THE ELECTION

Do you hear the people sing?. . .

It is the music of the people . . .

—“DO YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING?” FROM LES MISÉRABLES¹

A year and a half of caustic debates and outnumbered panels had all come down to this moment. All of the pontificating, the predicting, the imagining different scenarios, would be over, ultimately culminating in a Donald Trump victory.

Over the last few months I had encountered two clashing realities, one that I met in America’s heartland and another I faced in the far-off perches of DC and New York. When I would leave the confines of these metropolitan hubs and travel through the rural back roads of my home state of Florida, the signs that Trump would prevail on the night of November 8, 2016, were visible and undeniable. My two-hour drive through rural Florida just two weeks before the election displayed dozens and dozens of Trump signs but not one Clinton sign. As I drove along the two-lane Route 98 and through the tiny west coast towns of Homosassa Springs and Crystal River, I stumbled upon a flea market. Drawn to the colorful array of Trump signs, I pulled over to the side of the road and discovered an array of small-town folk, all avid supporters of then-candidate Trump. It was yet another real-life encounter that defied what the pundits were saying.

My occasional experiences outside the Beltway during Election 2016 comported with the experiences of Lara Trump and Katrina Pierson out on the campaign trail. Both women, along with other notable female Trump supporters, spent months driving across the country and campaigning as a part of the Trump-Pence Women’s Empowerment Tour. “For three months, I didn’t see my husband,” Lara told me. “But I would call Eric at the end of the day and tell him about the hundreds of people I saw supporting the president. ‘We can’t lose,’ I would tell him. There was a feeling in the country.” Occasionally returning to New York City for 12-hour periods, Lara would hear the ominous media predictions of an inevitable Donald Trump defeat. It was the reality I lived in from day to day on the sets of CNN as I was told again and again that Donald Trump could never be president. But it just didn’t correspond with what Lara was seeing before her very eyes.

“In Pennsylvania, we drove for miles right outside of Philadelphia. There was not one Clinton-Kaine sign,” she told me. “People paid with their own money to put up billboards.” Lara went on to describe swaths of people who would come up and tell her they were first-time voters or lifelong Democrats but now on team Trump. She recalled the whispered confessions she heard from Trump voters who were not ready to declare their support out loud. It happened to me too—in airports, at restaurants, everywhere I went. The hidden Trump voter was real.

But the continuous media drumbeat of negativity was pervasive. In one of the more favorable pre-election predictions, famed predictor Nate Silver gave Clinton a 2-to-1 chance of victory.² Most dubbed his prediction far too optimistic for the Trump team. On Election Day, all twelve of the Washington Post’s opinion writers predicted a Clinton victory, and half of them predicted she’d win in a landslide by more than 100 electoral votes.³

On my Anderson Cooper 360 panel the night before the election, my co-panelists endeavored to write the story of the election before it began. Sitting on the roof of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building with the glimmering White House as our backdrop, my seven colleagues and I watched Hillary’s final rally in Philadelphia. Standing tall with unbridled confidence, Clinton stood alongside Presidents Obama and Clinton before throngs of supporters. John King described the moment as “torch passing” for the Democratic Party.⁴ David Axelrod echoed the sentiment: “We’ve had 43 presidents, all white men, and on that stage, you have the first African-American president and potentially the first woman president. Pretty extraordinary.”⁵

The expected Clinton victory story line was a culmination of the “Trump doesn’t have a chance” chorus echoed again and again leading up to that night. But the media narrative would not alter the confidence of many in the Trump campaign. A local news outlet asked Lara just before the election whether Trump had a chance. “He will win in a landslide victory,” Lara remembered telling the host. “It was palpable. I knew that the media had it wrong.”

At a final rally in North Carolina, Trump assured the crowd that tomorrow would be “historic.”⁶ “I think it’s going to be Brexit plus, plus, plus. It’ll be amazing.”⁷ Brexit, of course, referred to the surprise vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Few predicted a vote to leave, but the forecasts were dead wrong. Confident of an American Brexit on the horizon, Trump made his final stops in New Hampshire, predicting, “We’re hours away from once-in-a-lifetime change.”⁸

Trump’s focus on a Rust Belt Brexit was as realistic as it was strategic, though the political class simply couldn’t see it. One Michigan strategist described Trump’s play for Michigan as a “Hail Mary” pass and discussion of Trump winning Wisconsin in the days before the election was virtually nonexistent.⁹ No Republican had won Michigan and Pennsylvania since 1988, and Wisconsin had not gone red since 1984. According to the mainstream media, Trump would not change that. But the Trump campaign had a different mind-set all together.

