It’s Election Night, and you feel something familiar in the air. It’s a feeling of confidence, of rising joy and anticipation. It’s been a long, tough campaign, but victory is in sight.
You’re going to win, and you know it. It’s a certainty. After four years of Trump, the Democrats are poised to claim a sweeping Electoral College and popular-vote victory.
Finally.
The last few weeks of October were a blissful whirl, with polling numbers looking strong across the board but your candidate joyfully working the crowds in swing states. She’s a happy warrior, praised for her political skills and the subject of endless glowing media profiles, but she keeps coming back to the big message: This is a referendum on Donald Trump. Almost every newspaper in America endorsed her in the final week, picking up that message; this is about removing him, at all costs. Your campaign broadened its appeal, not reaching a state of beautiful progressive wokeness but of a sense of common mission and purpose, a promise to restore American norms and values.
After the debates, it was clear your candidate, though occasionally rattled by Trump’s in-your-grill debating presence, had triumphed. She was smart, articulate, humble, and when it mattered, she hammered his weak spots. It’s everything you’ve dreamed about since Obama. Trump has been flailing, angrily tweeting a dozen times a day, stoking the MAGA base at an endless series of campaign rallies, but he’s punchy and tired, and looks worn-out.
Your campaign has a hard rule against engaging even those elliptical conversations about what role you might play in a Democratic White House. Instead, any time someone starts one, you cut it off, pushing them to focus on their mission, and work harder for the win. You’re going to need to rebuild the government from scratch, but there’s time for that after you defeat Trump.
A few of your older, wiser hands are grudgingly pleased, smiles slowly spreading on their weathered faces. They see how hard the team is working, down to the door-knockers and phone-bankers, all of whom are tracked to the very limits of technology. Everyone is exhausted, but people are knocking on doors, making calls, and pushing out voters until even after the polls close. The candidate herself insisted on adding events until the last second, her voice shot, her advance team shaky. Your finance people report that the campaign is going to end with just enough money in the bank to pay salaries and expenses, and not a dollar more. Everything else—everything—is either on the air in the swing states or in digital advertising to targeted voters.
They keep staring intently at the FiveThirtyEight map and running the same mental calculations over Electoral College numbers they’ve done a thousand times, but hey, you feel really great about this, not because of anecdotes, but because of data. You spent an eye-popping amount on targeting, data analytics, and digital, more than any campaign in history. You fought only where the battle was, and let the rest take care of itself. You ignored the screams from safe blue states, and kept the candidate and your dollars in the fifteen states you knew were the swing battlegrounds.
The campaign’s social-media metrics were weird the last few days, though, and your data and analytics people counterpunched hard against the massive inflows of ads from brand-new Republican super PACs and 501(c)(4) dark-money groups. You couldn’t take the chance this was just the last gasp for the Trumpian grifters making a last buck on the Donald. You suspected it was his Russian friends trying an end-run, just like 2016, but you had ads in the can, and a budget to respond. The Trump campaign and the RNC (but I repeat myself) ad buys were scattershot, and on issues that seemed off-kilter.
As the night starts, the ballroom is packed to the gills with eager, happy people ready to put Trump and Trumpism in the rearview mirror of history. The media risers, crowded with the A-talent from every network, are jammed. The results are about to come in, and the army of reporters in the back of the ballroom is in a near-frenzy.
You didn’t repeat the Hillary mistake of not visiting the states Trump and his Russian allies scored in 2016. Your candidate made the stops, and your advance and targeting efforts filled the halls and stadiums with big, happy, raucous crowds. Trump’s rallies were full, but the 2016 magic was missing from 2020, and it showed. Your state organizers tell you they’ve got armies of volunteers knocking on doors, making calls, and driving turnout. Your monitoring and data systems confirm it for you.
Still, the final tracking polls were close. You knew you couldn’t take your foot off the pedal in Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, and the rest. You took absolutely nothing for granted.
The exit polls were closer than you wanted but still looked good. As the first results were about to roll in, the AP, Washington Post, New York Times, Decision Desk, and Politico analysts started pinging you and the rest of the campaign’s senior staff.
“What’s going on in Michigan? Do you hear this stuff out of Florida?” Something is moving, something big, and you don’t quite know what it is yet.
By 9:30, it’s not looking like what you expected. Ohio, where polls showed Trump with a razor-thin lead, is breaking, barely, your way. He’s losing Michigan, as record turnout in Detroit rolls up a massive African American turnout, and the expected defection of suburban women means a bloodbath for Trump in Macomb and Oakland counties.
Florida is Florida, and although you had projected a four-point lead, by 10:00 the vote total shows the usual tied ballgame. It’s going to be a long night in the Sunshine State, but the exits are showing that you swung the Orlando, Tampa, and even Jacksonville suburbs cleanly enough to offset the blowout in the Panhandle and on the Gold Coast of southwest Florida.
