Throughout everything, Hillary Clinton was seeing a different race. From the earliest days of her campaign, when private polls suggested that some 10 million people who’d voted Democratic in 2012 now said they were supporting Trump, she and her advisers had refused to believe it. Those voters may be frustrated and disillusioned, they may be “sending a message,” but in the end they were Democrats—they would come home to Clinton. She need not waste time and resources to persuade them.
So certain of this was Clinton’s campaign that in the final weeks of the race, confident of victory and hoping for a landslide, she traveled to red states such as Arizona that she imagined were within her grasp, and ignored the upper Midwest until it was too late. “We’re already seeing the effects of climate change, and I have a plan to increase renewable energy that will create millions of clean-energy jobs that can’t be exported—they’ve gotta be done right here in Arizona!” Clinton belted out to ten thousand rally goers in Tempe, a week before the election.
This bid to broaden the map was no head fake. “Arizona ain’t an indulgence,” tweeted her communications director, Brian Fallon. “It’s a true battleground. Perhaps even more favorable-looking right now than some other places we’ve been on TV.” Clinton’s plan all along was to reactivate the same coalition of Democratic-leaning groups that had twice delivered Barack Obama to the White House: young people, minorities, and suburban women. That’s why she embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and vowed to protect from deportation a larger segment of the illegal immigrant community than Obama had. And if she could also carry states like Arizona that Obama hadn’t won, then her electoral mandate would be that much bigger.
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The reason Clinton’s moves so puzzled the Trump campaign is that just before she traveled to Arizona, Trump’s data analysts had become convinced, based on absentee ballots and early voting, that the people who were going to show up on Election Day would be older, whiter, more rural, and more populist than almost anyone else believed—so they re-weighted their predictive models to reflect a different electorate. As much as anything, this was a leap of faith. It’s what gnawed at Bannon and other Trump advisers in the closing days of the race. But, in the end, what other choice did they have?
“If he was going to win this election, it was going to be because of a Brexit-style mentality and a different demographic trend than other people were seeing,” said Matt Oczkowski, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica working in Trump’s campaign.
Imagining a more Trump-friendly turnout changed the composition of the electoral map—and with it, Trump’s strategy for the closing weeks of the race. On October 18, before the numbers had been re-weighted, the campaign’s internal election simulator, dubbed the “Battleground Optimizer Path to Victory,” gave Trump a 7.8 percent chance of winning the 270 electoral votes he needed. His long odds were mainly due to the fact that he trailed (albeit narrowly) in most of the states that looked like they would decide the election, including the all-important state of Florida.
Re-weighting the model to reflect an older, whiter electorate changed the polls by only a couple of percentage points in most of the major battleground states. But it shifted the odds of victory substantially in Trump’s direction because it either put him ahead or made him newly competitive in states such as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where he’d previously trailed or hadn’t looked to have a real chance. (Arizona wasn’t competitive for Clinton in either of Trump’s models.) Trump’s path to victory was now illuminated.
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Something else was happening, too. On October 25, Trump’s internal polls showed his support ticking up in nearly every battleground state, a trend that continued over the next three days. Out on the trail, Trump was stepping up his angry screeds, traducing Clinton, whom he accused of plotting “the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special interest friends, and her donors.’”
At first, this seemed like an expression of primal rage from a man of towering ego who understood, even if only subconsciously, that he was headed for a historic comeuppance. But then Republican voters started to respond in a way that established politicians couldn’t have imagined just two weeks earlier, when the Access Hollywood tape upended the race. Against all odds, Trump’s support steadily consolidated—and forced Republican lawmakers who had piously abandoned him to make a humiliating volte-face.
The most satisfying for several Trump advisers was that of Utah representative Jason Chaffetz, a media-hungry weathervane of popular sentiment who had been among the first to withdraw his endorsement of Trump in the wake of the tape scandal. “I’m out. I can no longer in good conscience endorse this person for president,” Chaffetz told Utah’s Fox 13 News on October 8. “My wife, Julie, and I, we have a fifteen-year-old daughter,” he said to CNN’s Don Lemon later that night. “Do you think I can look her in the eye and tell her that I endorsed Donald Trump for president when he acts like this?”
Not three weeks later, on October 26, under pressure from angry constituents, Chaffetz flip-flopped and announced on Twitter that he would indeed be voting for Trump.
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And then the bombshell landed. Early in the afternoon of Friday, October 28, James Comey, the director of the FBI, sent a letter to Congress announcing that new evidence had emerged in the case relating to Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. “In connection with an unrelated case, the F.B.I. has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation,” he wrote. The “unrelated case” involved sexually explicit text messages sent by former representative Anthony Weiner to a fifteen-year-old girl in North Carolina. Weiner was married to Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s close aides, who had saved some of Clinton’s e-mails on Weiner’s laptop. Having declared the Clinton e-mail case closed in July, when he delivered an unprecedented public rebuke of her “extremely careless” conduct, Comey now told Congress that he was reopening the Clinton investigation.