Sitting across from White House political director and former Trump campaign national field director Bill Stepien, I asked Bill how he was able to pinpoint these long-lost blue states as winnable. Bill quickly popped up from his chair and walked toward a wall covered with colorful maps from floor to ceiling. “Do you see that dark green color?” he asked me, gesturing toward a map of the United States. “And that lighter green area.” The map—filled with a sea of different colors—had a very clearly delineated green portion right in the center. Michigan and Wisconsin, in particular, were covered in green. “The green portions are areas where Trump outperformed former Republican nominee Mitt Romney by 10 percent or greater,” Bill told me.

Internal campaign data clearly showed these states as winnable. It’s why they deployed Trump to Michigan, causing the Clinton campaign to go on the defensive by sending Clinton and Obama to the state, while in the days before the election Mike Pence went to Wisconsin, a state that Clinton ignored entirely. “It was the numbers and the data,” Bill said. “But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. There’s also a human element. There was this feeling on the ground at rallies.” Something was happening—a Brexit of sorts.

Reflecting on the final Clinton and Trump rallies, Anderson Cooper remarked to our final preelection panel, “He [Trump] also says that whatever the polls say, the country should get ready for the kind of surprise Great Britain had when voters chose to leave the European Union, what became known as Brexit.”¹⁰

Dismissing the comparison, Axelrod replied, “Yeah, one thing, there’s a difference in polling here.”¹¹ He went on to explain how our polling is more sophisticated, and early voting numbers lend U.S. polling more credibility.

Van Jones—to his credit—warned, “The data is only as good as the polling sample. And I do think that there are a lot of people who are off the grid, both for Trump and against Trump, who may come pouring in.”¹²

Convinced that there was something to this so-called Brexit effect, I chimed in, “When we talk about this Brexit effect, what does it look like? One of the most interesting facts I read today was that in North Carolina, there’s a 42 percent surge of independent voters. That is striking . . . Independent voters, we know, are breaking for Donald Trump in most national polls to the tune of 12 to 15 percent . . . I think if we see a Brexit effect, it’s going to come in this swing of independents. We know 1.2 million unaffiliated voters turned out in Florida.”¹³

Axelrod countered, “Actually [it’s] not true that independents are breaking by those numbers. In fact . . . Hillary Clinton was winning among independents in some other polls that just came out in the last few days.”¹⁴

But independent voters did cast their ballots for Trump. In fact, in several of the states key to Trump’s victory, independents broke for him by double digits, just as I had speculated.¹⁵ Independents were indeed a huge part of his election night win.

Summing up election eve coverage and Trump’s alleged dismal chances of winning, John King concluded: “For 98 straight days, Hillary Clinton has been on top of this race. There’s been one or two or three national polls showing Donald Trump ahead . . . That’s why a lot of people, the technical people, the people that do this for a living say it’s not a Brexit situation.”

Well, the so-called technical people who “do this for a living” could not have been more off base. In the aftermath of the election, the “technical people” went back to their cozy jobs in media, in think tanks, and in lucrative consulting firms. Lloyd Gruber, a British academic, was one of the few candid enough to admit his mistake. “As a political scientist, I feel I owe you an apology,” Gruber wrote.¹⁶ “To say my discipline has been behind the curve this electoral season would be putting it too charitably. We haven’t missed one curve yet. We’re speeding through all of them—backwards.”¹⁷

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign was ahead of the curve, barreling forward with a sophisticated data operation that outperformed the political pollsters by wide margins. Bill told me that the Trump operation had zeroed in not just on specific states but also counties and precincts, all the way down to the individual voter. Stepien grabbed a large notebook from a bookshelf of many others. Flipping through the pages, he showed me how voters had been mapped on a spectrum from those most opposed to Trump to those solidly planted in the Trump base. Rally locations and ground operations were selected based on the number of winnable voters. The Trump campaign wanted to truly know the voters—what drove them, what they cared about, and how their campaign could best serve the people. President Trump was a man of the people and his campaign was to be a vehicle for them.

Although the Trump campaign was optimistic, on election eve, the unanimous liberal mainstream media consensus was a Trump defeat. After the final pre-election panel, I joined my mom and grandmother in our DC hotel room, and my relatives expressed the ultimate consensus of the American people that my CNN co-panelists were completely blind to: “He’s obviously going to win.” The liberal media had already written the conclusion of Election 2016, but the American people had other plans.

