Election Memo: The Art of the Deal
A critical negotiation Donald Trump made in the summer of 2016 to win office may block his return to power Tuesday
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If the latest Des Moines Register poll out of Iowa from decorated pollster J. Ann Selzer is a leading indicator, the election results Tuesday could be surprising, at least based on professional prognosticators and barometers which have deemed this race for the White House neck-and-neck for months now.
Selzer found Vice President Kamala Harris taking a surprising lead in support in ruby-red Iowa, carried on support from women voters there, especially older white women.
This trend has been reflected in most readouts of the massive early voting numbers, particularly in battleground states like Pennsylvania where my Republican sources have been raising alarm bells for the Trump campaign for weeks now. (You can read about that in my previous election memos here, and here.)
To understand how we ended up here, it’s worth going back to a critical deal Trump negotiated way back in the summer of 2016 which cemented his surprise victory that November, and could perhaps block his attempted return to power.
1. A historic deal
Donald Trump would not have won the White House without the pro-life movement, a collection of anti-abortion conservatives spanning religious groups who had been pushing to abolish abortion for decades, ever since the Supreme Court established federal protections in 1973’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, an anti-abortion champion, was the favorite of many evangelicals and social conservatives, and despite dropping his primary bid against Trump that May 2016 threatened a surprise comeback at the Republican convention.
To win over the pro-life movement, Trump cut a deal: he would nominate judges who promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, if they promised their complete and total support — which was crucial at the time as he looked to stave off a GOP insurgency at the 2016 Republican convention.
(To help shore up their support and win over reticent Midwest evangelicals, distinct from their Southern Baptist evangelical brethren, Trump also brought on then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence on the ticket, to repair that breach and ensure they showed up on Election Day.)
On election night in 2016, Trump trounced Hillary Clinton among white women voters.
In office, Trump kept true to his promise to the Christian Right, selecting anti-abortion judges from the vetted list and even making history as the first president to speak to the National Right to Life rally in Washington in January 2020.
Trump’s nomination of three conservative justices in just four years in office tilted the balance of power of the Supreme Court, and just a year and a half after leaving office, Trump’s nominees formed a key bloc in overturning Roe v. Wade.
2. A distinctly Trump wedge issue
But even as the Trump-molded high court made history, Trump vigorously cautioned Republicans running in the 2022 midterms to avoid talking about abortion at all.
The issue which carried him to victory in 2016 was now a new political “third rail” in the wake of the Supreme Courts’ Dobbs decision.
I was at the annual
summit for conservatives last summer, covering appearances from just about every Republican not named Trump. I’d been asking around for years at that point to try and get a sense of the shape of the modern Republican Party, inexorably changed first by Trump’s rise to power and then by his failed attempt to cling to power, the January 6th insurrection.Around that time The New York Times’ Nate Cohn published one of the best answers to this question, defining six distinct groups within the GOP, by region, ideology, age and other topics. He noted that Trump’s bedrock coalition inside the GOP, which would ultimately make him unstoppable in the Republican primary, consisted of “The Right Wing” (southern conservative evangelicals) and “The Blue Collar Populists” (northern Republicans brought into the party by Trump, who were socially moderate and supported Trump’s nationalist policies.)
The one key issue which divided Trump’s bedrock of supporters? Abortion.
Writing for the now-defunct The Messenger last October, I reported that Trump was very apprehensive about the issue, directing others to stop talking about it. (You can find that story here, courtesy of The Internet Archive.)
And indeed, even as Trump felled his Republican primary opponents steadily through the winter and into the spring, a stubborn protest vote formed around the lone woman in the field, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Suburban moderates and a good number of women primary voters kept casting votes for Haley in stunning numbers, even months after she had dropped out of the race.
Haley warned repeatedly that Trump would have to work to win back their support. Instead, Trump closed the race targeting the “bro” vote, with lengthy appearances on podcasts popular with young men, millions spent on targeted advertising around major league sports and betting and a nominating convention featuring Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock painting Trump as the ultimate man.
But Trump wasn’t always gender-based, and often had advisers pushing him to focus on winning back women.
3. Two historic bets
At its core, the first ever conviction of a former president of the United States boiled down to Trump worrying that he would lose women voters in the late stages of the 2016 race. Following on the heels of the release of the Access Hollywood tape, Trump and his team were convinced news of his affair with Stormy Daniels would sink his bid. (Trump’s lawyers argued that he was trying to shield his family from a baseless allegation.)
But Trump’s many, historic, judicial woes — including a multi-million dollar civil finding that he had raped former advice columnist E. Jean Carroll decades ago — did little to shift public sentiment, according to most polls and, in some cases even seemed to buttress his support.
The day after Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail, the President Joe Biden’s campaign targeted Republicans not with Trump’s historic mugshot, but with an ad blitz blasting the “MAGA Republican support for National Ban on Abortion.”
Democrats helped inject “Project 2025” into the popular vernacular — a stunning feat for a dusty think tank tome published regularly since Ronald Reagan first took office in 1980 — with its promises of strict anti-abortion and pro-life policies. (So much that Trump routinely blasted the policy manual’s authors, including some of his former top aides.
Biden struggled building his re-election bid as an existential showdown with the fate of American representative democracy on the line, and slid in the polls — before being pushed from the race after a disastrous race. Harris, anointed by Biden, burst into the race with a campaign message tailored for women, blasting Beyonce’s “Freedom” at her rallies.
And in her three-month sprint to Election Day, Harris energized women voters in a way that Biden never could.
Harris leaned into the issue regularly, if not always overtly.
Her closing argument delivered from the same spot where Trump had urged his supporters to march on the Capitol on January 6th, seemed designed to forge a closing argument that Trump was a threat to democracy. Instead it framed Harris against the backdrop of the White House, appearing presidential, as she argued that women’s freedom was on the line.
As voters show up in person to vote on Tuesday, the nation will discover which strategic gamble — Trump’s or Harris’s — paid off.