American Battleground: How a single state took Harris down and raised the new era of Trump

Analysis by Tom Foreman, CNN

(CNN) — When the sun falls from the darkening Washington, DC, sky, the electric crowd at Howard University appears certain it will rise brighter. Singing, cheering, linking arms and raising hands in the great outdoor quadrangle known as The Yard, they have come by the thousands to watch the election returns and witness history in a place where it has been made before.

The historically Black university has produced legendary authors and actors, esteemed scientists, the titanic Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and the groundbreaking woman for whom the rapturous throngs have rallied tonight.

“And every time we hear a mention of Kamala Harris winning another state this crowd goes crazy!” a local television reporter says to her camera.

Academically, every soul here knows the vice president could lose. But in the way of true believers in every political campaign, they feel she is destined to win; that the polls will clang shut east to west and acclaim will echo back from the far ocean, across the Rockies and Plains, through the farms and industrial towns to the nation’s capital, where their candidate will become the first woman elected president of the United States.

Her whole campaign, after all, has been like a movie, and that’s how movies end. The fact that Harris — a Black and Asian American woman — will crush the man many Democrats see as dismissive of women and non-Whites, former President Donald Trump, is a delicious detail they will savor all their lives.

“… We’re going to be here all night bringing you coverage,” the reporter goes on, “so stay tuned!”

“They were feeling so confident,” says CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez, who was also in the crowd. “They really thought they had it in the bag.”

The candidate is a few miles away at the US Naval Observatory, the official residence of all vice presidents: close enough to dash to the rally for a victory speech, far enough to be free of the crowd’s intoxicating optimism. There and at her campaign offices everywhere, sober political scrutiny is being brought to bear on every report from every precinct.

“All of us knew there were headwinds,” says Dan Kanninen, battleground state director for Harris. A political pro with a long pedigree, he is sharply aware of the worldwide trends against incumbents, the deep dissatisfaction of Americans with the direction of their country, and the late start Harris had been saddled with by President Joe Biden’s unexpected departure from the race in July.

“Kamala Harris had a lot to do in 107 days that was hard to do in 107 days. She had to define herself, pick a VP, stake out her positions,” Kanninen says. He thought Harris could overcome it all, but the early exit polls confirm what other assessments have shown in the closing weeks. Her rapid-fire campaign is on a knife’s edge. Victory and defeat seem equally plausible. And something else in the numbers is troubling. “Donald Trump’s approval ratings were the highest they’d ever been,” Kanninen says. “He was at 41, 42,43, 44% his entire candidacy and his entire presidency. He was at 49 in this campaign.”

Almost a thousand miles south at the former president’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, Trump is hosting a private watch party with the movers, shakers and wannabes of his circle, and he is seemingly nursing his own concerns. Earlier in the day, while casting his vote, he’d appeared tired, and he uncharacteristically nodded to the possibility of defeat.

“I hear we are doing very well everywhere,” he said to the cameras, adding, “I may regret that statement, but I’m hearing that we’re doing very well.” He said he had not written a victory speech. “If I win, I know what I’m going to say, and I don’t even want to think about the losing part.”

A reporter called out, “Regardless of what happens tonight, is this your last campaign? Are you done after this?”

“Yeah, I would think so,” Trump said, looking at the floor. “I would think so.”

Now it is evening, and by many accounts the most effective campaign team Trump has ever had is clawing through the data as feverishly as Harris’ contingent and sharing similar doubts. CNN’s Kristen Holmes is tracking the Trump team’s anxiety from the public watch party, which is also just a few minutes from the candidate’s citadel to allow a quick victory speech if warranted.

“They believed he was going to win. However, it was very tight margins,” she says later, noting that Team Trump was gambling that the polls, which ever so slightly favored him in the closing days, were underestimating his strength just as in past campaigns. “They believed that (Trump’s supporters) were being under-polled. That the actual turnout would have Donald Trump winning. That meant if they were reading it wrong… he might not win.”

What’s more, Harris’ ascendancy on the Democratic ticket — with her ecstatic crowds, celebrity backers, and mountains of fresh donations — had shaken the Republican candidate and his team from the start. “He himself saw a lot of the momentum around Kamala Harris,” Holmes says. “I think they believed that was slowing down, but there was still concern that there was some weird way she could pull it out.”

