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.
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