When the day of decision arrived and millions of Americans went to the polls to cast their ballots, I prepared to go into CNN and face whatever choice the American people made. Leaving my hotel around 2:00 p.m., I told my mom and grandmother that when I returned many hours later and in the early morning, we would know if Donald Trump was going to be the next president of the United States. Huddled together, the three of us said a prayer, urging for God to guide our nation’s future.

When I met Lara Trump in Trump Tower, she told me, “God played a role in this election without a doubt . . . the number of people praying. There’s something in that.”

As she spoke, it gave me chills.

Prayer was my animating principle on Election Day, as it was for so many others. It’s what gave me peace. Two weeks earlier the pastor of my hometown church had urged the congregation to “pray, pray, pray” that God would guide the hearts and minds of the voting public. It wasn’t so much praying for a candidate but about a God-ordained outcome that was best for America’s future. I, like Lara, am convinced that people of faith praying made a difference. It’s an incalculable variable that for some helps to explain an otherwise inexplicable election. Despite my uncertainty about what lay ahead, there was one thing I was completely certain of: the power of prayer.

When I arrived at CNN that afternoon, the mood could only be described as upbeat. High-spirited colleagues bustled through the halls. An array of food had been ordered. It appeared as if there was an impending celebration of some sort.

Taking my seat on one of our final Election 2016 mega-panels, Jake Tapper asked me, “Kayleigh, are there any specific areas that you’re going to be looking at tonight as the results start to come in to give you an indication . . . about how well Donald Trump is going to do?”¹⁸

I explained that my analysis of state polling averages led me to believe that Trump had several viable paths. First, he could get to 265 electoral votes by winning Nevada, Florida, Ohio, and Iowa. He was winning narrowly in each of those states, according to polling.¹⁹ Then he would just need to flip one state: Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, or New Hampshire plus Maine’s second congressional district would do.

“Pennsylvania is always kind of that elusive state that Republicans think they can get and it’s never quite within reach,” I told Tapper.²⁰ “Donald Trump, though, I think he is a different kind of candidate. He has more of a populist streak. He might get it.”²¹

Although Trump would not win Nevada as I predicted, his populism would win him not just Pennsylvania, where he was down by 1.9 percent, but Michigan, where he was down by 3.5 percent; Wisconsin, where he was down by a whopping 6.5 percent; and Maine’s second congressional, where he led by a slim half of a percentage point.²²

In the end, Trump would win more than 300 electoral votes. He would flip one-third of U.S. counties that voted for Barack Obama, picking up six Obama states and a portion of Maine.²³ While the media has criticized Trump for calling it a landslide, it was indeed a landslide in every sense of the word, especially given the flawed predictions to the contrary.

But in the early hours of election night at CNN, none of my colleagues suspected a Donald Trump victory, much less a landslide one. The biggest fear for many of my CNN peers was not whether Trump would win but whether he would accept the outcome of the election and concede to Hillary Clinton.²⁴

More than two hundred miles up the Northeast corridor, there were a variety of emotions at play in Trump Tower as Donald Trump, his family, and his campaign staff awaited the results. They had all seen firsthand the thousands upon thousands of energetic rallygoers all across America’s heartland. But now, back in Manhattan and crowded around a television, watching the media naysaying, doubt began to set in.

“We all felt it, but it was so hard to tune out the media,” Lara said. It was Lara and Eric’s two-year anniversary on November 8, 2016. “It would be the most amazing or not the greatest,” she laughingly told me. Jared Kushner revealed that his data team predicted early that afternoon that Trump was going to win. “It was going to be a Rust Belt Brexit,” he told me. Nevertheless, “everyone was nervous,” Lara said. “The numbers from our polls reflected that he would win, but every news outlet was confident about a Hillary Clinton victory.” Michael Glassner, who was also at the campaign headquarters, said to me in our Trump Tower interview, “The mind-set of the status quo political class was that Trump would never win. That was not the sense among his loyalists in the War Room that night.”

Anxiously probing for any advance information, all the campaign had to rely on was their internal polling—until the clock struck 6:00 p.m. “The exit polls were brutal,” Jared remembered. The pollsters began to predict the worst.

“I’m starting to think Democrats will take the Senate majority tonight,” tweeted Frank Luntz.²⁵ “In case I wasn’t clear enough from my previous tweets: Hillary Clinton will be the next President of the United States,” he wrote minutes later.²⁶

Discussing the differences in their internal data and the exit polling, Bill Stepien, the Trump campaign national field director, assured Jared that the campaign’s data would be more reflective of the actual results. The exit polls had erred in using the old 2012 Obama-Romney turnout model, Stepien noted. This model underestimated the number of low-propensity voters who would show up and vote Trump, just as the Brexit model had underestimated the number of voters who would vote to leave the European Union. Trump would over-perform among evangelicals, union members, and Hispanics, ultimately delivering him a victory.

