But the third page wouldn’t work. Trump glared at the machine and tried again. Nothing.
Wendy Sartory Link, the Palm Beach County elections supervisor, told the president there might be something wrong with the third page and offered him another ballot. Trump looked to his team and saw them nodding their heads. So he showed his identification again, received another ballot, and walked back to the voting booth to repeat his process.
He finished, slid the ballot into the sleeve, walked it back to the machine—and, once again the machine wouldn’t accept it.
Link suggested trying a different machine, and Trump cast the final page of his ballot.
“Ha! I thought it was me for a minute!” he said to the poll workers, and then turned to his team. “I guess we’re done here.”
Days until Election: 9
As a young woman long before joining the Front Row Joes, Libby DePiero followed Trump more closely than she did politics. In the 1980s, her mother was especially fascinated with the dashing New York tabloid denizen. The mother-daughter duo spent one New Year’s Eve at the Plaza Hotel when Trump owned it. They visited other Trump landmarks on their frequent trips to the city and daydreamed about moving into Trump Tower.
Libby became more interested in politics after the September 11 terrorist attacks and reconnected with her Christian faith. She married a Fox News fanatic, and she, too, was quickly hooked on conservative infotainment. By the time Trump announced his campaign, there was little doubt whom Libby would support. From her first chitchat with Trump at the Nashua Radisson to the 2020 primary night rally in Manchester, she’d attended fifty-eight Trump events in four years. She hoped to hit the century mark before November 3, but that goal vanished with the pandemic.
Libby hadn’t been to a single Trump event in eight months when, with just nine days until Election Day, Trump returned to Manchester. It had been an agonizing dry spell. Her fellow Front Row Joes pressured her to travel to Tulsa and come float in the boat parades. But the pandemic had changed her calculus.
“It’s like I’m a bad patriot because I’m wearing a mask,” Libby said.
By October, the pressure got to her, and so Libby ventured out. The Trump rally was just a short drive from her Connecticut home, and she’d been so diligent about pandemic precautions that she made a plan. She started taking hydroxychloroquine, based on the president’s touting of it as preventative medicine despite no proof. She would quarantine from her husband for two weeks after the rally, or at least until she could get a Covid test. And if her trial run panned out, maybe she could go to more rallies and partake in the final week of the campaign.
But as soon as she arrived at the rally at the Manchester airport, Libby realized she had made a mistake.
From the parking lot, she was crammed onto a bus that would shuttle her to the hangar for the event. After avoiding crowds for nearly the entire year, she felt uncomfortable packed in so closely with other people. About one-third of them weren’t wearing masks.
Libby’s friends had saved a seat for her up front, but the dense crowd was difficult to penetrate. In the commotion, Libby stepped on her shoelace and fell hard on the cement. Secret Service agents helped her to her feet. Her hip and tailbone were throbbing, but she refused medical attention. If she could walk, she thought, she could get to the front.
But the crowd was shoulder to shoulder across the hangar. Libby decided she was acting crazy. She wasn’t going to get to the front, and it seemed silly to risk catching the virus in the middle of the crowd. So she walked to the opposite end of the hangar, where Trump supporters with service dogs or in wheelchairs were all in masks and socially distanced.
After watching nearly sixty rallies over four years from the front row, Libby spent her last one in the very back.
Days until Election: 7
The weekly internal conference call run by Stepien, Clark, and Nick Trainer, the battleground strategy director, had just ended. And the flurry of text messages and sidebar calls immediately started:
Did that just happen?
The campaign’s leadership used the call on October 27 to run through six different paths to victory on Election Day. The scenarios ranged from hitting exactly 270 electoral votes on one map, to a landslide victory with a total of 363 electoral votes. But it was the final scenario that drove the rest of the team crazy, which was a path that included winning the White House while losing Florida and North Carolina.
“What are these people smoking?” one campaign adviser fumed.
“The level of delusion is magnificent!” said another.
Trainer made clear that they believed Trump would win Florida. But what seemed inconceivable to others on the call was any scenario in which Trump could lose those Southern battleground states yet somehow win a slew of Midwestern states where Democrats traditionally had the advantage.
There were open questions about whether there was any strategy at all.
Ten days out, Trump had held a rally in Ohio, which had been a battleground for years but few believed Biden could win this cycle. In three days, Trump had another rally in Minnesota, which few outside of Trump, Jared, and Stepien thought Trump had a chance to win. Yet winning Minnesota was on three of their six scenarios. The team in Georgia was begging for more resources: more mail pieces to help persuade voters on the fence, a visit from Pence, a visit from a Trump kid—any Trump kid! All the requests had been denied, but maybe here was their answer: There was no scenario in the six in which Georgia was ever in doubt.
Inside the campaign, everyone seemed to have their own theory as to what the plan really was. One was that since the consulting firm owned by Stepien and Clark also had been working for the Minnesota Republican Senate candidate, Jason Lewis, maybe they were trying to bring Trump there in order to generate excitement for their other guy—a charge the two men disputed. But others countered that Trump himself had long believed that he would have won Minnesota in 2016 if he’d just done one more rally there. Some felt the campaign was just throwing darts at the board. Others believed it was a final, frantic Hail Mary pass in the final minutes of the game.
