How Donald Trump completed a historic political comeback
By Steve Contorno, Kristen Holmes and Alayna Treene, CNN
West Palm Beach, Florida (CNN) — Donald Trump began his political comeback when many in his own party wanted him to go away.
He announced his third White House bid days after Republicans underwhelmed in the 2022 midterm elections, a performance that prominent GOP figures laid squarely at his feet — for the candidates he supported, for lingering resentments over the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and for his unwillingness to recede from public life in the aftermath of defeat.
Surrounded at Mar-a-Lago by the close allies and aides that had yet to abandon him during his post-presidency exile, Trump assigned blame elsewhere, including the justice system that had raided his Palm Beach estate three months prior. He offered a dark assessment of the country after he left office and forecasted that before long voters would turn against those in charge.
“I have no doubt that by 2024, it will sadly be much worse, and they will see clearly what has happened and is happening to our country,” Trump said, “and the voting will be much different.”
By early Wednesday morning, Trump’s prediction had materialized. Millions of Americans, including pivotal voters in Midwest and Sun Belt battlegrounds, cast ballots that clinched Trump’s historic comeback — one that promises to reshape American politics for the foreseeable future.
Trump’s victory, years in the making, is as notable for its breadth as for its method. His campaign aimed from the outset to remake the political coalitions that have underpinned American elections for generations. Trump reached out to constituencies traditionally loyal to Democrats: union households, wage workers, and Black and Latino men.
At the same time, he courted the disillusioned — men scattered throughout America’s forgotten places who had long given up on electoral politics altogether. And his allies exploited rifts between Democrats and their base of support. A Republican-tied super PAC, for example, aired ads on Detroit radio urging the area’s Arab voters to support Green Party candidate Jill Stein over the Democratic ticket due to the Mideast conflict.
Simultaneously, the Republican Jewish Coalition spent $15 million targeting Jewish voters anxious over the administration’s support for Israel and the left’s embrace of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses.
Preliminary data suggests his team achieved even more than they anticipated. Trump’s apparent gains among younger voters surpassed the rosiest of projections. When all the votes are counted, Trump appears likely to become the first Republican since 2004 to win the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.
“The most important thing and what should inform what happens with the party moving forward: He built a broad and diverse coalition,” senior adviser Brian Hughes said Wednesday morning just as Trump took the stage to delivery victory remarks. “And now the exit polling reflects it.”
A stable group of campaign aides and a consistent message
People within and close to Trump’s political operation credit his victory to a host of factors, not the least of which was a campaign that, from the start, appeared far more sophisticated and disciplined than its two predecessors. They argued that the campaign leadership, led by Florida guru Susie Wiles and veteran Republican operative Chris LaCivita, helped instill a sense of control over the candidate that extended to the Republican Party and helped counteract Trump’s proclivity to get in his own way.
The two managed to serve as the former president’s campaign heads for the entire cycle — unheard of in Trump world — and kept the fringe influences within his orbit at bay.
“Susie and Chris have held it together,” one longtime Trump confidant told CNN.
But the scale of Trump’s win points to forces at work beyond any single campaign maneuver or specific moment in a race marked by many unprecedented events, including multiple attempts on the Republican’s life and the abrupt exit of Democratic President Joe Biden.
Rather, the outcome reflects the very scenario Trump foreshadowed two years earlier: An American public beset by inflation, frustrated by years of immigration mismanagement and ultimately prepared to pivot away from the party in power — even if it meant putting the executive branch back in the hands of an unpopular, twice-impeached ex-president whose failed attempts to remain in office ended in a bloody riot in the nation’s capital.
For Vice President Kamala Harris, saddled with the baggage of an unpopular incumbent and sour views about the US economy, the race proved challenging, and her scramble to demonstrate her readiness for the role Trump once held ultimately fell short for enough Americans to tip the scales.
Skeptics in and outside of the GOP proved wrong
Yet, skeptics within the GOP remained and cast doubt as to whether enough Americans would ever again turn to Trump to lead the country.
A lineup of former allies, including Trump’s first vice president, Mike Pence; ex-political protege Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; and former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, set out to test that case, even as the former president made clear he intended to seek the Oval Office once more. For a time, it appeared there was an opening for those candidates to pull the GOP from Trump’s vise grip.
Trump enraged his close allies by dining with a known neo-Nazi in the days following the launch of his presidential campaign, and his threat shortly after to terminate the Constitution sent his political team — and his public support — spiraling. The episode marked a low point, Wiles would later tell The Atlantic, leading to an ominously dark Christmas in Palm Beach. Wiles recalled Trump asked her during that stretch, “Do you think I would win Florida?”
Then came a series of state and federal indictments targeting Trump’s businesses, his failed attempts to maintain power and droves of White House documents he allegedly took with him to Mar-a-Lago. The response from Republican voters was almost instantaneous. With each new case came a wave of donations and renewed support from the politicians who had left his side.
His Republican rivals, already straining to criticize Trump without alienating the GOP faithful, were stuck. All through 2023, Trump refused to attend a single Republican primary debate, leaving his opponents to fight among each other to establish themselves as an alternative.
Trump’s political team seized on their change in fortune, selling T-shirts with his mug shot and consolidating support throughout the country. Meanwhile, they set out to build a political machine that would pale in comparison to the disorganized and wayward operations of his first two campaigns.
The first test came in Iowa. The campaign recruited and trained around 2,000 volunteer caucus captains across the state. Each was assigned a mission: Get commitments from 10 first-time voters in the Iowa caucuses from a list of 25 prospective supporters the campaign had identified in their neighborhoods.
