It's not clear whether Donald Trump has seen the post-election report written by his chief strategist. Photo / AP
It's not clear whether Donald Trump has seen the post-election report written by his chief strategist. Photo / AP
A thorough post-mortem into former US president Donald Trump's election loss has revealed exactly why he was defeated by Joe Biden.
The report, completed by Trump's chief strategist Tony Fabrizio and leaked to US political news website Politico, is based on exit polling in 10 key states.
Five of them — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — were states that Trump lost after winning them in 2016. The other five — Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas — were states that Trump won in both elections.
Despite the former president's baseless claims of voter fraud, the report reveals that his defeat was primarily due to his mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the fact voters did not see him as honest or trustworthy.
That caused voters who supported him in 2016 to desert him in 2020, with the report concluding Trump saw the "greatest erosion with white voters, particularly white men", but that he ultimately "lost ground with almost every age group".
The 27-page report was completed in December 2020 and distributed to Trump's top political advisers just before Biden's January 20 inauguration, showing that most of Trump's staffers had accepted his loss even as he tried to cling to power.
It is unclear if Trump has seen the report.
In the five states that flipped to Biden in 2020, Trump's biggest drop-off was among voters aged 18-29 and 65 and older. Suburbanites were another key 'flip' group.
Fabrizio wrote a 79-page memo in mid-2020 arguing that Trump needed to focus on tackling the coronavirus pandemic if he wanted to win re-election.
Donald Trump at the White House on December 31. Photo / AP
In last year's presidential election - which saw the highest voter turnout in US history - nearly 70 per cent of all ballots cast nationwide came before election day, with an estimated 108 million people voting through the mail, early in-person or by dropping off absentee ballots.
The surge came after states expanded access to mail voting and early voting, with a few states sending absentee ballots to all registered voters in response to the coronavirus pandemic that raised safety questions about large crowds at the polls.
Republican lawmakers in statehouses across the country have since moved swiftly to attack some of the voting methods that fuelled the record turnout.
Although most legislative sessions are just getting under way, the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute, has already tallied more than 100 bills in 28 states meant to restrict voting access.
More than a third of those proposals are aimed at limiting mail voting, while other bills seek to strengthen voter ID requirements and registration processes, as well as allow for more aggressive means to remove people from voter rolls.
