Donald J. Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had seen just about everything in his three races working for the controversy-stoking former president. But even he seemed to be bracing for bad news.
Mr. Trump had just debated Vice President Kamala Harris, repeatedly taking her bait, wasting time litigating his crowd sizes and spreading baseless rumors about pet-eating immigrants.
Mr. Fabrizio had predicted to colleagues that brutal media coverage of Mr. Trump’s performance in a debate watched by 67 million people would lift Ms. Harris in the polls. He was right about the media coverage but wrong about the rest. His first post-debate poll shocked him: Ms. Harris had gained on some narrow attributes, like likability. But Mr. Trump had lost no ground in the contest.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mr. Fabrizio said on a call with senior campaign leaders, according to two participants.
It was yet more proof — as if more were needed — of Mr. Trump’s durability over nearly a decade in politics and of his ability to defy the normal laws of gravity.
He overcame seemingly fatal political vulnerabilities — four criminal indictments, three expensive lawsuits, conviction on 34 felony counts, endless reckless tangents in his speeches — and transformed at least some of them into distinct advantages.
How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. His mug shot became a best-selling shirt. His criminal conviction inspired $100 million in donations in one day. The images of him bleeding after a failed assassination attempt became the symbol of what supporters saw as a campaign of destiny.
“God spared my life for a reason,” he said at his victory speech early Wednesday, adding, “We are going to fulfill that mission together.”
At times, Mr. Trump could be so crude and self-indulgent on the stump that aides wondered if he were engaged in an absurdist experiment to test how much aberrant behavior voters would tolerate.
“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, an informal adviser to the former and now future president.
But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles — even if the candidate himself was, for much of 2024, as erratic as ever.
The Trump team schemed ways to save its cash for a final ad blitz, abandoning a traditional ground game to turn out its voters and relying instead on a relatively small paid staff buttressed by volunteers and outsiders, including the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Mr. Trump relentlessly pushed to define Ms. Harris not just as radically liberal but as foolishly out of the mainstream. The inspiration, his advisers said, was a memorable Nixon-era saying by the Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein: “A crook” — or, in Mr. Trump’s case, a convict — “always beats a fool.”
Mr. Trump’s aides gambled on mobilizing men, though men vote less than women, and it paid off. And they gambled on trying to cut into Democrats’ typically big margins among Black and Latino voters, and that paid off, too.
His close-knit campaign team navigated the hacking of a top official’s emails by Iranians, constricting security measures by American authorities following two assassination attempts and a final phase that included the use of multiple planes, in addition to the one with Mr. Trump’s name on it, to keep the former president safe.
How Mr. Trump won is also the story of how Ms. Harris lost.
She was hobbled by President Biden’s low approval ratings and struggled to break from him in the eyes of voters yearning for a change in direction. She had only three-plus months to reintroduce herself to the country and she vacillated until the end with how — and how much — to talk about Mr. Trump.
First, she and her running mate, Tim Walz, tried minimizing him by mocking him as “weird” and “unserious,” setting aside Mr. Biden’s grave warnings that Mr. Trump was an existential threat to American democracy. Then she focused on a populist message: Mr. Trump cared only about his rich friends, while she would bring down the prices of groceries and housing for ordinary people. Finally, late in the campaign, Ms. Harris pivoted again: Mr. Trump was a “fascist,” she warned — just the existential threat Mr. Biden had invoked.
Some finger-pointing emerged from the wreckage, including over whether Ms. Harris had focused too much on appealing to wayward Republicans or whether Mr. Biden had dealt her an unwinnable hand. “We dug out of a deep hole but not enough,” David Plouffe, a senior Harris adviser, wrote on X.
In the end, Ms. Harris got only the one debate with Mr. Trump to make her case. He never accepted a rematch and Ms. Harris’s team was left to wonder if they had missed a chance to box him in. During her debate preparations, they had discussed challenging him live onstage to a second debate — almost daring him to look afraid — but Ms. Harris decided against the move.
That meant no more national moments and eight weeks left to fill — a challenge for a candidate who had spent the first half of the race avoiding unscripted settings. Mr. Trump scored one break from the justice system when a judge pushed his September sentencing until after the election; Mr. Trump privately told people he thought that would have tested what voters would tolerate.
Not every decision Mr. Trump made was genius because he won, and not every decision Ms. Harris made was poor because she lost. But in a race and in a nation so narrowly divided, Mr. Trump and his team made just enough of the right ones.
For almost any other politician, Mr. Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts related to hush-money payments to a porn star would have been the worst day of his candidacy. Instead, it gave him financial rocket fuel.
Small donors poured $50 million into his coffers in 24 hours. And his main super PAC was informed by its bank of a $50 million wire transfer the day after the conviction — but needed to first confirm who had sent it first to make sure it wasn’t fraudulent. The problem was they didn’t know because one of the biggest contributions in American history had been sent without any heads up. Eventually, they determined the amount and its source: the reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon.
The $100 million day helped narrow the financial chasm Mr. Trump had been facing.
To finance a late fusillade of television ads, his team had stretched legal limits to shunt tens of millions of dollars in expenses from the campaign onto the Republican Party and other groups. More significantly, once he became the presumptive nominee, they scrapped the traditional campaign-run, party-funded field operation and outsourced it instead to unproven super PACs.
A scrub of the party’s books from 2020 by James Blair, the campaign’s political director, and Chris LaCivita, one of Mr. Trump’s co-campaign managers, found that the field operation had cost more than $130 million. That amounted to at least $100 for each conversation with a voter.
“We said we just simply can’t do that,” Mr. Blair recalled. “We just simply can’t spend that much money.”
A surprise ruling from the Federal Election Commission, however, had allowed candidates for the first time to coordinate with billionaire-funded super PACs, and the Trump campaign quickly did so, though Mr. Blair was widely second-guessed by veteran operatives in both parties. No one knew how well those outside groups and their mercenary operatives would fare at persuading and motivating people to vote.
The Harris campaign had spent months hiring 2,500 workers and opening 358 offices across the battleground states — enormous fixed costs the Trump campaign did not have to bear. Last weekend, some 90,000 Democratic volunteers knocked on more than three million doors, the pace reaching 1,000 doors a minute in Pennsylvania at one point.
Polls showed the race was one of the closest in modern history, and Ms. Harris’s team believed their superior infrastructure and army of believers would make the difference. But Mr. Fabrizio’s internal polling told a different and, it turned out, more accurate story — one in which Mr. Trump kept a consistent lead.
A ground game only matters in an exceedingly close race. In the end, Ms. Harris did not come close enough.
The gender gap
Mr. Trump had long been nervous about the issue of abortion.
He blamed the fallout from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade for the G.O.P.’s poor performance in the midterms in 2022. He considered the issue so politically fraught that it had the potential to single-handedly sink his campaign.
And so, on the first Tuesday in April, he settled into his seat on the jet his aides call Trump Force One, a thick stack of papers before him on his desk. On top was a document his senior political advisers had prepared, spelling out a simple and compelling argument against his coming out in favor of a national abortion ban.
The title, in all caps: “How a National Abortion Policy Will Cost Trump the Election.”
A 15- or 16-week ban — which Mr. Trump was seriously contemplating — would be more restrictive than existing law in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that were crucial to victory in November. The news media, his advisers told him, would relentlessly portray his position as rolling back the rights of women, who were already in revolt against the G.O.P. over abortion.
