Donald Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, had seen just about everything in his three races working for the controversy-stoking former president. But even he seemed to be bracing for bad news.

Trump had just debated Vice President Kamala Harris, repeatedly taking her bait, wasting time litigating his crowd sizes and spreading baseless rumors about pet-eating immigrants.

Fabrizio had predicted to colleagues that brutal media coverage of Trump’s performance would lift Harris in the polls. He was right about the media coverage but wrong about the rest. His first post-debate poll shocked him: Harris had gained on some narrow attributes, like likability. But Trump had lost no ground in the contest.

It was yet more proof of Trump’s durability over nearly a decade in politics and of his ability to defy the normal laws of gravity. He overcame seemingly fatal political vulnerabilities: four criminal indictments, three expensive lawsuits, conviction on 34 felony counts, endless reckless tangents in his speeches.

How he won in 2024 came down to one essential bet: that his grievances could meld with those of the MAGA movement, and then with the Republican Party, and then with more than half the country. Trump successfully harnessed the frustration millions of Americans felt about some of the very institutions and systems he will soon control as the country’s 47th president. Voters unhappy with the nation’s direction turned him into a vessel for their rage.

But more than just broad societal forces were at play. His victory owed, in part, to strategic decisions by a campaign operation that was his most stable yet and was held together for nearly four years by a veteran operative, Susie Wiles.

The Trump team schemed ways to save its cash for a final ad blitz, abandoning a traditional ground game to turn out its voters. Trump’s aides gambled on mobilizing men, though men vote less than women, and it paid off. And they gambled on trying to cut into Democrats’ typically big margins among Black and Latino voters, and that paid off, too.

How Trump won is also the story of how Harris lost.

She was hobbled by President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and struggled to break from him in the eyes of voters yearning for a change in direction. She had only three-plus months to reintroduce herself to the country, and she vacillated with how — and how much — to talk about Trump.

First, she and her running mate, Tim Walz, tried minimizing him by mocking him as “weird” and “unserious,” setting aside Biden’s grave warnings that Trump was an existential threat to American democracy. Then she focused on a populist message: Trump cared only about his rich friends, while she would bring down prices for ordinary people. Finally, late in the campaign, Harris pivoted again: Trump was a “fascist,” she warned — just the existential threat Biden had invoked.

Not every decision Trump made was genius because he won, and not every decision Harris made was poor because she lost. But in a race and in a nation so narrowly divided, Trump and his team made just enough of the right ones.

For almost any other politician, Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts related to hush money payments to a porn actor would have been the worst day of his candidacy. Instead, small donors poured $50 million into his coffers in 24 hours. And his main super political action committee was informed by its bank of a $50 million wire transfer the day after the conviction, from reclusive billionaire Timothy Mellon.

The $100 million day helped narrow the financial chasm Trump had been facing.

A surprise ruling from the Federal Election Commission allowed candidates for the first time to coordinate with billionaire-funded super PACs, and the Trump campaign quickly did so, though James Blair, the campaign’s political director, was widely second-guessed by veteran operatives in both parties. No one knew how well those outside groups and their mercenary operatives would fare at persuading people to vote.

The Harris campaign had spent months hiring 2,500 workers and opening 358 offices across the battleground states — enormous fixed costs the Trump campaign did not have to bear. Last weekend, some 90,000 Democratic volunteers knocked on more than 3 million doors.

Harris’ team members believed their superior infrastructure and army of believers would make the difference. But a ground game only matters in an close race. In the end, Harris did not come close enough.

The gender gap

Trump had long been nervous about the issue of abortion. He blamed the fallout from the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade for the GOP’s poor performance in the midterms in 2022. He considered the issue so politically fraught that it had the potential to sink his campaign.

And so, on the first Tuesday in April, he settled into his seat on the jet his aides call Trump Force One, a stack of papers before him. On top was a document his senior political advisers had prepared, spelling out a simple argument against his coming out in favor of a national abortion ban.

The title, in all caps: “How a National Abortion Policy Will Cost Trump the Election.”

A 15- or 16-week ban — which Trump was contemplating — would be more restrictive than existing law in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, the three “blue wall” states that were crucial to victory. The news media, his advisers told him, would portray his position as rolling back the rights of women, who were already in revolt against the GOP over abortion.

