Trump poised for historic win. How it happened

There was a moment in the September presidential debate in which Donald Trump spoke with surprising prescience. The moderators asked Vice President Kamala Harris about the Biden administration's immigration approach, prodding how she would have acted differently if she were president. Harris dodged the question, pledging to be a president "who actually puts you first." In Trump's response, he spoke about his supporters. "They want to bring our country back," he said. "They want to make America great again. It's a very simple phrase. Make America great again."

Two months later, Trump's analysis of the American electorate proved more correct than Harris': a slim majority of U.S. voters are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, and they trust Trump to fix it.

Early Wednesday morning, the race had not yet been formally called. But Trump seemed poised to secure a landslide victory. After he won Georgia and North Carolina, Harris' last chance was capturing the "blue wall" states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. By the time Harris' campaign announced — just before 1 a.m. ET Wednesday morning — she would not address the thousands of supporters gathered at her election night party at Howard University in Washington, D.C., it seemed all three states were slipping out of reach. Trump was on his way to winning all seven battleground states and delivering a clean sweep.

"America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," Trump said early Wednesday morning, declaring victory in West Palm Beach, Florida.

The writing on the wall was there, though Harris was convinced it didn't apply to her. For months, voters have expressed a dismal outlook on the direction of the country, particularly in regards to the economy. The latest Deseret News/HarrisX poll of the national electorate suggested that nearly two-thirds — 63% — believed the country was on the wrong track, while just 26% said it was on the right track. (That figure fell squarely within other similar polls .)

Harris, who positioned herself as a forward-looking, next-generation leader, attempted to convince voters that hers would be different from the Biden administration. In the closing weeks of the campaign, she pledged that her number-one task would be to lower costs. She unveiled an economic plan that she said would lift middle-class families and target disadvantaged groups.

But when a disgruntled electorate asked just how her administration would differ from her predecessor's, Harris failed to give a coherent answer. On "The View" in early October, she said "not a thing comes to mind" when asked to name something she would do differently than Biden. A week later, on Fox News, she said her administration would not be a "continuation" of Biden's, but gave no further detail. It became such a recurring theme that she eventually massaged an acknowledgement of the tension into her stump speeches, but offered little more clarity. "My presidency will be different (than Biden's) because the challenges we face are different," she would say.

The American electorate, it seemed, wanted something different, too. "This was a movement like nobody's ever seen before, and frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time," Trump declared early Wednesday morning. "There's never been anything like this in this country, and now it's going to reach a new level of importance, because we're going to help our country heal."

Few in Harris' orbit could have forecasted this. The outcome was expected to take days, or even weeks, to ascertain. While Harris was never expected to declare victory at her Election Night watch party in Washington , she certainly wasn't expected to concede. In the end, she didn't do either, opting to never make an appearance. Instead, moments after 1 a.m. ET, her campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond came onstage to announce they would "continue overnight to fight" to count every vote, and suggested Harris would make public remarks Wednesday. A demoralized crowd at Howard University, or what was left of it, offered a half-enthused cheer.

For two hours prior, a steady stream of attendees had been filing out . Around 11 p.m. ET, the ones leaving said they had work the next morning or they would watch the returns from home. "I'm anxious — not necessarily nervous," Paul Sadler told me. "There's still time." Others were still optimistic; Mark Gilbert, a big Harris donor and the former U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, texted me that it was still a "margin of error race." Soon after, when North Carolina — the first of the swing states to fall — went to Trump, he told me there was still a way. "Best path is blue wall," he texted.

By 1:22 a.m. ET, as Harris' crowd emptied and projections suggested a Trump sweep of the battlegrounds, I asked Gilbert if he still saw a path. "Only a narrow one," he responded. "Blue wall numbers need to improve quickly." Forty minutes later, CNN called Pennsylvania — the do-or-die battleground — for Trump.

How we got here That this election would end in an electoral landslide, after polls predicted razor-thin margins, seems appropriate: the race has been one of change, upheaval and unscripted chaos. Five months ago, the country appeared to be barreling toward a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden — a convicted felon versus an octogenarian president with low approval ratings. A month later, it was an entirely new race.

