by Tim Alberta
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.
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 fron
t 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.
For the party’s Trump skeptics, there was plenty of dark humor. When a friend texted South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, expressing dismay at the night’s outcome, she replied, “Cheer up. We just won the governor’s races in Vermont, Indiana, and North Dakota.”
Watching the returns down in Florida, Marco Rubio couldn’t help but think that America was getting the president she deserved. “If our culture was as outraged by this stuff as some in the press seem to be, he wouldn’t have been elected. It wouldn’t have worked,” Rubio says. “If people put this all on Donald Trump, they’re making a big mistake. All you have to do is spend five minutes on Twitter and see some of the things that prominent people write about each other to realize this is the era we’ve entered into.” (Having won reelection to the Senate, Rubio phoned Chris Christie to thank his old nemesis for making him a much-improved debater.)
As the granular details of the election’s result came into focus, Republicans commenced a spirited debate that proved impossible to resolve.
Had Trump, by virtue of running up the score among working-class whites and flipping three “Blue Wall” states, shown that he was the only Republican capable of reaching 270 Electoral votes? Or had Clinton, thanks to her underperforming vis-à-vis Obama in urban areas and her failure to mobilize the Democratic base in Middle America, demonstrated that any Republican could have won the White House in 2016?
“It’s hard to imagine that anybody else we nominated would have had the same kind of connection with working-class voters who, as Hillbilly Elegy pretty well laid out, felt that life had dealt them a bad hand,” says McConnell, referencing the 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance about socioeconomic decline in Appalachia. “President Trump obviously was able to appeal to working-class people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and he caught that lightning in a bottle. I’m not sure anybody else we nominated could have done that.”
“They say anybody could beat her, yet we barely did, and we did with a candidate who uniquely spoke to people in northern Wisconsin and western Pennsylvania and mid-Michigan like none of the other sixteen candidates could have,” Priebus says. “So, while people can wring their hands all day long about the nomination of Donald Trump, it turned out he was about the only person who could have won that race—even against a very weak Hillary Clinton.”
The problem with such analyses is that they rely heavily on Trump’s appeal to the white working class while ignoring other demographic groups with whom a less polarizing Republican nominee might have fared far better. While a Ted Cruz or a Marco Rubio or a John Kasich might not have done as well with Trump’s core demographic, would they not have compensated by dramatically outperforming him among minorities and suburbanites and college-educated women, thus winning the same states (and possibly more), just with a different electoral coalition?
“He was running against somebody who was detested. We’ve never had an election in which one out of every five voters thought neither candidate was qualified by temperament or experience to be president. We’ve never had an election in which one out of every five voters who vote for a candidate doesn’t like them,” says Karl Rove. “It all came down to change. If you thought the country was headed in the right direction, you voted for her. But if you thought we were on the wrong track, you voted for him. And that was all tribal.”
John Boehner, who says his former golfing buddy “never, ever expected to win” the White House, is more absolute. “The only Republican who Hillary Clinton possibly could have beaten was Donald Trump, and the only Democrat that Trump possibly could have beaten was Clinton,” Boehner says. “Joe Biden would have run circles around him. Marco Rubio would have run circles around her.” (“Three hundred and thirty million Americans,” Boehner says of Trump and Clinton, sighing, “and we got those two.”)
Boehner’s successor in Congress, the Freedom Caucus member Warren Davidson, says he doubts that another Republican nominee could have won Ohio by an 8-point margin. But he believes that the raw numbers belie the disquiet many voters had to surmount before backing Trump—and the sense of compulsion they felt because of his opponent.
Davidson recalls talking with a young woman at his church who was eligible to vote for the first time. She was raised conservative and could never cast her ballot for Clinton. Yet she felt guilty about the idea of supporting Trump. Davidson told her that he personally viewed the election as “a binary choice,” and urged her to pray about the decision.
Seeing her soon after the election, Davidson asked what verdict she had reached. “I prayed about it a lot. I got in the booth and prayed some more,” she told him. “I voted for Trump. And then I prayed again to ask God’s forgiveness.”
RYAN HAD PHONED TRUMP AFTER WISCONSIN OF ALL STATES DELIVERED the final verdict, the congratulatory call a blur of exhilaration and bafflement and trepidation.
He faced a legacy-shaping decision that night: Stay true to himself and step down as Speaker, or muzzle himself and serve alongside the new president. It was not a difficult choice. This was Ryan’s chance to actually achieve the things he had spent decades fantasizing about. All those long commutes, all those nights missing family dinners and his kids’ games and school events, would be worth it. Even if that meant getting in bed with the likes of Trump and Steve Bannon.
Even if that meant accommodating behavior from a Republican president that he would never tolerate from a Democrat.
Then and there, Ryan knew what needed to be done. Having spent his entire adult life chasing the impossible goals of rewriting the tax code and reforming entitlement programs, here was his opening. He could now serve as Speaker of the House in a unified Republican government and pursue his legislative destiny—if only he were willing to go silent on Trump, beginning that night in Janesville. There would be no speech. There would be no more public blistering of Trump, period.
His friends called it “Paul’s deal with the devil.” And Ryan, like most Republicans, did not think twice about making it.
Chapter Eighteen
November 2016
“You don’t have to worry about my street credibility.”
THE FOUR OF THEM STOOD ON THE SPEAKER’S BALCONY, GAZING OUT over the National Mall, pointing to some of the landmarks and making awkward small talk. In just over two months, Paul Ryan announced to the group, Donald Trump would stand in that very spot and be inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States. He and his wife, Melania, took it all in. Mike Pence, the vice president-elect, wore the smile of a lottery winner.
Ryan hadn’t slept one wink on Election Night. Instead, he lay in bed coming to grips with the arrangement he was about to enter into. “I felt a major onset of responsibility to help the institutions survive,” Ryan recalls. “So, from the next day on, my mantra was ‘Only one person can be Speaker of the House. I’m not a pundit, I’m not a think-tanker. Our job from now on is to build up the country’s antibodies, . . . to have the guardrails up, to drive the car down the middle of the road, and don’t let the car go off into the ditch.’”
Prior to the November 10 meeting, the Speaker shared with several friends that he planned to start by clearing the air, explaining to Trump why he had denounced him after Access Hollywood. They cut Ryan off: That was a terrible idea. He stood nothing to gain by reminding Trump, a known scorekeeper, of their past quarrels. Focus on the future, Ryan’s friends warned him. Pretend the past didn’t happen. Emphasize all the good things you can do for him. Kiss the ring, if necessary. To stand a chance of prospering in the new, post–November 8 Republican Party, one had to play the game by Trump’s rules.
