How the roads not taken have shaped the 2024 race for the White House

By Eric Bradner, Gregory Krieg and Steve Contorno, CNN

(CNN) — In a presidential race that polls show is neck and neck – one that could be decided by small numbers of voters in a single battleground state – every detail matters.

Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris both have viable paths to the White House, with five days until Election Day. Critical decisions both campaigns made this summer and fall, and key moments as the race progressed, could decide the election’s outcome.

Here’s a look at some of those potentially decisive choices – the wisdom of which won’t be known until after the 2024 contest is settled.

What if Trump had truly changed his tone after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania?

After Trump survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania on the eve of the Republican National Convention in July, he described himself as a changed man.

“This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together,” the former president told the Washington Examiner shortly after the attempt on his life. “The (convention) speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago.”

Trump said he had rewritten his address to focus on a more unifying message and described an almost existential wonder at his fate.

“That reality is just setting in,” he said. “I rarely look away from the crowd (during rallies). Had I not done that in that moment, well, we would not be talking today, would we?”

Leading President Joe Biden in most polls, Trump and Republicans arrived in Milwaukee for the RNC a couple of days later in a celebratory mood. When Trump entered the convention arena on the first night, a white bandage over his wounded ear, he received a hero’s welcome.

For most of the next four days, Republicans delivered toned-down speeches and framed Trump’s brush with death as an opportunity for the party to address voters with more vulnerability and a softer tone.

In the end, though, the era of good feelings lasted only about 20 minutes into Trump’s acceptance speech.

“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” he first told the crowd at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, before recounting what had happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, days earlier.

Then it was back to business as usual.

Trump attacked his political enemies, cheered the dismissal of one of his indictments, accused Democrats of “cheating on elections” and repeatedly slammed Biden, who had given a talk from the Oval Office calling on Americans to “lower the temperature in our politics” in the aftermath of the shooting.

Trump never looked back. He has gone on to run what’s been, even by his own standards, a divisive and grievance-laden campaign. Now, less than a week from Election Day, the country is in many places tense, angry and anxious over what will follow.

What if Harris had distanced herself from Biden earlier and more aggressively?

In her “closing argument” to voters Tuesday night in Washington, Harris delivered a message that she had mostly shied away from in the early days of her short campaign.

“My presidency will be different because the challenges we face are different,” the vice president said, staking out some distance from Biden without chucking him under the bus.

“Our top priority as a nation four years ago was to end the pandemic and rescue the economy,” Harris said. “Now our biggest challenge is to lower costs, costs that were rising even before the pandemic and that are still too high.”

It had been 100 days since Biden announced he would not continue his campaign, effectively passing the torch – and his political apparatus – to Harris. She quickly locked down support across the party’s assorted factions. Biden’s role going forward, though, went undefined.

At times, the now lame-duck president offered Harris a sort of shield against criticism of US policy, particularly in the Middle East, where the administration’s refusal to consider conditioning military aid to Israel has been met in some circles with an insistence that she cannot break, even rhetorically, from the policy of the sitting commander in chief.

But Harris’ unevenness on the question of Biden’s job performance roared back after she was asked on “The View” if she would have done anything differently from the president during his time in office.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of,” she offered haltingly. “And I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact.”

When she later pointed to a “difference,” it was that she planned to have a Republican in her Cabinet.

Republicans pounced. The clip was shared and aired widely as evidence, Trump and his allies said, that the new Democratic nominee bore no substantive differences to Biden, who has long been deep underwater in public opinion polls.

Harris’s more recent language, clearly meant to keep Biden at arm’s length, and his relatively few campaign trail appearances – to say nothing of his controversial Zoom chat on Tuesday – have mostly rendered him an afterthought.

Still, the questions are bound to linger if Harris falls short next week.

Could she have made the move sooner?

Did the delay, at least in the eyes of pundits (many of them Democrats), cost her in the end?

What if the Biden and Trump campaigns had waited until the fall to schedule their first debate?

In 2020, the first presidential debate didn’t take place until September 29. Four years earlier, the date for Hillary Clinton’s and Trump’s first onstage meeting was September 26. Barack Obama delivered his famously underwhelming 2012 debate debut on the third day in October.

This year, the schedule looked a whole lot different – and it wasn’t just Trump’s yearslong beef with the Presidential Debate Commission to blame (or cheer). In fact, it was Biden’s camp that spearheaded the commission’s defenestration. The campaigns in May announced they would hold two presidential debates, rather than the usual three, with the first coming on June 27.

The rest is, in many ways, already history.

Biden turned in one of the worst debate performances in modern political history, shocking Democrats from the grassroots to the donor conclaves, who moved in near unison to pressure him out of the race. The president and his closest allies pushed back at first, but his campaign was over less than a month later.

A few days after he announced plans to “stand down,” Harris had effectively locked up the nomination and begun a historic sprint toward Election Day.

In an alternate universe where the presidential debates of 2024 take place on a timeline like past cycles, Biden and Trump would not have met onstage until the fall – long after Democrats would have been legally or logistically able to switch horses had his performance caused a similar panic.

No matter the outcome next week – and for all that’s happened and will happen since Harris ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket – the definitive moment of this presidential campaign almost surely came in an Atlanta debate hall about three months before a vote was cast.

What if Harris had picked Shapiro?