Ever since The New York Times broke the news on March 2, 2015, that Clinton used a personal e-mail account and private server as secretary of state, risking exposure of classified documents to hostile foreign powers, the subject of her e-mails had stalked her campaign, fusing with the damaging Clinton Cash narrative to undermine the public’s trust in her. Clinton had persevered through a criminal referral from the Justice Department, through countless congressional hearings, and through a nonstop barrage of attacks from hostile Republicans. Now a controversy she thought was behind her came roaring back into the white-hot crucible of the presidential race.
Clinton and her staff were incredulous. “We are eleven days out from perhaps the most important national election of our lifetimes,” she said at a hastily arranged evening news conference. “Voting is already under way in our country. So the American people deserve to get the full and complete facts immediately. The director himself has said he doesn’t know whether the e-mails referenced in his letter are significant or not. . . . Therefore it’s imperative that the bureau explain this issue in question, whatever it is, without any delay.”
Inside Trump’s campaign, the mood was ecstatic. Bannon’s phone lit up with frantic text messages from reporters racing to get a comment on the shocking revelations. Bannon demurred. “Don’t want to step on Comey’s lines,” he texted back. As the cable news networks hit DEFCON 1, he understood that the worst thing the Trump campaign could do was to distract in any way from this damaging story.
When the news broke, Trump was just about to take the stage at a rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. As soon as he reached the lectern, he delivered the clip he knew the networks were waiting for. “I need to open with a very critical breaking news announcement,” Trump said. “The FBI”—he paused as the crowd cheered—“has just sent a letter to Congress informing them that they have discovered new e-mails pertaining to the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s investigation.” He paused once more, as chants of Lock her up! swept through the hall. “They are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States of America. Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we have never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.”
By the time Trump arrived at his next event, in Lisbon, Maine, he had hit upon an even better sound bite to capture Clinton’s travails. “This,” he told the audience, “is the biggest political scandal since Watergate.”
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Over the next eleven days, Trump did something that he hadn’t managed to do in months: he kept focused. Somehow, at this decisive final moment, he stuck to a script that extolled Bannon-style, “America first” nationalism while issuing elaborate condemnations of Clinton’s character and moral corruption. He had reason to be encouraged. His internal polls, which showed him already ascending before the Comey letter, now had him turning sharply upward in every state and continuing to climb.
On November 3, a report was circulated among Trump’s top advisers that took note of the Comey effect. “The last few days have proven to be pivotal in the minds of voters with the recent revelations in reopening the investigation of Secretary Clinton,” it read. “Early polling numbers show declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump, suggesting this may have a fundamental impact on the race.”
Five days out, Trump still trailed Clinton in nearly every public poll, and his forecasting model, although it showed improved odds of victory, still implied that a loss was the likelier outcome. And the Comey letter was not a panacea. The report noted that the jolt it gave Trump was already leveling off in all but a few places. “As of today, we have started to realize what the ‘ceiling’ is in many states, though four states continue to rise: PA, IN, MO, and NH,” the report said. “We will continue tracking these states to hopefully understand where the continued movement takes us.”
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Throughout the general election, both campaigns battled for a group of voters who would ultimately decide the race. While media outlets fixated on distinct character types considered representative of the election—the dispossessed factory worker registering to vote for Trump, the elderly woman longing to see a female president—the real competition between the campaigns was for voters of a less vivid hue.
Trump’s data analysts gave them a nickname: “double haters.” These were people who disliked both candidates but traditionally showed up at the polls to vote. They were a sizable bloc: 3 to 5 percent of the 15 million voters across seventeen battleground states that Trump’s staff believed were persuadable. Early on, many indicated support for third-party candidate Gary Johnson. But after a series of televised flubs, including Johnson’s admission that he didn’t know what “Aleppo” was (it was a city caught in the middle of Syria’s civil war), they largely abandoned him. What made the double haters so vexing to Trump’s analysts was that their intentions were difficult to discern. Many refused to answer pollsters’ questions or declared themselves undecided.
The Clinton campaign thought of these persuadable voters as being mainly “pocketbook Republicans”—people whose votes were driven by kitchen-table economic concerns but were made deeply uncomfortable by Trump’s racist and sexist outbursts. These were the voters Clinton had hoped to shear off from Trump with her “alt-right” speech in August.
“What we found is that they were very fickle: they’d toggle between telling pollsters that they were leaning Clinton or leaning Trump, depending on where the news cycle was that week,” said Fallon. “This is the largest piece of fallout we ascribe to the Comey letter. In ending the campaign on a note where people were reminded about the worst of our controversies, we saw those fickle, Republican-leaning voters that we’d been successfully attracting off and on throughout the general election revert back to Trump at the end.”
For all their many differences, on this subject the campaigns generally agreed. Comey’s letter had the effect of convincing the double haters to finally choose an affiliation—or, in the case of many who had been leaning toward Clinton, choose to stay home. “What we saw is that it gave them a reason to vote against her instead of voting for him,” said Matt Oczkowski. “They were finally able to admit that to pollsters without feeling any guilt. All of those double haters and last-minute undecideds started to break heavily toward Trump in the polling and research when, deep down, they were probably going to vote for him anyway. Now they had a reason.”
