How Donald Trump Pulled Off the Greatest Comeback in Political History
By Carlo Versano
Donald J. Trump completed the greatest political comeback in modern U.S. history in the early hours of Wednesday, claiming enough electoral votes to defeat Vice President Kamala Harris and return to the White House for a second term.
The president-elect declared victory in a speech from Florida at 2:30 a.m. ET, saying he had masterminded the "greatest political movement of all time" and pledging to "help our country heal," after vowing during the campaign to exact "retribution" on his political enemies. It was a nearly unthinkable coda to what might now be considered an intermission to the Trump era, which began with his refusal to concede defeat four years ago.
A violent attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters followed, which was then followed by four criminal indictments, a felony conviction on 91 charges, a $354 million judgment in a civil case against him and his business and another jury finding him liable for sexual abuse and defamation.
Trump The Comeback
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"The real verdict is going to be November 5, by the people," Trump said earlier this year.
Sure enough, the verdict arrived in his favor. "We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible," Trump told a crowd of overjoyed supporters assembled at the convention center near his Mar-a-Lago estate.
After thanking voters, he said he would not rest until he had delivered a "golden age" for America.
"He's the toughest son of a gun I've ever seen," Fox News' Brit Hume said late on Tuesday, as the results began to break Trump's way.
Not since Grover Cleveland in 1892 has a U.S. president been elected to two nonconsecutive terms in office. In the end, Trump was able to pull off the feat not with a strategy of simply rallying his MAGA, but by actually expanding the Republican electoral map. In fact, Trump was on track to win the popular vote in what would a first for the GOP candidate since George W. Bush pulled it off in 2004.
The Trump campaign strategy was straightforward: eschew the mainstream press, focusing instead on appealing to young men and disaffected minority voters with high-profile appearances on popular non-political podcasts, bolstered by influencers that have displaced the traditional media among those voters.
As Tuesday evening turned to night, it became clear that high-risk strategy was paying off. Trump overperformed his 2020 results across the map, while Harris underperformed against Biden in key counties and among key voting blocs, Latinos and working-class voters among them.
In Allentown, Pennsylvania, a majority Hispanic city, Trump increased his margins by 13 points. In south Texas, Starr County went for Trump by 16 points. Trump lost that border county, which is more than 90 percent Hispanic, by 5 points in 2020 and 60 points in 2016—for an almost unimaginable 76-point shift in eight years toward the GOP.
The shift showed up nearly everywhere. Trump came closer to victory in New York (56-44) than Harris did in Florida (56-43). In fact, according to AP vote tabulations, Trump gained ground in every single state but two: Utah and Washington.
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He also oversaw a realignment of the working class, winning voters making less than $50,000 by a point—a bloc that went for Biden by 10 points last time. Among those slightly more affluent, making between $50,000 and $100,000, Trump won by 2. That group went to Biden by 15.
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"Timing is everything in politics," Spiro Amburn, a Georgia-based GOP strategist, told Newsweek. "The American people clearly spoke regarding the failure by Democrats to address the issues of the public safety and the economy. Trump won on these issues."
Whether it was those specific issues or just through sheer force, Trump overcame a challenger who amassed $1 billion to defeat him, with a ground game behind her that was thought be the best in politics.
"The former president of the United States, given up for dead after January 6, 2021, is running stronger now than he did in the last campaign," John King said on CNN late Tuesday, noting Trump was running ahead of his 2020 performance by 3 points nationally.
Donald Trump U.S. Election
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"Trump defied history and created a new, diverse coalition," the political scientist Steve Schier told Newsweek. "His is an extraordinary achievement in presidential history."
The president-elect will take office with the wind at his back. Republicans also retook the Senate, meaning his cabinet and judicial appointments will likely face minimal pushback (control of the House remained up in the air as of midday Wednesday). After a period of post-pandemic inflation, the U.S. economy is firing on all cylinders, with the Federal Reserve likely to cut interest rates again when it meets this week. And the pending legal cases against him are now either dead on arrival or severely disrupted.
Now, instead of ending his career on a losing note—as a twice-impeached, one-term president and convicted felon—Trump will have four more years to reshape the government, and a chance to further cement his legacy as the most consequential Republican president since Ronald Reagan.
But Reagan's landslide victory 40 years ago came with it an explicit governing mandate. Is Trump returning to power with such a mandate from voters? In that, Joe Biden provides a warning.
The 46th president came to office promising to be a "bridge" to a "new generation of leaders," before proceeded in an attempt to govern in the mold of FDR. Despite cratering poll numbers, Biden chose to run for reelection even as vast swaths of the electorate, including those in his own party, repeatedly signaled that they thought he was too old.
As for Harris, she will be tasked as vice president with the role of presiding over Congress' certification of Trump's victory on January 6 of next year—four years to the day since the riot at the Capitol that seemed, at the time, destined to send her opponent to the dustbin of history.
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