Выбрать главу

Exit polls would later find that voters who were still making up their minds in those final days broke strongly for Trump. In Pennsylvania, a state with no early voting allowed at all, the margin among late-deciders was 54 to 37. In Wisconsin, where 72 percent of people voted on Election Day, it was 59 to 30. In Michigan, where 73 percent of people voted on Election Day, it was 50 to 39. And the pattern extended beyond the Midwest. In Florida, late-deciders went for Trump 55 to 38. That late surge was enough to put all these states in Trump’s column.

Normally, campaigns have a decent sense of how undecided voters are likely to break, based on their past vote history and demographics. And history shows that most people who tell pollsters they’re considering a third-party candidate will “come home” in the end. In the final days of the 2016 campaign, the voters you would expect to return to the Republican Party did so. But that didn’t happen on our side. Many Democratic-leaning voters flirting with third-party candidates ended up actually pulling the lever for them. And some undecided voters we expected to ultimately choose us went to Trump instead or stayed home.

That included suburban moderates who might have voted for Republicans in the past but didn’t like Trump and had been looking for an acceptable alternative right up until the end. On Election Day, a lot of them held their noses and voted for him anyway. It’s revealing to compare the results in the suburbs of Denver and Las Vegas, where the vast majority vote early and I did well enough to carry both Colorado and Nevada, with the results in the Philadelphia suburbs, where nearly everyone voted on Election Day. The final Franklin & Marshall Poll in Pennsylvania, based on interviews nearly all conducted before October 28, found I had a 36-point margin over Trump in the four counties of the Philadelphia suburbs, leading 64 percent to 28 percent. By Election Day, I only beat Trump there by about 13 points. That loss of suburban support in the final week meant I couldn’t match Trump’s strength in rural areas and ended up narrowly losing the state.

Working-class white women also moved en masse in the final days. Trump led among this group nearly the whole campaign, but according to the NBC–Wall Street Journal poll, I had closed to within just 4 points during the October debates. Then, in the final week, Trump’s margin grew to 24 points.

The Comey Effect

What happened in the homestretch that caused so many voters to turn away from me?

First, and most importantly, there was the unprecedented intervention by then FBI Director Jim Comey.

His October 28 letter about the investigation into my emails led to a week of wall-to-wall negative coverage. A look at five of the nation’s top newspapers found that together they published 100 stories mentioning the email controversy in the days after Comey’s letter, nearly half of them on the front page. In six out of seven mornings from October 29 to November 4, it was the lead story in the nation’s news cycle. Trump understood that Comey’s apparent imprimatur gave his “Crooked Hillary” attacks new credibility, and Republicans dumped at least $17 million in Comey-related ads into the battleground states. It worked.

On November 1 and 2, my campaign conducted focus groups with independent, swing voters in Philadelphia and Tampa, Florida. The undecideds weren’t ready to jump to Trump yet, but in retrospect, the warning signs were blinking red. “I have concerns about this whole Weiner thing. I find it unsettling. I had been leaning toward Hillary, but now I just don’t know,” said one Florida voter. “I was never a fan of either one, but this email thing with Clinton has me concerned the past few days. Will they elect her and then impeach her? Was she giving away secret information?” said another.

Outside focus groups were hearing similar things. Researchers who track what consumers are talking about, essentially a word-of-mouth index, found “a sudden change,” with a 17-point drop in net sentiment for me, and an 11-point rise for Trump. According to Brad Fay of Engagement Labs, which applies well-established consumer research techniques to study elections, “The change in word-of-mouth favorability metric was stunning, and much greater than the traditional opinion polling revealed.”

Those concerns we heard in the focus groups help explain why Comey’s letter was so devastating. From the beginning of the general election, we had understood the race to be a contest between voters’ fear of risk and desire for change. Convincing Americans that electing Trump was just too big a risk was our best shot at overpowering the widespread desire for a change after eight years of Democratic control. In demographic terms, our strategy depended on compensating for expected weakness with working-class white voters (a trend that had been getting worse for Democrats for a long time) by doing better among college-educated suburban moderates—precisely the people most likely to be concerned about risk.

Before October 28, there was every reason to believe this strategy would work. Voters thought Trump was unqualified and temperamentally unfit. They worried he might blunder into a war. And they thought I was steady, qualified, and safe. Comey’s letter turned that picture upside down. Now voters were worried my presidency would be dogged by more investigations, maybe even impeachment. It was “unsettling,” as that Florida voter put it. When both candidates seemed risky, then the desire for change reasserted itself and undecideds shifted to Trump or a third party.

In the week that followed Comey’s letter, Nate Silver found that my lead in national polling dropped by about 3 points, and my chances of winning the election shrunk from 81 percent to 65 percent. In the average battleground state, my lead was down to just 1.7 points—and the fact that there were few if any polls still in the field that late in the game in places such as Wisconsin meant that the damage could easily have been worse.

Then, on the Sunday afternoon before Election Day, Comey sent another letter explaining that, in fact, there was no new evidence to change his conclusion from July. By then it was too late. If anything, that second letter may have energized Trump supporters even more and made them more likely to turn out and vote against me. It also guaranteed that undecided voters saw two more days of headlines about emails and investigations.

Hours after Comey’s second letter hit the news, Trump whipped up the outrage in a rally in Michigan: “Hillary Clinton is guilty. She knows it. The FBI knows it. The people know it,” he said. “Now it’s up to the American people to deliver justice at the ballot box on November 8.” The crowd responded with loud chants of “Lock her up!”

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, credited Comey’s letter with reversing his candidate’s fortunes. “With eleven days to go in this election cycle something amazing happened,” he said. In his new book, Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, Bloomberg News reporter Joshua Green reveals that the Trump campaign’s data scientists thought the effect of Comey’s letter was “pivotal.” In an internal memo written five days before Election Day, they reported seeing “declining support for Clinton, shifting in favor of Mr. Trump” and predicted, “This may have a fundamental impact on the results.” Sadly, they were right.