Over Labor Day weekend in 2015, four months before the first primary votes were cast in Iowa, a somewhat obscure policy analyst and strategist wrote a confidential memo to a presidential campaign he was informally advising. He outlined what he believed was the path to victory for the GOP in the 2016 presidential election, based on election simulations he had run using a couple of publicly available models. He attacked the GOP’s official Election 2012 post-mortem as being politically motivated and divorced from actual voting data. A portion of the memo, edited lightly for style and length, is reproduced below.
Nothing came of the memo, which was received politely but not acted on. That candidate did not become the GOP nominee, or even come close to doing so. But while Donald Trump may or may not have gotten a similar memo, his campaign certainly acted according to the principles expressed in this one. He took all the states listed above except New Hampshire, where he lost by a hairbreadth, and Virginia, and added Michigan, where he won by a similar margin, taking advantage of the same demographic forces. Had the author assigned even a trivially small (10 percent) Hispanic vote share for the GOP, which he refrained from doing only to support his broader point about the importance of white turnout, it would have forecast Trump’s Florida win as well.
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