There was nothing Clinton could do to stop them.
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As midnight approached on November 7, a restive Trump audience was packed into the DeVos Place Convention Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan. On this single day, the last before Election Day, Trump had barnstormed across many of the states his campaign was now certain were in play: Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and then one final rally in Michigan. Too late, Clinton had awoken to the danger of the tightening race: she, too, had swept through Pennsylvania (twice) and North Carolina, and had also visited Grand Rapids earlier in the day.
Before Trump appeared, Ted Nugent hit the stage in a camouflage jacket and cap to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” on an electric guitar, shouting “This is real Michigan!” It was past midnight when Pence took the lectern to introduce “the next president of the United States, Donald Trump.”
“So you know, we added this stop about twelve minutes ago, and look at this place—is this incredible?” Trump said. “We don’t need Jay Z or Beyoncé, we don’t need Jon Bon Jovi. We don’t need Lady Gaga. All we need is great ideas to make America great again.”
For the last time as a candidate, Trump worked through all his famous tropes, pausing wistfully at times and basking in the crowd’s energy. “We’re hours away from a once-in-a-lifetime change,” he said. “Today is our Independence Day.”
“Today the American working class is going to strike back,” he said, marveling at the thought. “The election is now. Can you believe it? It’s today.”
Soon, Trump and his audience slid into the familiar call-and-response rhythms of his rallies.
“Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency of the United States.”
Lock her up! Lock her up!
“Our jobs are being stolen like candy from a baby—not going to happen anymore, folks.”
Booooo!
“It used to be, the cars were made in Flint and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now the cars are made in Mexico and you can’t drink the damned water in Flint. What the hell?”
Trump! Trump! Trump!
“We’re going to fix our inner cities. Right now they’re so unsafe, you walk to the store to pick up a loaf of bread, you get shot.”
“A Trump administration will also secure and defend the borders of the United States. And yes, we will also build a great, great wall.”
Build the Wall! Build the Wall!
At this, Trump stepped back from the lectern and opened his arms, smiling at the audience. “I just want to ask you one question, if you don’t mind, at one in the morning,” he said. “Who is going to pay for the wall?”
Mexico!
“One hundred percent,” he said. “They don’t know it yet, but they’re going to pay.”
In the end, he came back to his signature phrase, emblazoned on hats and placards throughout the hall: “To all Americans tonight in all of our cities and all of our towns, I pledge to you one more time, together, we will make America wealthy again. We will make America strong again. We will make America safe again. And we will make America great again.”
And then Trump delivered one final importunement to the crowd.
“Go to bed!” he told them. “Go to bed right now! Get up and vote!”
On Election Day, Trump’s forecasting model indicated that he probably wouldn’t make it. Some of his advisers said his odds of victory were 30 percent; others went as high as 40 percent. At least one adviser said, “It will take a miracle for us to win.”
And then the world turned upside down.
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On the morning after the election, Bannon had barely slept. The sudden rush of victory, the drama of Clinton’s concession call as Trump was about to take the stage, the glare of the spotlight in his eyes as he gazed out on the drunken, jubilant revelers in MAGA hats at the victory party—it left him in a fugue state.
But now, as the sun came up over Manhattan, he could see how everything had come together exactly according to script. “Hillary Clinton was the perfect foil for Trump’s message,” Bannon marveled to a reporter. “From her e-mail server, to her lavishly paid speeches to Wall Street bankers, to her FBI problems, she represented everything that middle-class Americans had had enough of.”
The beauty of it was that no one had seen her downfall coming. “Their minds are totally blown,” he said, laughing. Clinton’s great mistake—the Democrats’ great mistake—was one he recognized all too well, since he’d watched Republicans commit it during their anti-Clinton witch hunts of the nineties: they’d become so intoxicated with the righteousness of their cause, so thoroughly convinced that a message built on identity politics would carry the day and drown out the “deplorables,” that they became trapped in their own bubble and blind to the millions who disagreed with them—“and that goes for you guys in the media, too,” he added.
Now Trump had shattered that illusion, and the wave that had swept across Europe and Great Britain had come crashing down on America’s shores. “Trump,” Bannon proclaimed, “is the leader of a populist uprising. . . . What Trump represents is a restoration—a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism. Elites have taken all the upside for themselves and pushed the downside to the working- and middle-class Americans.” Bernie Sanders had tried to warn them, but the Democrats hadn’t listened and didn’t break free of crony capitalism. “Trump saw this,” Bannon said. “The American people saw this. And they have risen up to smash it.”
For all his early-morning bravado, Bannon sounded as if he still couldn’t quite believe it all. And what an incredible story it was. Given the central role he had played in the greatest political upset in American history, the reporter suggested that it had all the makings of a Hollywood movie.
Without missing a beat, Bannon shot back a reply worthy of his favorite vintage star, Gregory Peck in Twelve O’Clock High.
“Brother,” he said, “Hollywood doesn’t make movies where the bad guys win.”