From political outcast to the presidency.
Four years after Americans kicked then-President Trump out of the White House and he fled Washington in political humiliation two months later, after attempting to overturn his election loss, they are returning him to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“It’s a political victory that our country has never seen before,” Trump said in his victory speech early Wednesday morning, referring to his clear electoral and popular vote victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, termed the triumph “the greatest political comeback in American history.”
During his victory speech, Trump emphasized that his political movement was unique and unprecedented. “This was the greatest political movement of all time.”
For an undisciplined campaign known for exaggeration, Tuesday’s election results looked to validate Trump’s claims.
“This is a historic political realignment,” seasoned Republican strategist Ryan Williams stated.
According to Williams, Trump “basically threw out the coalition that Republicans had put together for the last several decades and reached out and doubled down on voting blocks that he thought he could make a connection with.”
“He simply broadened the party in ways that no previous nominee has been able to do before. And I believe that’s why the polls missed it, because he fundamentally altered the composition of the electorate,” Williams stated.
Trump’s 2024 campaign was a hard two-year marathon. He announced his candidacy at his south Florida Mar-a-Lago club only days after the 2022 midterm elections.
And he launched his campaign amid accusations from many in his party that he was partially to blame for the GOP’s poor performance in the midterm elections.
Despite a rocky start, the former president handily defeated a field of GOP primary opponents that had briefly swollen to over a dozen rivals last year, as he did earlier this year in the Republican presidential primaries.
Trump, who was arrested in four separate criminal cases, witnessed a rise in popularity and financing in late spring of this year, after becoming the first former or current president to be convicted of a felony.
A month later, President Biden suffered a major setback when a disastrous late-June debate performance against Trump reignited long-standing questions about whether the 81-year-old president was physically and mentally fit for another four grueling years in the White House, sparking calls from within his own party for him to resign.
Trump’s polling lead against Biden grew, and the former president received further political support after surviving an assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, two days before the commencement of the Republican National Convention in July.
However, the race was turned upside down days later when Biden dropped his re-election bid and endorsed his vice president. Democrats swiftly rallied behind Harris, and her fundraising increased as her poll ratings rose.
Harris’ honeymoon lasted until the late August Democratic National Convention and into September, when most analysts judged her the winner of the only presidential debate between her and Trump.
But as the calendar turned from September to October, Trump appeared to regain his footing, with public opinion polls showing the former president gaining traction.
Longtime GOP strategist David Kochel stated that we are “still in a country where you have a 70% wrong track.” Voters wanted to change who was in the White House.
Kochel, a veteran of multiple Republican presidential campaigns, said that while Harris “breathed some life into the campaign, some enthusiasm,” the basics remained unchanged. People are dissatisfied with the economy. They believe the country is moving in the wrong path. They wanted to make a shift. “And it turns out that Trump won the change argument.”
“And he also ran a very effective swing state campaign with effective advertising that hurt her,” according to Kochel.
Williams also praised the Trump campaign, saying they “had a strategy and stuck to it.” They basically said we’re going with men. They doubled down on guys; they had a constant strategy, and it succeeded.
And Williams claimed that Harris “basically took the Hillary Clinton playbook from 2016, xeroxed it, and made it worse.”
Both strategists emphasized that Trump was able to overcome his numerous misstatements and inflammatory remarks.
“We pay so much attention to Trump’s wild statements. All the things that people find unacceptable. “That stuff doesn’t matter,” Kochel said. “He had a better strategy and an environment that played to his favor.”
Williams also highlighted Trump’s ability to “understand the electorate and connect with people in a way that no other politician does.” He basically speaks off the cuff in his own style, and even though he tells a lot of lies, he’s seen as genuine because he’s not a polished politician.”