election.” It showed the more moderate
abortion policies in the so-called Blue Wall states – Pennsylvania,
Michigan, and Wisconsin – and argued, the book says, that “if Trump
supported a national ban, he would be campaigning on a stricter rule
than was currently in effect in the Midwest battlegrounds.”
“Only electoral math matters,” said the presentation – obtained
by the authors and reviewed by CNN. “Bottom line: Declaring any
number of weeks would play directly into Joe Biden’s hands on his
simplest path to electoral victory.”
Trump on abortion during the campaign, but ultimately he said in a
recorded video that he was committed to leaving restrictions to the
states and would veto a federal ban – a stance that proved popular
with moderate voters.
A ‘startling discovery’ about men
Trump’s third and final pursuit of the presidency offered a dramatic
departure in the way his team deployed its resources across the
country, as well as the targets of those resources. Aides James Blair
and Tim Saler dove into Trump campaign voter data from 2016 and 2020,
Dawsey, Pager, and Arnsdorf write, and “made a startling
discovery.”
“The conventional wisdom was that Trump lost in 2020 because of his
erosion among women, particularly suburbanites horrified by his
handling of the coronavirus pandemic and tired of his taunts and
insults. But Saler and Blair concluded Trump’s problem in 2020 was
that he slipped among men,” they write.
Blair and Saler presented a memo to senior staff detailing the
campaign’s 2020 slippage with White men compared to 2016 – a copy
of that memo obtained by the authors and reviewed by CNN said that
marked “the single most significant factor” in Trump’s 2020 loss
(the memo described it as a “reported raw vote shortage” rather
than a loss).
The team proposed a shift away from targeting swing voters and toward
motivating low-propensity voters who would vote for Trump if they
showed up at the ballot box. That included rural White men, as well as
young, male, and non-White men who “tended not follow politics
closely or receive their news from traditional media,” Dawsey, Pager,
and Arnsdorf write.
That became the basis for Trump’s untraditional strategy to target
irregular voters. CNN one month before the election that the campaign
internally acknowledged it was a gamble, but one that they insisted was
built on data they collected over nearly a decade and tested in the
months prior.
And that strategy, which relied on grassroots networking and
appearances by the candidate on male-oriented podcasts like “The Joe
Rogan Experience” and “This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von” propelled
Trump to a – and an advantage with voters who didn’t turn out in
2020.
From ‘dangerous’ to ‘too big to rig’
The most significant Trump turnabout between 2020 and 2024 came on the
issue of early voting.
Trump had falsely alleged massive fraud in the 2020 election due to
mail-in ballots, which he cast as “dangerous” and “corrupt.”
His campaign filed lawsuits to stop changes made by states to make it
easier to vote by mail. Altogether, the steps fomented mistrust among
Republican constituents, inadvertently encouraging them not to vote
before Election Day.
The authors write that Trump was pushed by numerous advisers to get the
president to stop disparaging early voting – from Sean Hannity to
Florida lobbyist Brian Ballard to Conway. But, they write, the first
person to break through on the issue was Rob Gleason, the former
Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman.
“Trump started going on again about how much he didn’t like early
and mail-in voting, and Gleason asked him to think of it this way: when
a Trump supporter gets a mail ballot, he argued, they were so excited
to vote for him they wanted to do so right away. Why wouldn’t he want
them to have that chance to show their enthusiasm for him?” the book
says.
Trump was urged by Wiles and others to use the “Too Big to Rig”
tagline, actively promoting early and mail-in voting.
At the same time, Trump allies were not copacetic with those who said
former President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory was legitimate. After Ronna
McDaniel left her position as chair of the Republican National
Committee, LaCivita was installed to run the party’s day-to-day
operations and oversaw a hiring purge as Trump aides asked RNC staffers
if they believed the 2020 election was stolen, the reporters write.
That was only paused, the book says, when an RNC official warned
LaCivita that he “would trigger a mass layoff notice under DC labor
laws.” Wiles later stepped in to remediate the dysfunction.
“Wiles posted up at the RNC, taking phone calls and complaining about
the mess she now had to fix. Some of the fired staff would be re-hired.
LaCivita fired one staffer, John Seravalli, thinking he was someone
else. He agreed to hire him back and gave him a raise. He renegotiated
a consulting fee for Boris Epshteyn, thinking he had achieved a
reduction, but it was actually an increase,” the book says.
CNN’s Steve Contorno, Fredreka Schouten, Em Steck, Andrew Kacyznski,
and Jeremy Herb contributed to this report.
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