The June 27 debate was the catalyst. Biden's rambling and incoherent performance set off a two-week period of hysteria among Democrats, who questioned whether Biden was, in fact, capable of defeating Trump. Biden's central campaign message was that his opponent was a threat to democracy; if the stakes were so high, Democrats wondered aloud, could they risk keeping Biden on the ticket? Within a week, polls of Democratic voters nationally showed they wanted a new candidate.

Behind the scenes, Biden's close allies tried to nudge him out of the race. Nancy Pelosi warned he would buckle Democrats' chances to stop Trump; Chuck Schumer said he would kill their hopes at keeping control of the Senate. But the conversations took a backseat when Trump barely escaped disaster in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13. A gunman fired several rounds toward the lectern, narrowly missing Trump and killing one rally attendee, Corey Comperatore. Others were injured.

That was a Saturday; on Monday, when the Republican National Convention commenced in Milwaukee, what was already expected to be a coronation ceremony became liturgical. Underneath the policy talk — on tariffs, on immigration, on abortion — there was a theological discussion : There was little question about God saved Trump — "it seems it was God's (will) that Trump was spared," the Lutheran pastor who offered the benediction at the convention's opening session Monday told me — but, instead, the God "is certainly not finished with President Trump," Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.

The answer became the campaign's rallying call. On the convention's final night , when Trump formally accepted the party's nomination, there was a feeling that the election's outcome was foregone, that Trump was already the foreordained victor. Balloons fell and attendees cried. "See you at the inauguration," some said as they hugged.

election, perhaps, was over. But less than 72 hours later, an entirely new race began. In a letter unceremoniously pasted to social media, Biden announced his decision to bow out of the race, allowing his vice president, Harris, to take his place. It was a jolting decision, though not altogether unsurprising: even as Trump's near-assassination and jubilant convention sucked the air out of the news cycle for a week, Biden's closest allies ramped up pressure on him to pass the torch. Publicly, Biden remained defiant ; privately, he inched toward the decision that the race was not his to run.

In near unison, the Democratic establishment filed in line behind Harris. Within days, she had secured support from enough Democratic delegates to be the presumptive nominee, and a virtual vote before the mid-August convention cemented that position. Suddenly, it was Harris' campaign that appeared to be touched by the divine: in a matter of weeks, Harris' favorability rating — a net negative since 2021 — saw a complete reversal; she made up Biden's deficits in the polls, thanks to an apparent, newfound enthusiasm from Black and Hispanic voters; and her message of hope and joy took over the election. When Biden was atop the ticket, the campaign was dogged by concerns about stamina and capacity. Suddenly, it was sprinting on newfound vibes.

The Democratic National Convention was a weeklong celebration . The September debate , the first in-person meeting ever between Harris and Trump, was widely viewed as a success for the vice president. Trump, unable to restrain himself, seemed to be self-detonating: he questioned Harris' race, he scapegoated immigrants, he considered overhauling his top campaign staff. Meanwhile, Harris pitched herself as the unity candidate, contrasting with Trump's chaos. She talked about bridge-building and peacemaking; she promised to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and hit the campaign trail with Liz Cheney .

But there was one thing she couldn't dog: the widespread dissatisfaction with the state of the country, and the fault that lay at Harris' feet. For the better part of the past year, voters said the economy was the most important issue for them; the same voters said they were overwhelmingly pessimistic about the state of the economy during the Biden-Harris administration. Even as Harris attempted to pivot her closing message to an indictment of Trump, the former president refined his, asking voters if they were better off now than they were four years ago. Never mind the state of the U.S. economy in November 2020, in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic; never mind that the country has seen a post-pandemic soft landing. Polls showed high resentment and high dissatisfaction. Voters laid the blame at Harris' feet. "The VP struggled to separate herself from economic dissatisfaction because, as vice president, she's closely tied to the administration's policies," Scott Howell, who hosted Harris in Utah in 2020, said.