Eyes on the battlegrounds

The evening is a grind of returns and projections that are neither surprising nor consequential in that both campaigns have pre-counted the electoral hauls from states where their wins are unassailable. Trump takes Indiana and Kentucky. Harris wins Vermont. Trump takes Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Harris grabs Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Trump wins Ohio. Harris takes Illinois. Journalists stand in front of glowing maps analyzing the spreading patchwork of reds and blues. More than 35 million Americans are watching on TV; untold millions more are tracking the action online. Everyone has been told it will take a long night, perhaps long days, before a winner can be determined.

At Howard, the huge crowd remains packed and buoyant. In Florida, conservative firebrand Tucker Carlson chats on a webcast with Trump super-supporter Elon Musk. When the richest man in the world’s small son giggles, Carlson joins in. “I like your laugh,” he says. “That’s the laugh of an honest man!”

Behind the celebrations, the Harris and Trump number-crunchers are eyeing the battleground states that could go either way. Each election has them, and they change from time to time, but in this race, they are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Shortly after 10 p.m., the Tar Heel state arrives first at the tape.

“CNN projects that Donald Trump will win the state of North Carolina,” says Jake Tapper as 16 electoral votes are added to Trump’s column and the watch party in West Palm Beach erupts. “Donald Trump now has 227 electoral votes. Kamala Harris has 153.”

It is not seismic. Harris’ team knew North Carolina — which Trump twice won before — was a reach. She wins Oregon, New Mexico, Virginia and Hawaii.

Then, at nearly midnight on the East Coast, another battleground is called. Georgia goes for Trump too. Still, not a huge surprise. The fact that it had flipped by a sliver from predictably red to blue for Biden in 2020 was unusual enough to make the Peach State a central part of Trump’s obsessive claim that Democrats must have cheated. Georgia was where then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani would falsely accuse a pair of poll workers of manipulating the results in Biden’s favor. The former New York mayor’s election lies would cost him his law license and a court would order him to pay the two women almost $150 million for defamation. Among items he was ordered to forfeit: his luxury apartment in Manhattan, a baseball jersey signed by Joe DiMaggio, a 1980s Mercedes that once belonged to the late film star Lauren Bacall, furniture, clothing, jewelry and more.

With two battlegrounds now sizzling red on the map, the campaign teams go back to watching the remaining five, and one above all the others. Like armies circling each other at a distance, trying to find the most favorable spot for their inevitable clash, both campaigns in the final weeks have settled on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as critical to their victory.

“What makes the state so important?” asks CNN’s Michael Smerconish. “Democrats dominate the two largest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but spread out in between are rural territories favoring Republican candidates. And over time the state’s suburbs have become uniquely purple.”

That perfectly balanced prize leaned Biden’s way in 2020 and secured his win. Pennsylvania is where Harris has spent enormous amounts of money and time trying to rally every voter she can find. Pennsylvania is where Trump was grazed by a bullet, cementing his image as a fighter for his fans and, polls suggest, giving a boost to his long-beleaguered approval ratings.

Each campaign has mapped out many intricate combinations of demographics, geography, election law and ground forces to plot a winning path. Both parties have battalions of lawyers prepared for the court cases that will surely explode if the results are as tenuous as so many experts predict. The possibilities have been analyzed by pundits to the point of exhaustion. Yet for practical purposes, in every scenario Pennsylvania and its 19 electoral votes will live up to its name as the Keystone State.

Polls have found the contest there agonizingly close, and the law itself is conspiring to prolong the suspense. “State law in Pennsylvania doesn’t permit our county election officials to begin processing … mail-in ballots until 7 a.m. on election morning,” Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania’s secretary of the commonwealth, explains. “Plenty of other states, red and blue alike, allow that process to begin days if not weeks in advance.”

For all the efforts to suss out the true nature of this year’s electorate and divine what will actually happen, Pennsylvania began Election Day as a black box. Unknown. Unknowable. It is among the places most likely to drag the final decision of this race into an eternity of waiting.

