The doubts about the campaign and, among some, the realistic notions about the difficulties they were going to have that evening, potentially insurmountable difficulties, began to evaporate for many in the innermost circle.

Several campaign aides registered Kushner’s uncharacteristic hand pump.

Before 9 p.m., Kushner called upstairs to the Executive Residence and told his father-in-law that the Florida numbers meant fantastic news across the country.

“Holy shit,” said Miller, standing up from the horseshoe set of tables in the White House Map Room.

There were four giant screens in the Map Room, side by side against one wall, like a polyptych on a Renaissance church altar.

With its nineteenth-century still lifes and portraits, the formal and ceremonial nature of the Map Room was a slightly discordant setting for the boiler room nature of the final hours of a political campaign, with everybody intensely bent over laptops, fortified by Diet Cokes and gummy bears.

The White House Election Day operation had begun in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) in the predawn—the first hours of voting across the country were key moments for spotting any suspicious business (people not showing up to open the polls, polling stations without ballots, poll watcher issues). There was a station for each of the seventeen battleground states, staffed with a lawyer and a political pro who knew the state. The rapid-response media operation was based out at campaign HQ in Rosslyn, just across the Roosevelt Bridge. There banks of computers were staffed with people fresh out of college, who sat staring at two massive walls of TV screens following social media, scouring platforms for any mention of voting problems or irregularities or funky stuff. But the true brains of the operation were here in the Map Room.

Oczkowski, up late the night before, was in his seat by late afternoon. He had come into the 2016 campaign through the back door of Cambridge Analytica, the behavioral target–marketing company that was owned by far-right billionaire Robert Mercer, which had, controversially, scraped Facebook profiles for its own data banks and for its own use—an effort, with at best mixed results, to use social media data mining for right-wing causes.

After 2016, Oczkowski left Trumpworld to run his own company, HUMN Behavior. He billed himself as an expert on “Middle America”—that is, the people who might otherwise not be captured in the typical marketing grid, the more-than-not unhappy and dissatisfied American. “Using tactics from the worlds of behavioral science, data science, growth marketing, sentiment graphing, and geographic analysis,” HUMN, per its official description of its methods, could reach the hidden Trump voter. Oczkowski’s models had proven uniquely and, in many ways, eerily correct in 2016. In 2020, Parscale, trying to buttress his own claims of vast data omniscience, had pulled “Oz” back into the reelection effort (Parscale always introduced him as an MIT graduate, when in fact he was a graduate of James Madison University in Harrisburg, Virginia).