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.
