Election Day winners and losers

It was the biggest political shock in living memory: Republican nominee Donald Trump won the presidency on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Clinton despite the Democrat’s comfortable lead in the polls as Election Day dawned.

The intricacies of how and why Trump won will be debated for a long time, while the agenda of a Trump administration is only beginning to take shape.

For now, here are the winners and losers of Election Day itself.

  

WINNERS

Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon

To the winner go the spoils — and to his aides go the plaudits.

Conway and Bannon took over a Trump campaign that was listing badly in August. The businessman’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, had come and gone, and the man who in effect replaced him, Paul Manafort, was on the way out.

{mosads}Conway, a well-respected GOP strategist and pollster, seemed to improve the candidate’s focus. She sought to persuade him — albeit with limited success — to steer clear of self-defeating controversies. And she drew on her own media skills, becoming one of his most effective TV surrogates.

Bannon had a lower public profile but was strategically vital, encouraging Trump to double-down on the base-first strategy that ultimately delivered the White House.

 

Matt Drudge/The Drudge Report

The website and its eponymous founder were among the biggest boosters of Trump, regularly propagating stories that were positive for him or that cast his rivals — including his internal GOP critics — in an unflattering light.

Drudge’s enthusiasm for Trump attracted plenty of critics. But the election result proved that the website still has its finger on the conservative pulse.

 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

The race for the Senate was overshadowed by the seismic shock of Trump’s victory. But the GOP had a great night in the battle for the upper chamber.

Democrats began Election Day thinking they had a strong chance of netting the four seats they required to take control, assuming — as almost all the party’s lawmakers did — that Clinton would win the White House.

In the end, Democrats picked up just a single seat: Rep. Tammy Duckworth defeated incumbent Republican Sen. Mark Kirk in Illinois. Other highly fancied challengers fell short in Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina and even Wisconsin.

McConnell easily retained the title of Senate majority leader after a night that was as good as he could have dared to expect.

 

Vice President-elect Mike Pence

The Indiana governor’s decision to join Trump’s presidential ticket paid off in a big way.

It didn’t always look as if it would. Pence, a committed Christian, was said to have been furious when a 2005 tape emerged in which Trump was heard bragging about groping women without their consent. More broadly, a heavy defeat for Trump would almost surely have besmirched Pence’s reputation as well.

Now, he will take office in January as the vice president. And speculation will build as to whether he might eventually ascend to the top job.

 

Trump’s key backers

Stepping aboard the Trump Train was at one time a very risky endeavor. But several of those who took the gamble will now be very glad they did. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is back on the national stage in a big way. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has been under a large “BridgeGate” cloud, also has a new lease on political life. Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) and Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions also gave powerful backing to the president-elect.

 

Immigration hawks

Republicans who want a more restrictive immigration policy are ecstatic. They will soon have a president whose signature proposal is building a wall along the border with Mexico, forcing the southern neighbor to pay for it.

 

The NRA

The gun rights group endorsed Trump back in May, with its executive director suggesting that members of the association who wanted someone else other than Trump to be GOP nominee ought to “get over it.”

In the early hours of Wednesday, as Trump’s victory was confirmed, the group issued a statement asserting that voters had “sent a loud and clear message that our gun rights are not for sale.” 

 

 

MIXED

Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.)

The Speaker easily retained his party’s majority in the House. But the bigger picture for Ryan is more complicated. He has positioned himself as the champion of a very different brand of Republicanism to that espoused by the president-elect. Now, Trump Republicanism has won a stunning victory — which presumably weakens the case for the more cerebral, center-right variety with which Ryan is identified.

 

 

LOSERS

Opinion pollsters and the media

After the last presidential election, the GOP carried out a post-mortem. This time around, it’s opinion pollsters who will find themselves poking around at the corpse of their reputation.

From the pollsters’ perspective, the outcome was a disaster. The overwhelming evidence from national polls and swing-state surveys was that Clinton would win — and it was all wrong.

There will probably be theses written on how the polls went so awry. But that won’t do much to repair the public’s faith.

In the process, the media’s reliance on polls — a trait of virtually every news organization, including this one — needs to face serious scrutiny too.

More broadly, Trump and his supporters are already gleeful at having won in the face of what they consider constant hostility from the “dishonest media.”

 

President Obama

Clinton’s defeat spells big trouble for President Obama’s legacy.

It would be tough to argue that her defeat was his fault. His approval ratings have been at their highest levels in years, and he drew big crowds whenever he took to the stump for her.

But now he faces the very real prospect that his big achievements both domestically (the Affordable Care Act) and internationally (the Iran nuclear deal) will be wiped out by President-elect Trump, who will enter office with GOP majorities in the House and Senate.

 

Clinton campaign strategists

How Clinton lost to such an unusual opponent as Trump — the most unpopular major party nominee of modern times — will be puzzled over for a long time. But, whatever the answer, it won’t be good news for the people guiding her campaign. 

From the Democratic perspective, this was a catastrophic, inexplicable loss. That is bad news for the reputations of everyone associated with that bid, including campaign manager Robby Mook and chairman John Podesta.

 

The political establishment

Trump’s victory came in defiance of just about every political norm. It wasn’t just his policies or his tone that flew in the face of conventional wisdom — though they did. The way he conducted his campaign was equally unorthodox. He spent relatively little on TV ads, did not seem overly bothered about establishing a campaign infrastructure and was sometimes just as indifferent about building alliances on Capitol Hill. And, of course, he won — raising questions about whether the bedrock beliefs of the establishment are valid at all.

 

The immigration reform lobby

Advocates for liberalizing immigration laws believed they were about to see movement under a President Clinton. Their dreams have died, at least for the moment, now that it will be President Trump instead.

 

Clinton’s star surrogates

Unlike Trump, Clinton could turn to A-list political stars in the campaign’s final days. First lady Michelle Obama was perhaps the most potent of all, especially when she delivered an eviscerating attack on Trump over his attitudes toward women. But there were other stellar surrogates too, including former President Bill Clinton and left-wing icons Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

The problem was not just that they didn’t deliver a Clinton victory. Their job was to boost Democratic enthusiasm — and with Clinton falling short of President Obama’s 2012 popular vote total by almost 8 million ballots, it’s clear that didn’t work.