Exclusive: Inside the cynical choices on abortion, women and early voting that drove Trump's third campaign

CNN

6 hours ago

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.
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 'his own position had long been a moving target.'
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 repeatedly waffled 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.
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 reported 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 more diverse coalition – and an advantage with voters who didn't turn out in 2020.
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 at the time 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.