PhotoJames Comey on Capitol Hill in July 2016.Credit
Al Drago/The New York Times
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The
polling analysts who worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign
had a name for the many Americans who didn’t like him but didn’t like
Hillary Clinton either: “double haters.”
Many
of these double haters seemed likely to vote anyway, given their long
voting history. “They were a sizable bloc,” Joshua Green writes in his
new book “Devil’s Bargain,” the first deeply insightful political
narrative of the Trump era, “3 to 5 percent of the 15 million voters
across 17 battleground states.”
The double haters spent much of the campaign unsure what to do. In the end, as Green told
Fresh Air’s Terry Gross last week, “they broke to Trump.” As part of
his reporting for the book, Green got access to internal polls and memos
from the Trump campaign, and this material makes clear that Trump’s
aides believed one factor made a bigger difference than any other.
