WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Democrats were counting on fed-up women to elect America’s first female president. Instead, dissatisfied men helped return Donald Trump to power.
The president-elect’s two eldest sons
helped him pick
a running mate who once decried “childless cat ladies,” while his youngest son, Barron, encouraged his father’s pivot to podcasts in an effort to reach other young men, a typically reliable Democratic voting bloc that split evenly this year.
“I think the gender gap is going to be the story of the next 20 years. Truly,” Democratic strategist Caitlin Legacki said. “There are a lot of men who feel like they’re being left behind, that society doesn’t have a place for them. And if we don’t want a civil war breaking out along gender lines, we’ve got to figure that out. That is the biggest widening gap in American society.”
The entire country shifted right, like other Western democracies in the inflationary post-Covid era. And with the electorate in a foul mood, Vice President Kamala Harris struggled to separate herself from a deeply unpopular incumbent who waited too long to step aside and whose aides had undermined her for years.
Trump, meanwhile, made strides in his promise to assemble a multiracial working-class coalition, winning 45% of Latinos and 55% of Latino men — records for a Republican presidential candidate — while making gains in blue states and pushing his margins among non-college-educated and middle-income voters to new heights, according to NBC News exit polls.
“The demographic shifts for us were just so brutal,” a Harris aide said. “Our people rejected us.”
Democrats’ recriminations started before the clock ran out on Election Day — Harris was too cautious, many said, or she should have broken cleanly from President Joe Biden and replaced the leaders he installed in the campaign — but Trump’s victory was conclusive enough across the board that there may have been little she could do.
“The electorate has moved decisively to the right on a number of key issues, which happen to be the key issues that defined this election, especially immigration and inflation,” said Evan Roth Smith, the lead pollster for the Democratic group Blueprint. “It was probably impossible for any Democrat to win, and probably any Republican could have won, because Harris made probably the best possible attempt to win it and Trump made the best possible attempt to lose it.”
Indeed, on his third run for the presidency and after nine years as a fixture of American life, Trump is positioned to be the first nonincumbent Republican of the century to win not just the Electoral College, but also the most votes.
“The worst part: He’s going to win the popular vote, too,” another Harris aide said.
This account of how Trump won and how Harris lost is based on more than 35 interviews with operatives and officials from both parties and campaigns, many of whom were granted anonymity to offer immediate candid observations about what went right or wrong.
New campaign, same Trump
Less than four years ago, after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Trump was cast into the political wilderness by his own party, as Republicans turned to new faces they thought could harness Trump’s energy but with less of his baggage, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Republican voters had other ideas, sticking with Trump, the former reality TV star, who reclaimed his image as an outside change agent and faced prosecutions and two assassination attempts.
A campaign official said Trump’s primary clash with DeSantis helped him hit his stride after a “social stigma” followed him in the early months of his post-presidency.
“Rewind back to 2021 and 2022 —it was kind of rough,” a campaign official said. “He wasn’t seen as cool. The spark was gone a little bit. When he really started with DeSantis, the spark came back to him. Having an adversary brought the spark back.”
The “social stigma” receded further after the indictments, this person said.
“It turned Donald Trump into a f—ing folk hero and icon,” the person added.
“And then he gets shot, and that only increases the view of him as a folk hero and icon.”
Breaking from the improvisational chaos that defined his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, Trump “made it clear from the beginning: He wanted a professional operation,” said Chris LaCivita, who along with fellow senior adviser Susie Wiles co-managed a campaign that was widely seen as more disciplined and competent than his previous ones — even if Trump himself remained as allergic to staying on message as ever.
Outside of some clashes involving LaCivita and longtime Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski that
recently spilled out into public
, there was little of the backstabbing that typified past Trump campaigns.
“There was very little drama,” a campaign official said. “It was like a normal campaign where people basically got along. You would talk through strategy, agree on stuff and you wouldn’t run to NBC to knife the person if you disagreed with them.”
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