But after more than two years of chaos and in-fighting, the mistrust ran deep, and no one was willing to give anyone else the benefit of the doubt. At the RNC, Richard Walters suspected that Stepien and Clark were trying to undermine Ronna with a secretive process to rewrite the party rules. Stepien thought Brad had built the campaign almost exactly wrong. Everyone assumed Brad was taking an extra cut of campaign cash for himself, even though the president—and his family—could have investigated the issue to figure it out.
Stepien took input from all directions, one person after the next—Jared, Hope, Bossie—all claiming only they knew what the campaign should be doing. By the end, Stepien barely reacted anymore. Some wondered if he’d just checked out. But Trump’s insistence on multiple mega-rallies a day—and his capacity to perform at each one—meant even more opportunities for debates over the schedule.
“Who the fuck made the decision to go to Nevada?” Corey had shouted on Air Force One a week prior.
And at the end of the day, no one in Trump World wanted to narrow the map. Trump wasn’t dissimilar from other presidential candidates who thought they could win any state with enough time to persuade the voters. The difference was how firmly Trump insisted.
“Stepien had well-laid plans, and then the president goes and does something else,” said one of Trump’s outside advisers. “I’m not defending one or the other. But he had a principal who moves around the map and moves around the day just like he moves around a tweet button.”
Two years earlier, when Trump political director Chris Carr was carving up the country into political regions and deciding where he should suggest placing battleground state directors and staff, it occurred to him that he should be prepared for these offices to remain open for the duration of the race. In 2016, Trump erupted when stories surfaced about the campaign pulling out of Virginia to reallocate those resources
elsewhere. For Carr, there was something reassuring about that. He’d spent years building a field program based on the idea that Republican staff needed to be in key communities year-round to build the kind of relationships with volunteers that would pay dividends come Election Day.
In fact, Trump’s final ten days of rallies in 2016 had been just as frantic as they were in 2020 and included stops in states such as Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia—all places where Clinton would eventually clobber him.
So while the president may not have spent as much time as Carr did thinking about the Republican ground game, his campaign’s political director had hit on a truism of Trumpism: Never, ever wave the white flag.
Days until Election: 2
In the final ten days of the race, Trump hosted thirty-three campaign rallies. Those events were spread across thirteen states, but mostly targeted in Pennsylvania (eight), Michigan (four), Wisconsin (four), and North Carolina (three). The campaign had gone back and forth for weeks over whether Pennsylvania or Michigan was most important. The original seventeen battleground states had been narrowed slightly to about a dozen and divided into three tiers in order to, ideally, guide decision-making on how to spend tens of millions of dollars in the final days and where to invest their most valuable resource—Trump’s time.
But even after all the calculations, pondering, and tinkering, Trump stopped just once during those last ten days in Georgia, where his duel with Biden would be fought to a near draw and end in a defeat for the incumbent that ultimately would drive his Shakespearian descent into a postelection, voter-fraud delirium.
And even that lone visit almost never happened.
Trump’s rally on November 1 in Rome, Georgia—an Appalachian mountain town nestled in the Republican-heavy corner of the state—wasn’t added to the president’s schedule until three days prior, and only after a barrage of phone calls to Trump from David Perdue, the Republican senator from Georgia. A former Dollar General chief executive and one of Trump’s closest confidants in the Senate, Perdue was up for reelection and had grown increasingly concerned that both he and the president could lose. With less than a week left, early turnout was well below projections in Rome and the rest of northwest Georgia, where roughly four out of five voters consistently backed Republican candidates. Perdue’s team didn’t know exactly who or what to blame for the drag, but it didn’t much matter in the moment. Perdue desperately needed Trump to inject some energy into that part of the state.
Perdue had long known that Georgia would be a slog for both candidates and had spent much of the year warning Trump World. But the pitch always fell flat. The predicament for Perdue—as well as Kelly Loeffler, Georgia’s second Republican senator who was also on the November ballot—was that he needed to collect more than 50 percent of the vote to keep his seat and avoid a runoff in January. And the one certain way both Georgia senators could clear that threshold was if the president performed even better.1 But Trump was too absorbed by his own race. Perdue’s concern could never compete with that.
The president knew that a simple plurality in his contest could capture the state’s electoral votes, and he constantly reminded Perdue and other Georgia Republicans that he’d won the state comfortably in 2016. But Georgia was changing. The state had added more than 315,000 new inhabitants since 2016, a growth rate that was 60 percent faster than the national average. Perdue’s team knew that the narrow, 1.4-point margin that had decided the Georgia governor’s race in 2018 was a more accurate picture of the current political landscape than Trump’s 5-point win just two years earlier. Georgia, in the course of a single presidential term, had become more politically competitive than even Florida—the predominant battleground in all five presidential elections in the twenty-first century, Georgia’s southern neighbor, and the president’s adopted home.
