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When former President Donald Trump clinched the Republican Presidential nomination last month, his win was taken by many as both a hard-fought campaign victory and the conclusion of a long-standing inevitability. Although much of today’s GOP exists as a de facto extension of the MAGA movement, Trump’s dominating primary performance cannot be attributed to his personal sway over the conservative zeitgeist alone. For months the former president and his campaign team have worked behind the scenes to ensure the mechanics of this election cycle work in his favor. Some of these maneuvers have taken place publicly, such as Trump’s installment of loyalists to run the Republican National Committee. Other instances have been less dramatic but equally impactful, as Trump alters both the spirit of the American electoral system and its operational structure as well.

A ‘death knell for Trump’s competition’

In the past, Trump’s political agenda had been “frequently stymied by infighting and incompetence” thanks, in part, to having “populated his campaigns with huge egos,” Vanity Fair said. The 2024 contrast is stark, with a drama-free campaign best represented by senior advisor Chris LaCivita and his “Talmudic understanding of primary rules.” LaCivita has spent much of the past year pushing for “state Republican parties to change their processes to favor Trump.” Perhaps nowhere was that effort more impactful than in California, where the campaign orchestrated a change to the primary rules so that a “candidate who wins more than 50% of the statewide vote on March 5” receives the state’s entire delegate count, rather than a proportional amount, Politico said. Ultimately, the maneuver was a potential “death knell for Trump’s competition” like Ron DeSantis, who had been planning his California campaign to pick off delegates from the total batch under the old rules.

Recently Trump and his allies attempted a similar operation in Nebraska, which metes out electoral college votes based on district wins, rather than the winner-take-all system used by the vast majority of the country. In many past elections, “Republicans take two and Democrats take one of the state’s votes, though the third is tightly contested,” The Hill explained. After Republican Gov. Jim Pillen endorsed a bill to change his state’s electoral college process, Trump publicly threw his support behind the measure, calling it “right for Nebraska” while urging supporters to lobby on its behalf. 

“When you realize you can’t win with the current rules, you go back to the drawing board to change the rules so you can win?” Democrat State Sen. Jen Day of Nebraska asked during last week’s debate. The measure was ultimately defeated, but by lending his weight to the issue, Trump and his allies “underscore[d] just how narrow the race for 270 electoral votes could be in November,” CNN said. 

‘Changing the battlefield’

While the average American voter likely doesn’t follow the picayune ins and outs of every state’s primary voting rules, the Trump campaign has not been shy about manipulating the system in its favor. After several states “adopted Trump-friendly rules in 2020 to ward off competition for the then-president,” in 2023 the former president’s team began actively “advocating for modifications in half a dozen additional states,” Reuters said, highlighting the “scale of the effort.” For much of the 12 months prior to the 2024 primaries, Trump and his allies were “changing all these party rules, getting their people in place, changing the battlefield,” one GOP strategist told Vanity Fair.

Trump is hardly alone in his effort to shape the existing political system to his liking. President Joe Biden’s efforts with Democrats to change the primary schedule so South Carolina — a state widely seen as being to his political advantage — would vote first helped fend off a challenge from Minnesota Rep. Dean Philips. It also “helped set up an advantage for Trump” by cutting into then-chief rival Nikki Haley’s base since “any registered voter can participate in either party’s primary. But voters can only choose one primary,” Politico said.

Working the electoral system to benefit incumbents may well be a bipartisan pursuit. For someone like Trump, who has built his political capital on claims of being the victim of a “rigged election,” however, it might be the deciding factor in a path back to power.