On January 15, Trump captured support from 51% of Iowa caucusgoers, leaving a wide chasm between him and the rest of the field. From there, Trump marched to the GOP nomination, losing only the Vermont and Washington, DC, primaries.
Still, Haley had exposed lingering discomfort with Trump among some moderate Republicans, especially suburban women who had turned against the former president almost immediately after his 2017 inauguration.
A new tactic for the general election
Trump’s team concluded early that the economy and external forces were more likely to dictate how those voters viewed their decision in 2024 than any outreach he or they could make. Instead, his operatives set out to replace their support by building a new coalition across the battleground states most likely to decide the presidential election.
He promised Libertarians a cabinet spot, and to Bitcoin enthusiasts he vowed to install a pro-crypto administration. He made repeated overtures to Michigan autoworkers. He held a rally in the Bronx geared toward Black and Latino voters. He visited deeply blue parts of the country, convinced expanding his efforts outside the traditional battleground map could put the popular vote within reach.
Along the way he dangled financial incentives to key groups: no taxes on tipped wages to service workers in Nevada; no taxes on overtime wages for blue-collar workers; no taxes on Social Security for seniors. Mostly, he sought to convince each group that the flow of migrants through the US southern border threatened their jobs, safety and way of life.
He also sat down for lengthy interviews with an emerging media ecosystem of male influencers and podcast hosts — comedians, athletes, pranksters and Joe Rogan — who his campaign believed touched men of all stripes, from the investor class to the industrial exurbs.
The strategy was piloted in part by 27-year-old Alex Bruesewitz, who convinced Trump he could reach millions of unlikely voters on these shows. Trump ran some of the campaign’s digital ideas by his son Barron, on whom he has increasingly relied for advice on connecting with younger voters, a source told CNN.
Trump started a TikTok account, despite once having threatened to shut down the Chinese social media company, and attempted to build on his outreach through viral moments, including a photo op working at McDonald’s and driving a sanitation truck on an airport tarmac in response to Biden seeming to call his supporters “garbage.”
The campaign’s intense focus on low-propensity voters, a term political operatives use for people who rarely, if ever, vote, rattled the nerves of longtime Republican operatives used to fighting for more reliable voters whose politics wavered from left to right every election cycle. Trump further alarmed the GOP faithful when his campaign helped orchestrate the ouster of Republican Party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, threw out the party’s battleground state plans and installed loyalists atop the RNC to help execute his campaign’s vision.
The decision to take over the party came with Trump on the heels of securing the nomination after his allies raised concerns about how McDaniel was spending its money.
“It was a marketing operation for the party,” a person involved in reviewing the party’s activity and spending told CNN. “We needed to get the entire apparatus under one roof.”
Taking a risk
Wiles and Trump’s political director, James Blair, had honed this targeted approach in campaigns they ran together in Florida, including the former president’s successful 2020 operation there. Still, one person deeply involved in carrying out these plans acknowledged to CNN that if Trump lost, they would field considerable blame for their unconventional ways.
“We’re either going to be ridden out of town on a rail for this and a lot of other things,” the person said. “Or we’ll be geniuses, and it will change things for a long period of time.”
Their push relied in part on the work of outside groups, made possible by an FEC decision this year granting campaigns the ability to coordinate with outside political action committees on paid canvassing. Those groups included Turning Point Action, a group targeting younger voters run by Trump loyalist Charlie Kirk, and America PAC, a super PAC founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk, who in the final months steered his tremendous wealth and influence and his social media website X toward getting Trump reelected.
By the end of October, Musk’s super PAC had spent more than $140 million on boosting Trump, according to its disclosures with federal regulators, including more than $80 million the group categorized as spending on canvassing and field operations. The money went toward door-knockers, phone bankers and other canvassers, and included daily $1 million giveaways to registered voters in battleground states that prompted the Philadelphia district attorney to sue Musk.
In Arizona, Turning Point spent tens of millions on a get-out-the-vote program it called “Chase the Vote.” Full-time staff called “ballot chasers” were trained to build relationships with 400 to 600 specific individuals over months and ensure they voted in the presidential election. They were instructed to drive them to the polls, help them mail in a ballot and encourage early voting.
A week before the election, a person with knowledge of Turning Point’s operation told CNN that it had banked votes from more than 125,000 of the low-propensity voters it had targeted in Arizona — a margin greater than Trump’s defeat in the state four years prior.
A final vibe shift
In the final stretch of the campaign, Trump’s team grappled with uncertainty, unsure whether their months of groundwork would translate into the outcome they sought.
Mounting concerns lingered over Trump’s erratic behavior in the closing weeks — a pattern marked by chronic tardiness, a subdued energy, and lengthy, meandering speeches before thinning crowds. A particularly chaotic rally at Madison Square Garden, marred by incendiary remarks, risked reminding voters of the very conduct his advisers had carefully sought to keep out of the spotlight. A particularly offensive joke about Puerto Rico by a comedian sent Trump’s political operation into a tizzy of finger-pointing because everyone knew how hard they had worked to build support in Latino communities.
With the clock ticking down on Election Day, Trump and his allies appeared to develop last-minute jitters about their reliance on male voters. Kirk, Musk and others spent the day pleading online for men to match the turnout they had seen already. Trump himself sent out a robocall telling men to “get off that beautiful couch” and vote.
In the end, though, the concerns were unwarranted. Trump’s campaign had made substantial gains among every demographic his campaign set out to find new votes.
“They came from all quarters: Union, nonunion, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American,” Trump said in his victory remarks. “We had everybody, and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment. Uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.”
CNN’s David Wright contributed to this report.
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