Fear: Trump in the White House

Even if Trump and his campaign didn’t know it, Priebus knew Trump needed the RNC to stick with him. Trump had almost no field operations out where the voters were, and didn’t know some of the most fundamental things—Politics 101.

Priebus had spent the last years overseeing a massive effort to rebuild the RNC into a data-driven operation. Borrowing from Obama’s winning campaign strategy, the RNC started pouring vast sums—eventually more than $175 million—into analytics and big data, tracking individual primary voters, and using that information in areas divided into neighborhood “turfs” staffed with armies of volunteers.

All along, the expectation had been that once the Republican nominee was selected, the RNC would hitch this massive shiny new wagon to an already fairly robust and large campaign apparatus. For all the abuse the RNC had taken during the primaries—at one point Trump had called the RNC a “disgrace” and “a scam” and said that Priebus “should be ashamed of himself”—the RNC was effectively the Trump campaign staff.

The first step was for field staff to get an absentee or early voting ballot to those they deemed pro-Trump because they scored a 90 or above on a scale of 0 to 100 in the national database. In Ohio, out of perhaps 6 million voters, approximately 1 million would score 90 or above. Those 1 million would be targeted for early voting ballots, and the field staff and volunteers would hound each one until the ballot was sent in.

Next the field staff would move to persuade those who scored 60 or 70, trying to convince them to vote for Trump. The system was designed to reduce the randomness of voter contact, to make sure the volunteers and field staff concentrated their efforts on those most likely to vote for Trump.

The campaign announced the leadership changes on August 17. The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to make Stephen K. Bannon, chairman of the Breitbart News website, his campaign’s chief executive was a defiant rejection of efforts by longtime Republican hands to wean him from the bombast and racially charged speech that helped propel him to the nomination but now threaten his candidacy. . . . For Mr. Trump, though, bringing in Mr. Bannon was the political equivalent of ordering comfort food.”

Bannon tried to sit down with Trump and walk him through refinements of the strategy and how to focus on particular states. The candidate had no interest in talking about it.

Bannon assured Trump, I have “metaphysical certitude you will win here if you stick to this script and compare and contrast” with Hillary Clinton. “Every underlying number is with us.”

“I realized,” Bannon said later, “I’m the director, he’s the actor.”

Kellyanne Conway had gone to the four-day Democratic convention in Philadelphia in July. She had listened to the speeches, talked to delegates, appeared on television. Her observations shaped her current strategy. “Their message is Donald Trump is bad, and we’re not Donald Trump. The rest of the message was race, gender, LGBT.”

Conway coined the phrase “the hidden Trump voter.” These were the people who found themselves perplexed by the vote ahead of them, saying, “God, my daddy, my granddaddy and I are all in the union. I’m going to vote for Donald Trump?” Putting a question mark at the end. “I’m going to vote for a billionaire Republican?” Another question mark.

“And you’d have these women who’d say, you know, I’m pro-choice . . . but I don’t think Roe v. Wade is going to change. But I don’t understand why we can’t afford everyday life anymore, so I’m voting on that.”

Much of the media did not buy “the hidden Trump voter” line. But Priebus and Walsh’s database gave the RNC and the campaign insight into almost everything about every likely voter—what beer they drank, the make and color of the car they drove, the age and school of their kids, their mortgage status, the cigarettes they smoked. Did they get a hunting license every year? Did they subscribe to gun magazines, or liberal magazines like The New Republic?

And Conway said, “There’s not a single hidden Hillary voter in the entire country. They’re all out and about.”

About Clinton, she said, “She doesn’t seem to have a message. Now if I’m her, I’m going to find a message. I’m going to buy a message. And it’s going to be very positive and uplifting and optimistic. All I can see from her so far is not optimism.”

Clinton had not cracked 50 percent in eight key states that Obama had won twice with over 50 percent. Conway agreed with Bannon that if the Trump campaign could make the race about Hillary, not Trump, they would win with those hidden Trump voters. If the race stayed about Trump, “we’ll probably lose.”