The mainstream media’s exit polling missed the hidden Trump voters, who concealed their support in the hostile environment of Election 2016. Trump supporters had been called deplorable by Clinton. Their houses were egged,²⁷ their signs, in one case, pierced with bullet holes.²⁸ “Supporter Who Painted a Trump 2016 Sign on the Side of His House Has His Home Egged, His Truck Damaged and One of His Walls Vandalized with Graffiti—Before His Front Yard Gets Set on FIRE,” read one Daily Mail headline.²⁹

“The left didn’t make it easy to be a Trump supporter,” Stepien noted. Recognizing this is what led Stepien to seek out the hidden Trump voter. The Trump campaign included a question in its polling to mine this information, asking voters whether they liked some of Trump’s policies even though they might not agree with him all the time. Questions like this led him to the hidden Trump voter. “Eight to 12 percent gave Trump their quiet support,” Bill noted. The methodology of the exit polls was just wrong, Stepien explained to Kushner as election night approached.

Although the 6:00 p.m. exit polls looked discouraging, the Trump campaign would not give up. Family and close friends hurriedly called into dozens of drive-time radio shows, knowing that they could still impact last-minute voters. Eric, Lara, Rudy, and Don Jr. all picked up the phone and made an eleventh-hour push to advocate for the Republican nominee. Don Jr. called in to twenty-seven shows, and Trump himself called in to seven. If the Trump campaign went down, they were not going to go down without a fight.

At CNN, word about Hillary Clinton’s internal polling began to trickle out. One Clinton ally loudly pronounced in the greenroom, “Clinton wins. It’s over. She’s got Florida. It’s done.” My heart sank as I shared with my fiancé and family what I had heard. “That’s ridiculous. The polls haven’t even closed yet, and you’re telling me Hillary won?” my fiancé responded.

The confidence of the Clinton campaign stood in stark contrast to the reserved humility of the Trump world. “That contrast between the glass ceiling at the Javits Center [that Hillary was supposed to break through] and the small ballroom at the New York Hilton [where Trump had his election watch party] was by design,” Mark Serrano told me. “The [soon-to-be] president didn’t want a mammoth ballroom. He wanted it to be a small event, because he didn’t want to take anything for granted.” By contrast, Hillary Clinton’s campaign planned an elaborate fireworks display in front of thousands of supporters on election night, an event she called off just one day before the election.³⁰ “He wasn’t assuming he was going to win,” Mark told me, “whereas Hillary Clinton assumed she was going to win.”

With my co-panelists on the CNN 2016 election night set. Courtesy of author’s collection

Adding to my nervousness, I crossed paths with former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as I walked onto the CNN set. As we exchanged seats, I anxiously whispered to him, “What do you think? Is he going to win?” The exit polls were about to come out, and they can be highly predictive of whether any given candidate will win or lose.

“We will know in thirty minutes whether Trump is going to be the next president of the United States,” Corey told me.

“Please text me when you know,” I said to him.

I anxiously took my seat on CNN’s final election night panel with Jeffrey Lord on one side and Van Jones and Paul Begala on the other. The results began to roll in as the clock struck 7:00 p.m. Trump won Indiana and Kentucky, while Clinton won Vermont. Georgia and Virginia were too close to call.

As the hour progressed, I never heard back from Corey, adding to my unease. Then a new bit of CNN reporting completely killed my optimistic spirit. “Jake, a senior advisor from Donald Trump’s inner circle is sizing up the GOP candidate to me this way,” Jim Acosta reported.³¹ “Quote, ‘it will take a miracle for us to win.’ This adviser went on to say that Trump was in such a deep hole after the release of that Access Hollywood tape. It was viewed inside the campaign that he was going to lose this race by a wide margin.”³² Only now do I know—after interviews with many people who were in Trump Tower on Election Night—that this was not the view inside the campaign. In fact, it was just the opposite. Many loyal Trump campaign officials had unbridled confidence that Trump would prevail. This “anonymous source” could not have been more off base.

Even in the face of this new reporting, I did not lose hope. Several times on CNN’s set I closed my eyes and quietly said a prayer: God, let your will be done. Whatever it may be. The outcome was out of my hands and in God’s. That gave me peace.