But that is not what happens. As results begin trickling, then flooding, in from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Uniontown, Scranton, Bradford, Erie and beyond, a rumble begins in both the Harris and Trump camps. In short hours, it becomes an earthquake shaking the Democratic Party’s famed blue wall to its foundation.

At 2:05 in the morning, Pennsylvania falls to Trump. Tapper is back on screen looking at the results from his home state and saying, “This is a huge, huge achievement for Donald Trump and a huge bucket of electoral votes.”

Of more than 7 million votes cast in Pennsylvania, Trump beats Harris by just over 120,000. But it’s enough to brush away any doubts. At Howard University, the crowd is stunned. CNN’s Alvarez is working the phone, firing off emails, trying to get any read from the Harris team. Nothing.

“The campaign had pretty much gone dark,” she says. “They were not responding to just about anything. I talked to one source who said once Pennsylvania was clearly going to Donald Trump, it was the nail in the coffin.”

Wisconsin is so close it seems Harris might win, but Trump takes it, too. Then he wins Michigan.

News outlets, adding up the electoral votes, begin calling the race.

It is over.

A decisive, if limited, victory

“Look what happened! Is this crazy?”

Trump is crowing, beaming, exulting before a thunderous MAGA crowd in the wee hours, celebrating what many consider the election of a lifetime even as much of America is asleep, many unaware of the finality they will wake to in the morning.

His team had braced, like everyone else, for a marathon slog to a declared victory, but now they stand startlingly at the finish line. “They were pretty confident by around 10 p.m. — 10 or 11 — that they had won the election,” Holmes says, but the team gently guarded against Trump making any premature declaration of victory as he had in his 2020 loss. Holmes says they told him, “We think you can win this. Let’s just wait it out and see.”

Now he is free to proclaim his joy and relief to the world and he is bathing in the adulation.

“I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honor of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president,” he says. “This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before … and frankly this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time … and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal.”

For the first time, not just the Electoral College, but more Americans have chosen him over anyone else to be president of the United States. “That means everything to him,” Holmes says based on her years of being around Trump. “To him, it means that he is the real winner. For him, it is a much bigger deal to win the popular vote because it says a lot of his ‘gut’ was right.”

Right about the issues that would light up American voters. Right about the framing of his opponents.

At 78, he is the oldest person ever to win the White House, yet he dances onstage as the crowd cheers. “Winning the popular vote was very nice,” he says. “Very nice, I’ll tell you.”

Trump’s victory is decisive. He not only forced his party to keep him as its standard bearer after he left Washington in disgrace in 2021, but he also convinced a solid majority of the GOP he had never lost in 2020 anyway. He became the first Republican to win both the electoral and popular vote since President George W. Bush 20 years ago. Trump expanded his margins over 2020 and bested Harris in every battleground state. He led the ticket as his party recaptured the US Senate and held onto the House. He coaxed thousands of typically Democratic-leaning Black, brown and Asian Americans into his fold. He wagered against the advice of political pros on his ability to ignite passions among low-propensity voters and lure them to the polls — and his bet paid off.

The new president-elect proclaims the might of his victory. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate!”

But calling his win a landslide, as so many Trump allies do, is laughably false.

Trump received slightly more than 77.3 million popular votes — just 1.5 percentage points more than Harris. It is one of the more anemic victories in a half-century and weak even in these hyper-partisan times, when close races are common. He collected 312 electoral votes, putting him in the lower half of all presidential winners — certainly more than Biden’s 306 in 2020, but far behind Barack Obama in 2008 with 365 and 2012 with 332. Bill Clinton was elected and reelected with electoral counts in the 370s. And the GOP’s hold on both chambers of Congress will be very narrow, making it potentially politically hazardous for the party to aggressively pursue the more radical aspects of Trump’s agenda.

And it is worth noting a fine point from which Trump’s foes may take cold comfort: Most Americans who cast ballots in the 2024 presidential election did not want Trump to win. He clearly and fairly took the plurality of those votes, but the majority was split between Harris and a smattering of third-party candidates. Trump ended up with just under 50% of all the votes cast.

He undeniably won. But despite his historic, remarkable comeback, once again Trump will be a minority president.

The-CNN-Wire
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