The RNC had modeled numerous Election Day scenarios, all of them resulting in a Clinton victory. Splicing their data with the exit poll figures, party officials predicted to Ryan that Trump would win 220 electoral votes; the House GOP majority would be cut in half; and Senate Republicans would lose control of the upper chamber. It would be a massacre—exactly what Ryan had feared with Trump atop the ticket.
He fumed in the backseat of his security detail’s SUV as it ferried him across town to the Holiday Inn, where his campaign was hosting a party for supporters. It had all been so preventable. The Speaker had spent his first months on the job crafting a sweeping policy agenda for the GOP, one that projected inclusion and optimism from a party not often associated with either. Ryan hoped it would be an inspiration for the party’s presidential field; instead, Trump sabotaged it by running a campaign based on fear and insecurity and exclusion. Boosted by unprecedented free media coverage and backed by millions of anti-establishment voters, Trump had successfully exploited the worst impulses of the electorate en route to winning the Republican nomination—and remaking the party in his own image.
Seething inside a first-floor conference room at the Holiday Inn, Ryan plotted his revenge.
Clinton’s victory carried a silver lining: Ryan would be liberated, once and for all, to forsake Trump and purge the Republican Party of his insidious influence. The Speaker would waste no time. With members of the national media assembled in Janesville, he would give a speech blasting Trump and turning the page on a dark chapter in GOP history. He would be free of Trump and so, too, would be his party. Ryan would be its leader for another four years, and a top priority would be erasing the remnants of Trumpism.
Then the returns came in.
THE CLOSING DAYS OF THE CAMPAIGN HAD NOT BEEN KIND TO CLINTON. Between Comey’s heavily criticized decision to make public the FBI’s reopening of an investigation involving her emails and the torrent of WikiLeaks’ hacked correspondences from Clinton’s top advisers, Trump’s misdeeds had faded from the front page.
This seemed to many a mere Band-Aid, something that might help at the margins, keeping some Republican House and Senate candidates from being washed out of office in a wave. In the forty-eight hours prior to Election Day, two of Priebus’s top lieutenants, Katie Walsh and Sean Spicer, launched a furious preemptive spin campaign, putting the impending loss squarely on Trump and absolving the RNC of responsibility for a wipeout of the party.
And yet, the polls had been tightening for weeks—so much so that Priebus, who was famously stingy when it came to spending RNC money on television ads, bought airtime during Game 7 of the World Series in early November. (This earned him an earful from McConnell, who was still lobbying for party funds to be diverted away from Trump and toward competitive Senate races.)
Though Clinton still staked a comfortable lead in most of the key battleground states, there were signs that Trump was closing fast in several of them. The Republican nominee was working on an inside straight: If he held all the states won by Mitt Romney in 2012, he would need 64 additional Electoral votes to win the presidency. This was not inconceivable; internal polls showed North Carolina, the toughest state to hold, was trending toward the GOP. And it just so happened that the four states Trump had spent the most time targeting—Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), and Wisconsin (10)—offered exactly 64 between them. Ohio was already in the bag; so, too, was Iowa, an Obama state whose 6 Electoral votes would provide insurance in the event that Utah slipped away due to a third-party conservative’s effort there.
The 2016 election was coming down to Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. All of them were overwhelmingly white (Michigan’s 2012 electorate was the most diverse of the three, at 77 percent white1). All of them were predominantly blue collar (a majority of voters in each of the three states lacked college degrees in 2012). None of them had been carried by the Republican Party in a presidential election since the 1980s.
Clinton was supremely confident, so much so that she lavished attention on Arizona in the hope of running up the score while ignoring Wisconsin in the belief that it was not truly competitive. Victory seemed certain: Even if one or two of the Rust Belt states slipped away, her campaign had invested tens of millions of dollars into North Carolina and Florida. If she took care of both, as expected, the election was over.
It was no surprise when, at around 10:40 p.m. Eastern, the networks called Ohio for Trump.
But when they moved Florida into the Republican nominee’s column some fifteen minutes later, Democrats began to panic. It seemed premature, even to Trump’s advisers. Was this going to be the inverse of 2000, when they called Florida early for Al Gore, only to take it back?
Sequestered away in an unfinished space on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, everyone was suddenly on their feet. The campaign had set up a makeshift war room where they wouldn’t be bothered; the showcase was a hulking projector screen being updated from an RNC data feed. When the networks called Florida, Priebus ordered the staff to keep the state front and center, worried that Trump’s lead would evaporate. Instead, it grew wider. Trump himself entered the war room, but nobody noticed: North Carolina had just been called for him, too.
The dominoes were falling in surreal fashion. Never, even under the sunniest of circumstances, had Trump’s campaign considered a sweep of both North Carolina and Florida. They hoped for a split of the two, which would keep alive their hope for an inside straight in the Rust Belt. Now, with both states in the Republican column, it was Clinton who needed a sweep of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
Priebus pulled Trump aside. “You might win,” the party chairman whispered.
Trump nodded. He suggested they move upstairs to the residence. The Republican nominee had not written a victory speech, and from the sound of things, he might just need one.
RYAN SAT IN HIS TEAM’S WAR ROOM AT THE HOLIDAY INN, ONE EYE ON Fox News and the other on a laptop spitting out sequences of numbers and projections.
His own race had been called early, and attendees waited patiently in the ballroom for his victory speech. But the Speaker was paralyzed, watching in silent disbelief as Trump surged past Clinton in Florida and North Carolina. The RNC’s numbers, his advisers told him, as well as the toplines of the national exit polls, were badly flawed. The GOP’s Senate majority was safe. Only a handful of House Republicans were losing. And if the current trends held, Trump was going to win the biggest upset in presidential history. The Republican Party was going to control the entire federal government.
Ryan called Priebus. Was this for real? The RNC chairman told him to prepare for a long night; the results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin were so tight that anyone forecasting the outcome was guessing.
Shortly before 10:00 p.m. Eastern, Ryan finally took the stage and spoke for three minutes. He wore the look of a man who had escaped a burning building. “I’ve just been sitting there watching the polls,” he told his hometown audience, shaking his head. “By some accounts, this could be a really good night for America. This could be a good night for us. Fingers crossed.”
The Speaker returned to his bunker, still in a state of astonishment over what was unfolding. When the AP called Pennsylvania for Trump, just after 1:30 a.m. Eastern, Ryan phoned Pence. “I think you’re going to win this thing,” he said.