More polls closed, revealing a tighter-than-expected race. My co-panelists and I quietly zoned in on our computers and our notes, scouring data, maps, and social media for any updates we could find. One fact was certain: all roads to the White House passed through Florida, a state that jockeyed back and forth between Clinton and Trump as vote totals came in. CNN’s Jeff Zeleny nevertheless reported, “The Clinton campaign is increasingly confident about Florida . . . [O]ne senior Clinton adviser I just talked to said the Hispanic numbers are rising through the roof. That is why we’ll win Florida.”³³ For a time that seemed to be the case.

“Hillary Clinton has now taken the lead in Florida and North Carolina,” I heard Wolf Blitzer announce from across the room. “Let’s look at Florida first, 72 percent of the vote in. That’s a big chunk of the vote. Hillary Clinton is now ahead by an impressive almost 172,000 votes . . .”³⁴ But, in truth, Hillary led by just over 1 percent of the vote.

No prob. Panhandle will make that up, my dad texted me, perhaps sharing some local wisdom lost upon the CNN crew.

At Trump Tower, Bill Stepien was standing right next to then-candidate Trump when the first batch of Florida numbers came out. Recognizing that the Panhandle had not yet come in, Stepien told Trump, “It’s going to be a long night, but it will get better.” Confident in the campaign’s data, Stepien distinctly remembers telling the soon-to-be president, “The pathway still exists.”

As 8:00 p.m. approached, Hillary Clinton’s prospects of becoming president continued to look promising. In addition to CNN reporting a significant lead for her in Ohio, Wolf Blitzer exclaimed, “Look at all these wins we’re projecting for Hillary Clinton right now.”³⁵ Illinois. New Jersey. Massachusetts. Maryland. Rhode Island. District of Columbia. No surprise there, I thought.

But in the short course of an hour, the Hillary Clinton momentum would slow. As our colleagues seemed to hint at a Clinton win, Jeff Lord and I—to my knowledge, the only Trump supporters in the room—closely monitored our home states of Pennsylvania and Florida. To two locals, the numbers didn’t seem to tell the whole story. We knew our states intimately, and we both predicted that Trump would prevail.

Seemingly out of nowhere, everything changed. In a matter of mere seconds, Hillary Clinton’s lead in Florida shrunk from 15,000 votes to 11,000 votes to a mere 700. “You have a tug of war here,” John King noted.³⁶ Remarkably, Trump quickly took the lead by 918 votes in my key home state of Florida. His lead continued to grow. “We have a key race alert right now,” Blitzer said.³⁷ “In Florida right now, 29 electoral votes are at stake, 91 percent of the vote is in and Donald Trump is building up a sort of impressive lead, 63,297 votes.”³⁸

Wolf later noted, “It’s a lot closer, Dana, than so many people thought in these key battleground states. This is going to take a while.”³⁹

Completely focused on my Mac computer, I stared at a map of Florida divided by county. I pressed the “refresh” button over and over and over again, glued to the second-by-second updates of vote percentage totals by county. “That was me,” Stepien told me, sitting alongside a huge map on the floor, pressing “refresh” constantly. “Nothing could’ve happened without Florida. We never took our eye off of the state.”

As the various county totals slowly ticked upward, two counties, Miami-Dade and Broward, didn’t seem to budge an inch. Trump had taken the lead, but these two slow-reporting and more liberal counties could deliver the state for Hillary. I pressed the “refresh” button for what seemed like hundreds of times, but Miami-Dade and Broward never seemed to move. In the end it would be Florida’s panhandle that delivered the state for Trump, just as my Floridian father had predicted.

As the polls tightened in several states, optimism built over at Trump Tower. “Everyone was on edge, but it was electric,” Lara recalled. “Joy and confidence built with every state.” The clock struck 9:00 p.m., and Donald Trump had taken the lead in a host of coveted battleground states: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Georgia, and North Carolina.

We win Florida, I texted Corey. 98% of Broward is in, 99% of Miami, 95% of Palm Beach in. That means no more blue for Clinton to gain. I was sure of it.

I agree, he answered.

“There are some happy campers over here at Trump campaign headquarters, Wolf. It is very clear, every time the returns are flashed on the screens here from the state of Florida, this place erupts into cheers,” Jim Acosta described.⁴⁰ “We’re hearing a lot of, you know, pessimism and some people sounding very glum inside this campaign, inside this operation earlier today. That mood has done a 180, Wolf.”⁴¹

“Everything we felt on the campaign trail was literally coming true on the screen before us,” Lara told me. “The Florida rally that was so huge was coming to fruition on our screen.”

