To win in November, former President Donald Trump should take a page from Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential reelection campaign playbook. As with Trump's campaign, the Reagan campaign was taken by surprise in July of that year when Walter Mondale chose Geraldine Ferraro as his vice presidential running mate. As with Vice President Kamala Harris' s emergence as the Democratic presidential nominee, Mondale’s unexpected choice of Ferraro galvanized female voters. Both women also appealed to specific ethnic or racial groups. In both cases, GOP strategists were rocked back on their heels and initially fumbled their responses to these history-making female candidates.
A final similarity is that both women's name identification was soft, meaning most voters knew little more than their names. That left the Reagan-Bush campaign, like Trump-Vance, with 100 days to define Ferraro’s candidacy and contain her appeal. The task was urgent. Our pollsters predicted that Ferraro’s presence on the ticket could mobilize as many as a million more female voters to turn out than in 1980, potentially altering the race.
My duties on the Reagan-Bush campaign that July began with working on a team of strategists to draft Reagan’s campaign plan. They ended with myself and one other campaign aide put in charge of handling the challenges posed by Ferraro. Trump could benefit from emulating the disciplined approach we used.
Our first step was to impose a blackout on comments by our campaign and its top supporters about Ferraro. We needed to buy time for in-depth polling and focus group research to be completed. Until we had a solid understanding of Ferraro’s impact on the race and how voters would react to messaging about her, we wanted to avoid inadvertent political blunders. The temptation in an election year is to react immediately, and that is even more true in 2024 with its 24/7 news cycle than it was in 1984. Trump and Vance have already had a taste of how their ad hoc jibes can backfire. They’re ineffective and a waste of precious time and media coverage during the final countdown to Election Day.
Ferraro made our task harder in 1984 because she came out swinging, attacking the sincerity of Reagan’s religious convictions. She triggered first lady Nancy Reagan’s defensive instincts. Nancy Reagan pressed us to quickly come up with a strategy to hit back at Ferraro, but we resisted her pressure to act until we had data. Our pollster’s results showed any questioning of Ferraro’s resume or qualifications to be president backfired badly with women. They saw it as attacking her capabilities because of her gender. For similar reasons, questioning her past as a prosecutor was also off-limits. That left the issues and some questions about her involvement with her husband’s real estate firm as fair game.
We moved fast to build dossiers on Ferraro’s record in Congress and her dealings with her husband’s business. We put together separate teams of experts to delve into all aspects of each. We uncovered problems with Ferraro’s congressional ethics filings that led to a unanimous House Ethics Committee vote to investigate her. Legwork, tips, and detailed scrutiny of her campaign contributors uncovered links to Mafia figures.
As we obtained results, we refined the messages we would use and the means for disseminating them. For both strategic and operational reasons, we avoided head-on techniques like campaign advertising, news conferences, or attacks from the podium by either Ronald Reagan or Bush.
The Trump-Vance campaign should follow Ronald Reagan’s lead and cease attacking Harris until they have thoroughly analyzed polling and focus groups. The voters they should pay most attention to are Independents and GOP-leaning women who are put off by Trump’s sometimes acerbic personality. Their next step is to find issues and messages that will resonate with these voters and begin identifying and refining both the messages and how they will be delivered.
Next, they need to tie Harris to the top three voter concerns: the economy, immigration, and crime. This election ought to be decided by these three issues. Harris is vulnerable on all three. If the Trump campaign can get its act together and define a vote for Harris as a continuation of all three problems, Trump will win reelection.
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The toughest step for the Trump team is to avoid distractions and keep a disciplined focus on the top issues. If the Trump team fails to do so, the race is likely to be decided on personality and demographics. Harris’s age and demeanor are assets, as is her capacity for reinventing her stand on issues like fracking.
We never underestimated our opponents in 1984. Discipline and a solid strategy for handling Ferraro paid off. Ronald Reagan won 49 states and a majority of female voters, including Italian-American women.
John B. Roberts II is a former political strategist and executive producer of the McLaughlin Group who served in the Reagan White House. He is the author of “ Reagan’s Cowboys : Inside the 1984 Reelection Campaign’s Secret Operation Against Geraldine Ferraro.”
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