By that time, Trump and his team were finished revising his planned remarks. To the relief (and pleasant surprise) of everyone who had traveled upstairs to the residence, Trump was adamant about giving a gracious speech. “No bragging. Let’s calm the waters,” he announced. “That’s what I want.”
With the speech wrapped up, and Pennsylvania in the bag, Trump and his entourage set off for his Election Night party at the Midtown Hilton.
Pence, having long projected an unfaltering belief that Trump was destined to be a pivotal character in the American story, felt a certain absolution. Hours earlier, when the RNC officials and Trump aides had shared the exit-poll data, Pence ordered his team to ignore the noise. Then he sent them a photo, via text message, of the famous newspaper headline from the 1948 election: “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
IT WASN’T OVER QUITE YET. BUT WITH TRUMP NOW AT 264 ELECTORAL votes, any one of the outstanding competitive races—Michigan, Wisconsin, or Arizona—would put him over the top.
He won all three.
When the final numbers were tabulated, Donald Trump had defeated Hillary Clinton in one of the strangest results in presidential history.2
Trump won the Electoral College with 306 votes to Clinton’s 232 (officially 304 to 227, after seven pledged electors went rogue).
The margin of the GOP victory was found in three states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—which Trump won by a total of 77,744 votes, less than the capacity of some Big Ten football stadiums.
Meanwhile, Clinton won the popular vote by nearly three million.
All across the country, from the Rust Belt to the Great Plains to the spine of the Mississippi River, the Republican nominee flipped rural and exurban counties from blue to red on the potency of his appeal to middle- and working-class whites. (Clinton won just 37 percent of all white voters, per the exit polls, including 31 percent of white men; Trump was dominant among noncollege-educated whites, winning 66 percent of them to Clinton’s 29 percent.)
But this recoloring of the map was not indicative of any enormous surge in voting among white men without college degrees. As the Brookings Institute reported, turnout for these voters “was markedly lower than it was in 2004, when George W. Bush beat John Kerry. It was also four points below that of white women without college degrees, and more than 20 points lower than white men or women with a college degree.” It wasn’t that Trump turned out historic new numbers of blue-collar whites; he simply won a far higher share of them than past Republicans had.
This was largely predictable. These voters had been trending toward the GOP for a generation, and Trump’s candidacy was a known accelerant. The expectation was that Clinton would counter by mobilizing the groups central to her party’s coalition: minorities, young people, college-educated women.
She did not. Nationwide, and particularly in the Midwest, Clinton badly underperformed among these constituencies relative to Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. In the three decisive states, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, Clinton won roughly 600,000 fewer votes than Obama had four years earlier, with particularly deep drop-offs in the urban precincts.
The irony wasn’t lost on Priebus. Having spent the last four years laboring to build a party that wasn’t solely dependent on working-class whites, he watched Trump win the presidency by prioritizing that very demographic in the narrowest possible way. “The dog caught the car,” Priebus says. “Donald Trump had a good instinct. He knew he had the ability to excite people that haven’t been excited in a long time. But what he didn’t know, and what his campaign didn’t know, is whether the numbers of those people would be enough to actually win.”
The margin of victory erased any doubts about the Supreme Court’s significance in shaping the outcome of the election.
Exit polls revealed that Supreme Court appointments were “the most important factor” for 21 percent of the electorate; Trump won 56 percent of those voters to Clinton’s 41 percent.3 Moreover, 26 percent of the people who voted for Trump called Supreme Court nominees “the most important factor” in their decision; only 18 percent of Clinton voters said the same. A total of 6,655,560 votes were cast for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Extrapolating from the exit poll numbers, that means 1,730,446 of them were primarily motivated by the Supreme Court—in states he carried by a combined 77,744 votes.
Any number of variables could tip the scales in such a tight election. But it’s not difficult to deduce that without the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2014, allowing McConnell to block Obama’s nominee, and thus dangling a vacant Supreme Court seat in front of reluctant conservatives, there would not have been a Republican takeover of the White House in 2016.
“I agree,” McConnell says, grinning.
JASON MILLER, THE CAMPAIGN’S COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR, FOUND Trump holed up backstage at the Midtown Hilton.
It was now 2:30 in the morning and a steady stream of friends, family members, and advisers had spent the past hour telling Trump that he was going to win, that the math had become impossible for Clinton. But the Republican nominee ignored them. No network had called the race, and he wasn’t about to trust the delirious prognostications of his allies.
“Mr. Trump,” Miller said. “The AP just called the race. You’re going to be the president of the United States.”
Trump turned to Miller. He looked neither happy nor sad, just surprised, wearing the expression of a student who earned the highest grade in the class despite not having studied for the test.
“Really?” he said.
Just then, a few feet away, Kellyanne Conway’s phone rang. It was Huma Abedin, the longtime aide to Clinton. The Democratic nominee was calling to offer her concession. With his court of friends, family members, and advisers hugging one another and shouting in euphoria, Trump held the phone to his ear and stared ahead stoically. “I’m honored by your call,” he told Clinton. “I’m very honored by your call.”
Emerging onto the stage twenty minutes later, the president-elect sounded like a changed man. “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,” Trump said.4 “Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division. . . . I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans. And this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.”
Later in his speech, Trump sang the praises of Priebus, calling him a “superstar” and inviting him to give remarks at the podium—the only person besides Pence to speak. The man who exactly one month earlier had warned the Republican nominee to either quit or suffer a historic loss was now standing at the lectern, in front of a frenzied crowd, saying, “The next president of the United States, Donald Trump!”
They shook hands. “God bless,” Priebus announced. “Thank God.”
INSIDE THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, REACTIONS TO TRUMP’S VICTORY RAN the gamut: delight and dread, mild surprise and utter shock, excitement at the idea of governing with control of all three branches and panic at the prospects of the president behaving in office as he had on the campaign trail.