By contrast, at the Clinton headquarters, Brianna Keilar reported, “There are a number of anxious faces, the faces I’m looking at here in the crowd.”⁴²

In a candid admission, Jake Tapper said, “Look, if this night ends up being the way that Donald Trump and his advisers think and hope that it will be, boy, I mean, it’s going to put the polling industry out of business . . . I don’t know of one poll that suggested that Donald Trump was going to have this kind of night.”⁴³

Dad—Are you watching this? I texted, well aware that he was usually in bed by this time. Is this Brexit? Knock on wood, I cautiously added.

YES, he replied in all caps. Win Fla. And we got a fight!

As the minutes passed, the victory that few had predicted was playing out in real time. Trump began to pass Clinton in states that Republicans had not won in years if not decades. Places like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Something was going on. Something unexplainable.

As people in the Trump campaign crowded around nearby televisions, Bill Stepien remained in his chair, zoning in on his maps. “At first, we didn’t seem likely to win Pennsylvania. We lost Philadelphia and its collar counties by more than Romney, but we drove up numbers in northeast Pennsylvania, in Scranton, for example, and in places like the Lehigh Valley.” This was cause for optimism. “That’s the Rust Belt. Coal country. Once we began to build momentum in Pennsylvania during the late stages of the campaign, we hoped the rest of the Rust Belt would fall like dominos—and they did.”

“We scheduled the last ten days in all the right places,” Jared told me. “It was not an accident that we were in Michigan as a last stop. New Mexico was a head fake, and we knew Wisconsin would be close.” The campaign suspected that winning Wisconsin would be a long shot, but unlike Hillary, who never visited the state, the Trump campaign didn’t count the people of Wisconsin out. Not considering America’s Dairyland completely out of reach, the campaign called Paul Ryan and organized an appearance with him and Mike Pence in the days leading up to the election. “We gave it a shot,” Jared noted. An aura of optimism began to develop at Trump Tower. “We started to feel good about Pennsylvania,” Jared said. “The voting was in line with our empirical model. It was a suburban Brexit based on turnout.”

As the mood at Trump Tower brightened, the one at CNN dimmed. Jeff Lord and I began to perk up and sit tall with an excited rejuvenation while my Clinton counterparts slumped down with distressed expressions. Although it was difficult to contain my jubilation, I recognized and empathized with the defeated look on my colleagues’ faces.

“Those early exit polls show that there were a lot of angry voters out there in the United States,” Wolf observed.⁴⁴ It was the point that I had tirelessly reiterated throughout the entire election. It fell on deaf ears until tonight. All of a sudden our colleagues began to repeat the points that Jeffrey Lord and I had offered for more than a year.⁴⁵

Jeff Lord and I growing increasingly optimistic on CNN’s 2016 election night set. Courtesy of author’s collection.

David Axelrod noted that “there was a hunger for change among a lot of Americans and . . . Those who were angered and disenchanted with government overwhelmingly were supporting Donald Trump.”⁴⁶

Gloria Borger described the “massive outpouring among voters who perhaps didn’t vote before, who perhaps were hidden, and they came out tonight.”⁴⁷

Michael Smerconish remarked that the star-studded event with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama on election eve might have “boomerang[ed]” and had “the complete opposite impact because it reinforced who really represented the establishment.”⁴⁸

As Trump pulled ahead in states like Michigan and Wisconsin—places he was not even expected to be competitive in—CNN projected a win in North Carolina. In the Trump headquarters, the win was hugely significant.

“My father-in-law was right to the front left of me when they called North Carolina for him,” Lara said. Back in August, Donald Trump had looked at his daughter-in-law, Lara, a North Carolina native, and said to her after a rally in the state, “I want you in charge of North Carolina.” The next day she went to her boss at Inside Edition and informed her that she would need to take three months off to run the state. “I was there once a week during the campaign,” Lara explained. “It was so close one hour after the polls closed . . . I’ve never been as nervous as I was then.” After North Carolina was placed in the Trump column, the soon-to-be president-elect turned to his daughter-in-law and said, “We won because of you.” Lara said, “I will never forget that moment.”

While the media remained in denial, the Trump world began to internalize that Donald Trump would be our next president. According to two family members, people in that room in Trump Tower began to approach the next commander in chief and say, “How does it feel to be the next president?”

He would quickly reply, “Wait, don’t jinx it.”

“Let’s just wait,” he told another family member.

“He was superstitious,” they recalled.

But as the hour closed in on midnight, the facts continued to suggest just that: Trump was going to win. The biggest indicator was his lead in Wisconsin. “She never stepped foot in the state of Wisconsin since winning the Democratic nomination,” Dana Bash noted. “That’s how confident they were.”⁴⁹

Just after 11:30 p.m., CNN made a major projection: “Take a look at this. And CNN projects Donald Trump will carry the state of Florida.”⁵⁰

Still sitting on CNN’s set, I sent a quick and simple text: Corey . . .