It’s no secret that Pennsylvania could be the election’s tipping point. Pro-Harris and pro-Trump advertising spending is approaching $500 million there since late July – the most in any state.

New CNN polls released Wednesday found Harris with a narrow edge in Michigan and Wisconsin, two of the three Great Lakes states that make up the “blue wall.” But she was tied with Trump in Pennsylvania. And while Harris is competitive in several Sun Belt battlegrounds, she might need to sweep all three blue wall states to win.

That exact scenario was what drove many Democrats to hope Harris would select the commonwealth’s popular governor, Josh Shapiro, as her running mate.

Harris, of course, instead chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, betting on the former high school teacher and football coach’s working-class appeal. Much like Walz faced scrutiny over his departure from the National Guard and previous claims he’d made, Shapiro, too, would have faced intense scrutiny, including over the decisions he made as Pennsylvania attorney general. And voters’ decisions are overwhelmingly driven by who’s on at the top of the ticket.

Still, if Pennsylvania is a nail-biter, questions about whether Shapiro might have given the Democratic ticket a slight boost could haunt the party. And if Harris loses a razor-tight election, that second-guessing could also shape the earliest stages of the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.

What if Trump had picked Haley?

This year’s election could see a historic gender gap. The last CNN/SSRS poll of likely voters nationally found Harris with a 6-point edge among women, and Trump up by the same margin with men.

That gap is partially fueled by Trump’s appointment of three Supreme Court justices who helped reverse Roe v. Wade’s abortion rights protections in 2022.

But it’s also a reaction to the former president’s message, and his selection of Ohio Sen. JD Vance as his running mate. Vance’s selection was quickly followed by controversy over his criticism of top Democrats as “childless cat ladies.”

The demographic Harris is courting is the same one that lined up behind former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s Republican presidential primary bid. Though Haley never came close to seriously threatening Trump, she did lay bare one of the former president’s political vulnerabilities – performing best among women, moderates and college-educated voters.

Would Trump’s choice of running mate have made a difference – especially if he’d set aside their primary battle and picked Haley?

Haley herself sounded the alarm Wednesday night on Fox News, when she urged Trump’s campaign to “look at how they are talking about women.”

“This is not a time for them to get overly masculine with this bromance thing that they’ve got going,” said Haley, who served as US ambassador to the United Nations under Trump.

“Fifty-three percent of the electorate are women. Women will vote. They care about how they are being talked to and they care about the issues,” she said. “This is a time of discipline, and this is the time of addition.”

What if Trump had run a more conventional campaign?

Trump’s third bid for the White House is notable for its departure from traditional Republican campaign strategies honed over past election cycles. Rather than following an established path to securing a national victory, Trump has assembled a campaign apparatus as much – if not more – focused on contesting electoral outcomes than simply winning the race outright.

That effort began shortly after Trump’s commanding lead in the GOP primary ended with a takeover of the Republican Party. Existing leaders were ousted and replaced by Trump’s hand-picked allies – Lara Trump, his daughter-in-law, and Michael Whatley, chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party – and his strategists put in charge. Together, they dismantled the party’s traditional battleground playbook, instead prioritizing efforts to train poll watchers and flood courts with voting-related lawsuits.

Simultaneously, Trump’s campaign has taken on the costly challenge of reaching out to voters who historically sit out elections, hoping that these untapped supporters will tip the scales in closely contested battleground states. To lead this outreach, Trump has enlisted two conservative organizations with limited experience in political ground operations: Turning Point Action, led by Trump ally Charlie Kirk, and a super PAC supported by tech magnate Elon Musk.

However, this approach has sparked unease among seasoned Republican strategists, who argue that the campaign’s focus is too narrow and unconventional.

Should Trump’s efforts fall short, the second-guessing will likely spread to his campaign’s final push, including the substantial advertising budget spent on messaging around transgender issues and campaign stops in traditionally noncompetitive states such as California, New Mexico and Texas. One of those appearances, a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York – an unusual choice for a Republican presidential hopeful – was intended as a capstone event but ultimately exposed the campaign to fresh criticism for catering to fringe voices rather than the broader electorate traditionally needed to secure victory.

What if Trump’s court cases had moved faster?

The 2024 election will take place with the criminal prosecution of Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results still in legal limbo.

The federal and Georgia cases have faded into the background politically, but they are still playing out in courtrooms. Trump’s legal team last week asked a federal court to dismiss the election subversion case, arguing that the office of special counsel Jack Smith is unconstitutional.

Ultimately, voters, rather than a jury, will render the most important decision on whether the charges Trump faces merit blocking his return to the Oval Office. But what if those court cases had moved faster? What if Trump had been on trial in the weeks before the election?

Trump spent years turning his legal woes into a political strategy. He accused Democrats of political persecution and appeared in court in person even when he was not required to do so. He also held campaign events before and after court appearances, including in September, when he said a woman who had accused him of sexual assault on an airplane in the 1970s “would not have been the chosen one.”

Harris, meanwhile, has used Trump’s actions to try to win over independents and moderate Republicans – including in a speech Tuesday night from the Ellipse in Washington, the same place Trump told his supporters on January 6, 2021, to “fight like hell,” shortly before many of them rioted at the US Capitol. It’s an argument that could have been amplified if Trump’s court cases had taken center stage during the election – or even been resolved beforehand.

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