On that flight, Trump began dictating the script of a video he would release the following week: He would leave the abortion issue to the states and would not say how many weeks he considered appropriate — disappointing some social conservatives but making it harder for Democrats to use the issue against him.

His team’s data showed that the highest return on investment would be a group that didn’t often vote: younger men, including Hispanic and Black men who were struggling with inflation, alienated by left-wing ideology and pessimistic about the country. The Trump campaign committed its limited resources to communicating with these young men, embracing a hypermasculine image.

Harris’ team was trying equally hard to mobilize women in the first national election since the fall of Roe v. Wade, showcasing the stories of women who suffered catastrophic medical emergencies in states where Republicans had enacted strict abortion bans.

About a week after the September debate, Trump started spending heavily on a television ad that hammered Harris for her position on a seemingly obscure topic: the use of taxpayer funds to fund surgeries for transgender inmates.

“Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access,” Harris said in a 2019 clip used in the ad.

Trump was leading on the two most salient issues in the race — the economy and immigration — yet here he was, changing the subject. But the ad, with its vivid tagline — “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” — broke through in Trump’s testing to an extent that stunned some of his aides.

So they poured still more money into the ads, running them during football games, which prompted Charlamagne Tha God, the host of The Breakfast Club, a popular show among Black listeners, to express exasperation — and his on-air complaints gave the Trump team fodder for yet another commercial.

The Charlamagne ad ranked as one of the Trump team’s most effective spots, according to an analysis by Future Forward, Harris’ leading super PAC.

The anti-trans ads cut to the core of the Trump argument: that Harris was “dangerously liberal” — the exact vulnerability her team was most worried about. The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women — the same group Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.

The Harris team debated internally how to respond. Ads the Harris team produced with a direct response to the “they/them” ads wound up faring poorly in internal tests. The ads never ran.

Change candidate

By early October, the Trump team had been trying for weeks to blunt Harris’ efforts to portray herself as the change candidate.

The Trump team’s internal polling had showed Harris succeeding at portraying herself as a change agent in August. She had settled on the slogan “A New Way Forward” and was pressing a generational argument against Trump, who was vying to become the oldest man ever elected president. It was one of the most worrying findings for the Trump team in the early weeks of her candidacy.

Then she went on “The View.”

In what was otherwise an anodyne talk-show appearance, Harris was asked if she would have done something differently from Biden. She paused, then said, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

Blair told the Trump campaign team it needed to get the clip seen by as many voters as possible. By that afternoon, up to 10 million voters received text messages containing the clip on their cellphones. Television ads broadcast it to tens of millions more over the following weeks.

The Harris campaign’s pollsters seemed to press for a label — “dangerous” — that echoed how Trump was trying to pigeonhole Harris ideologically. Finally, they agreed on what campaign officials described as the “three U’s.”

Unhinged, unstable, unchecked.

Ads featuring that tagline soon followed. But Democratic allies immediately began to second-guess the focus on Trump’s character. Those doubts grew after Harris called attention to a report that Trump’s former White House chief of staff had said Trump fit the definition of a fascist.

Republicans argued that calling Trump a fascist — as Harris soon did — would not persuade anyone.

“I’m sorry, we had him as president for four years; we know he’s not a Nazi,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a close Trump ally.

Days later, Harris traveled to the Atlanta area for her first rally with former President Barack Obama.

Her campaign had already announced the location of her closing speech — the Ellipse in Washington, where on Jan. 6, 2021, Trump had revved up the crowd that overran the Capitol — and it hinted at her intentions.

Obama had other ideas. He urged Harris to infuse her closing argument with the story of who she was in order to get across the kind of president she would be. The share of the speech that focused on Trump ultimately shrank.

On the final Sunday evening of the campaign, at a rally in Michigan, Harris did not mention Trump once. It was the first time she had omitted his name from a speech at a campaign rally.

In the final 10 days, Trump promised to be the protector of women “whether they like it or not.” He made a crack about Liz Cheney with rifles “trained at her face.” His campaign put a comic’s racist set onstage.

Some of the Harris team’s final measurements suggested his wild antics were breaking through and that they believed voters were weighing them against the former president.

But the election results showed the opposite.