He knew exactly what I meant.

We won, he answered.

After a few brief messages, he sent me the familiar refrain that Trump famously touted on the campaign trail: “I never get tired of winning.”

The media was increasingly befuddled by what was transpiring. Tapper noted, “It’s just remarkable because I mean—I don’t think we can overstate this. Not only Democrats in the Clinton campaign, not only pollsters in the mainstream media but Republicans did not anticipate that this night was going to be this way . . . Very, very few people who were actually running these races anticipated that this night was going to be so strong for Donald Trump.”⁵¹

A few minutes later the cameras shot over to our side of the CNN studio. Anderson Cooper said to me, “Kayleigh, I mean, all along in the face of all these polls . . . you were saying that there were hidden Trump voters out there.”⁵²

“Yes. It’s looking increasingly like we have a Brexit on our hands,” I replied. “[T]here were these voters out there that were afraid to talk to pollsters. And Anderson, I think the American people right now are sending a loud, clear, unmistakable message. They want their government back. This is supposed to be a government of, by and for the people. It’s increasingly become one of, by and for the elite. This is the people rising up saying it’s time to listen to us . . . Donald Trump [ran] against Republicans. He ran against Democrats. He ran against the elite. He ran against the government. He ran against the media, but he was an unmistakable voice for the people.”⁵³

And the people showed up. All across the nation, hidden Trump voters traveled to their polling locations and silently voted for Donald Trump. Concealing their support from friends, neighbors, and certainly inquiring pollsters, they nevertheless cast their ballots. “They hated Washington and wanted to see change. They felt government was not working for them,” Jared told me. He was right, and my night at CNN proved just that, at least anecdotally.

Just before 1:00 a.m., I left the CNN set and was asked to remain in the greenroom in case I needed to rejoin the panel. Sitting alone on the couch, I paused to take in this historic moment. But I wasn’t alone for long. As I processed the realization that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States, a cameraman who I had never met approached the entryway. Before he entered the room, he looked both ways and scurried in. “I can’t say this too loud, but I am a Trump supporter. I have to keep it quiet, but I just want you to know how excited I am,” I recall him saying. After talking and silently celebrating together, he left the room, only to be followed by another CNN worker. This time a makeup artist joined me, delivering a similar whispered confession of support for our new president. It was rather astounding. These were the hidden Trump voters, and their silent admissions of support were reflective of the hidden Trump voter who delivered him the presidency.

As Donald Trump’s path to victory crystallized, disappointment beset the Javits Center, where Clinton had planned to give her victory speech. “Wolf, the scene here is so different than it was a few hours ago when people were happy and relaxed,” Brianna Keilar reported. “I have been looking around the room at people who are stone-faced. Some of them have been crying.”⁵⁴

Meanwhile, jubilation filled the New York Hilton, where Donald Trump would eventually speak. A sea of red hats chanted, “USA! USA! Donald Trump. Drain the swamp.” The mood was electric.

As America watched the contrasting images, Jake Tapper offered this: “If Donald Trump wins . . . in addition to his celebration and the victory lap that he has every right to take . . . I really hope that the victor does actually take that opportunity to try to unite the country after this extremely brutal election.”⁵⁵

What Tapper, the media, and the public were unaware of what was transpiring behind the scenes at Trump Tower. Donald Trump eventually left the campaign headquarters and crowded into a small downstairs kitchen with his family, Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, Dan Scavino, and Keith Schiller. At this point all the analysts were saying Trump was going to win.

“It really took a while to absorb,” Ivanka said.

“This was a distinct line in life,” Lara said. “Things were never going to be the same in my life. I could help to make things better in this world.”

“When we realized my father would be president, all attention turned to what to communicate for the first time,” Ivanka told me. The Trump campaign had prepared two speeches, an A version and a B version, one a victory speech and the other a concession. This was widely reported that evening, but here is what was not reported.

As the president-elect reflected on his first words to an attentive nation, he took notice of the images that came across his TV screen: half images of crying Clinton supporters contrasted with images of jubilant Trump voters. Reflecting on the sight of Clinton voters, Trump picked up the previously planned victory speech and ripped it up. The speech hit the elites and the establishment. It just wasn’t right for the moment. “I want to bring the people together. I want to speak to those people too,” Ivanka Trump remembered her father saying as he watched the distraught Clinton crowd and set the torn paper aside. “I see their pain.”