But even that stark point from Perdue hadn’t landed. In the two years since the 2018 midterms, Perdue had watched as Air Force One flew over Georgia for nine campaign rallies in Florida, and then back north for ten rallies during that same time in North Carolina. Minnesota, where a Republican presidential candidate hadn’t won since 1972, was targeted five times. Meanwhile, heading into the final weekend of the 2020 campaign, Georgia had hosted Trump for the same number of campaign rallies as Oklahoma: one.
The Perdue campaign had provided reams of polling and analytics to Trump World that were never disputed—just ignored. It was a confounding combination. The president’s campaign never bothered to share any of its data with Perdue or his allies. Perdue’s team worried that Trump viewed the need to compete in Georgia as a sign of his own electoral weakness instead of the state’s changing political dynamics.
In fact, the Trump campaign had shelved most of its polling operation for the final months of the race. They were trying to cut costs, and had also started to focus more on analytics—tracking voters who had already returned their ballots and making inferences off of that. They didn’t have projections to share until almost the end of the campaign, but even the campaign’s modeling of Georgia was significantly off the mark.
It had taken more than six weeks, but Stepien’s rebuilt data team was finally firing in the same direction during the first week of October. The shotgun marriage between Oczkowski and Skelly—whom Stepien had brought in to oversee the data operation—had surprisingly turned out to be a happy one. And the pair—with some assists from Fabrizio and the RNC—had delivered Trump World its first round of vote goals for each state. Using a mix of past election results, population changes, and consumer trends, vote goals were the total number of votes a campaign believed it would need to win each state. As Sasha Issenberg wrote in The Victory Lab, the 2012 book about the analytical revolution in modern politics, vote goals were a staple of any campaign plan—and usually among the initial documents that a general consultant or campaign manager drafted in the earliest days of the race.
For Trump, it had taken twenty-eight months into his twenty-nine-month reelection campaign, but he finally had his vote goals.
In the first meeting to go over the new numbers, Jason Miller pointed to the states with deficits, and the buckets of voters Skelly and Oczkowski had identified as most persuadable.
“This is great,” Miller said. “But what do we say to them?”
“What do you mean, what do we say?” Skelly said. “It’s literally the first week of October. What does our research say?”
Silence washed over the room.
Just like in July when Ronna had schooled Brad over how it was clearly and obviously the campaign’s job to develop its own messaging for the convention program, the data team was stunned to hear Miller, the campaign’s top communications strategist, ask how to define Trump’s message to persuadable voters. Oczkowski argued he could point the campaign to which voters wanted to hear messages about jobs and the economy, or those who prioritized national defense. But his expertise wasn’t setting broad, overarching message strategy—that was the campaign’s job.
The data they did have only underscored the need for more messaging research: Some persuadable voters thought Trump had pushed too fast to reopen the country amid Covid, while others said the country wasn’t opening fast enough. To address both issues required a level of nuance and subtlety that needed to be sharpened by focus groups and polling. There wasn’t time for either.
Instead, the campaign turned to Chris Carr, the Republican field general in charge of thousands of ground troops spread across two-dozen states, who were already knocking on doors and organizing communities in order to push millions of conservative voters to the Election Day polls for Republican candidates up and down the ballot. But now, the campaign needed Carr to turn off that program and refashion it into a makeshift focus group. They asked Carr to grab his five best volunteers in each battleground state, arm them with a script the campaign was now scrambling to write, and send off the Republican foot soldiers with orders to return only after they’d each finished twenty-minute conversations with ten voters
.
The advantages of incumbency should have prevented this kind of confusion so late in the race. But the silver lining was that the party’s turnout operation had always planned to kick into high gear in the final weeks, and on the campaign trail there was a sense the race was tightening.
“It wasn’t too late,” one campaign official said. “Everyone thought it was possible.”
Carr’s field program turned around its pseudo-focus group so efficiently and quickly that it surprised some inside campaign headquarters. But even as the campaign dug into the data, they were still at odds over how to puzzle together the electoral map to get Trump 270 votes.
The RNC’s final round of voter scores on October 27 hadn’t been much help. Those scores showed Trump losing in Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina—all states he’d comfortably win—and getting trounced by double-digits in Wisconsin and Nevada, both states he’d narrowly lose. In Georgia, the state Trump would lose by 0.24 percent, the RNC showed him trailing Biden by eight points. But it had been weeks since Stepien paid any attention to the RNC data—and it turned out he’d made the right decision. In the first months after the 2020 election, Ronna acknowledged significant problems with the party’s data program and started implementing a round of personnel changes aimed at sorting out the issues.
Inside the campaign, the data situation wasn’t much better. Fabrizio’s last poll in Georgia showed Biden and Trump tied. There was just one problem—no one in Trump World saw those numbers. Fabrizio had been sidelined. Fabrizio’s Georgia poll was paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee—a group that was helping Perdue, who was relying, at least partly, on their polling to drag Trump back to Georgia.
“Frankly, We Did Win This Election”: The Inside Story of How Trump Lost Page 38