Florida’s enormous influx of Puerto Rican voters meant the Democrats were on track for a stunning victory there because someone bothered to register them, communicate with them, and turn them out. You did. You fired any consultant who wouldn’t produce results.
You post sky-high numbers in South Florida.
“What the hell is happening in Wisconsin?” is your next question. With the Democratic gains in 2018, you expected to do well, but as local results roll in, it seems that 2018 wasn’t a fluke; Trump’s deep unpopularity is realigning the state. The disastrous scam of Foxconn left Wisconsin workers holding the bag for a failed deal with China. Wisconsin farmers had suffered terribly from Trump’s trade war. The Wisconsin GOP is wiped out, top to bottom.
Pennsylvania is a blowout. You focused on calling out Trump’s economic bullshit in western PA and rolled up earthshaking female turnout in Philly and its suburbs, and it worked.
Hell, even Texas is closer than you thought, though you still don’t win it. You lose New Hampshire by a nose, but Shaheen holds the seat. Taxes are still a thing there, and that’s one message you couldn’t escape.
In nearly every swing state, you’re losing rural areas and taking the most affluent suburbs, just as you planned. Turnout is sky-high everywhere, and you needed it. GOP turnout percentages are just as high, but the party itself isn’t what it was. All those newly minted independents in the suburbs used to be Republicans, and you were there to catch them.
That’s why, come midnight, your candidate is in the suite, taking the call from Donald Trump to concede the election. There are tears all around. You can hear Trump on the speakerphone, curt and smug. His concession tweet will be late in coming.
The next morning, you begin to put together the mosaic of data points in your head from the last few weeks. You start to see the messages and strategies Trump and his campaign used that seemed lurid and absurd at the time, and how easily you could have fallen into his traps in the same way Hillary Clinton did in 2016.
You weren’t trying to win big, swing the nation toward a new ideological polarity, or be the next savior. You were animals, trapped in a win-or-die moment, and you used tooth and claw to succeed. You realize as the Electoral College numbers for the Democrat rise and rise that Trump’s campaign needed the cliché Democrats to run the cliché campaigns of the past, and you refused to play that game.
Suddenly, you see that your candidate’s refusal to be bound to policy proposals and white papers, and her very measured words on climate change, reparations for slavery, Electoral College reform, guns, the Green New Deal, and healthcare policy, were assets. You put electoral realities ahead of progressive fantasies, and as difficult as it was, it paid off. Refusing to give Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders keynote addresses at the convention where they could declare fraternal communist solidarity with the workers of the world was a smart move.
You refused to let the primary race to secure the progressive bleeding ideological edge blind you to the reality of largely center-right states on the Electoral College scoreboard. You refused to hand Trump the weapons he could use to cut off your head. You knew Trump’s lowest-common-denominator message was cultish, racist, and blisteringly stupid, and even though it was simple, constant, and repeated, you refused to feed him issues to use against you.
Wall. MAGA. Judges. Socialism. Revenge.
You laughed it off, bringing it back to Trump, over and over. You posited one question, and one question only: “Should this man be president?” You never, ever lost focus on the fact that this election is—I promise, this is almost the last reminder on this point—a referendum on Donald Fucking Trump.
You believe in your progressive message but know it isn’t universal, and you know the swing states have a very different political polarity from California, New York, or Massachusetts. You knew you could never shame Trump or Trump voters into listening to the better angels of their nature by talking about diversity, inclusion, and progressive values. You never gave the Trump campaign fodder for the weaponized grievance machine that put him in office in the first place.
You never let them distort, twist, or slander your message, policies, and values. You turned out your base, and added to it, winning back the Obama-Trump voters, consolidating African American and Hispanic support, and appealing to the moderates in both the GOP and the Democratic Party. You destroyed the GOP with Hispanics, winning almost 80 percent of their vote for the first time ever. Kids in cages turned out to be a bad look.
You beat the worst president in history.
You beat him by making the campaign about him; his record, his hideous personal behavior, the reeking cloud of corruption, and his broken economic promises made him unelectable for even a decent campaign, and you ran—shockingly—a decent campaign. His divisive, shitty, be-worst reign was a stain and an embarrassment. He tried to make it a referendum on policy, not a referendum on himself, and you never let him. You went into a reality-television contest understanding the rules, and you beat the master of the genre at his own game.
The sun is rising over America again, and you’re exhausted, beaten down, and shaking. For five years, you’ve greeted every Trump tweet with a sense of dread. Has he conceded?
Does it matter?
At this point you open the Twitter client on your iPhone, enter “@realDonaldTrump” one last time, and do what America just did, and put him on mute, forever.
You send a text message to Kellyanne Conway: “In the words of the poet, sage, and philosopher DJ Khaled, ‘You played yourself.’ ”