Trump began to plan his remarks as he waited for a call from Hillary Clinton. “Until she concedes, it’s not official,” Trump said. After waiting what seemed like forever for the call, the Trump family and team of advisors finally decided to head to the New York Hilton.

Before Trump received the call from Clinton, there were indications that the Clinton campaign knew the race was over. “Wolf, there is still a crowd behind me here at the Javits Center . . . They have turned off the election coverage early for the last several hours,” Jeff Zeleny reported.⁵⁶ “I am told that campaign chairman John Podesta is on his way here to the Javits Center from the Peninsula Hotel, where he has been with the Clintons . . . He is going to be giving some type of an announcement or message. I’m told Secretary Clinton is not going to be coming here, at least not now at this moment.”⁵⁷

Shortly after the announcement, Podesta took the stage to address a crowd of disappointed supporters. “Well, folks, I know you’ve been here a long time and it’s been a long night, and it’s been a long campaign . . . They’re still counting votes and every vote should count. Several states are too close to call. So we’re not going to have anything more to say tonight . . . Everybody should head home. You should get some sleep. We’ll have more to say tomorrow.”⁵⁸

The announcement was striking on two levels. National media outlets were clearly about to call the election for Trump, and a concession was in order. And didn’t her distraught supporters deserve to hear from her directly, not her campaign manager?

Corey Lewandowski, who had taken my place on the CNN panel for the remainder of the night, observed, “Hillary Clinton is going to lose tonight. She should call Donald Trump immediately . . . We have 99.9 percent of these ballots counted. We’re waiting for a small fraction . . . which will not materially change the outcome of this election. I think this is, exactly to Van’s point, not bringing the country together.”⁵⁹ Corey continued to point to Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy. She had admonished Trump about his potential unwillingness to accept election results, and here she was doing just that. Corey’s allegation was widely rejected by the panel, although Anderson did acknowledge his point.

“I think Corey raised an interesting point,” Anderson said.⁶⁰ “There was a lot of criticism of Donald Trump, what would you do on Election Night? If the roles were reversed . . .”⁶¹ It’s a point on which Dana Bash and Jake Tapper agreed.

After much speculation about Hillary’s next move, Dana Bash was finally able to inform viewers around 2:40 a.m., “CNN can report that Hillary Clinton has called Donald Trump to concede the race. She has called Donald Trump to say that she will not be president.”⁶²

“Everyone in the room was stunned when it happened,” Michael Glassner told me. “After Podesta came out publicly instead of Clinton, our assumption was that Clinton would not concede. There was still tremendous uncertainty.”

“President-elect Donald Trump,” Blitzer chimed in.⁶³ “If Hillary Clinton has conceded, that is dramatic; that is a dramatic development, Dana. And to hear the words ‘president-elect,’ we haven’t yet projected that.”⁶⁴

Donald Trump received the call just before he emerged from behind the curtains to address a divided nation. His whole family hugged, embraced, and congratulated the new president-elect. “I tried not to cry,” Lara said. It was finally official.

Vice President elect Mike Pence came out just before the new president-elect. In between the two speeches, CNN finally reported, “Now a historic moment. We can now project the winner of the presidential race, CNN projects Donald Trump wins the presidency . . . Donald J. Trump will become the 45th president of the United States, defeating Hillary Clinton in a campaign unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetime . . . History has been made.”⁶⁵

They were words that, just hours earlier, almost no one had expected to hear.

Taking the stage after “one of the most stunning political upsets in recent American history” in one CNN reporter’s words, a fractured nation looked to their new president.⁶⁶ Slowly walking out to the sound of victorious music, Trump appeared with his family just behind him.

“I’ve just received a call from Secretary Clinton,” he said.⁶⁷ “She congratulated us—it’s about us—on our victory and I congratulated her and her family on a very, very hard-fought campaign . . . Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country. I mean that very sincerely.”⁶⁸

It was a gracious, heartfelt nod to a broken opponent. Now it was time to do the same for a half-broken nation.

“Now it is time for America to bind the wounds of division, have to get together,” Trump continued.⁶⁹ “[T]o all Republicans and Democrats and independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people. It’s time. I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all of Americans and this is so important to me.”⁷⁰

Before Trump went on to thank his family and friends, he thanked the people who had stood behind him all along. “It’s a movement comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs, who want and expect our government to serve the people and serve the people it will.”⁷¹

Trump delivered his brief speech and left that stage as the soon-to-be forty-fifth president of the United States. The media was speechless. The political world was rocked. The people had spoken.