Days after Republicans failed in the 2022 midterm elections, he declared his third run for president. Prominent GOP leaders blamed his poor showing directly on him, the candidates he backed, his refusal to step back from public life after losing, and the lingering anger over the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
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.” 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 caucus goers, 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.
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