Among the Trump team, where most everyone had an Apprentice-like geniality and firm handshake, Matt Oczkowski was grossly introverted, deeply inarticulate, and often entirely unresponsive. At best, you’d finally get his views at the end of a long series of strangled ahems and stammers. Oz was almost everyone’s point of constant reference and authority on the campaign, but the president was kept carefully away from him; he was too nerdy for the president. Occasionally, Trump would inquire further—“Oz? Like the Wizard of Oz?”—only to be told, as part of the pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain theme, that it was short for an unpronounceable Polish name and that he was just the numbers guy.

The president’s best data set was crowd size, and he was still reliving the overflowing and tumultuous rallies of the past week. By this measure, he and his data wizard were on the same page: once again, polls had been unable to accurately measure the true passion and fealty of the Trump nation.

The president, calling down, went over the Florida numbers again and again, taking an extra amount of pleasure in another defeat for Michael Bloomberg (doubly sure now that the former New York City mayor hadn’t put up the money he’d said he’d spend to support Biden—although in his telling this would shortly become, even with Bloomberg spending all that money, Trump had won anyway!).

In the space of a few minutes, the anxieties of COVID, the economy, and an underdog and nearly flat-broke campaign were replaced by the sense, inexplicable to even the most dedicated Trumpers no matter how many times they had experienced it, that the president possessed some otherworldly power. And suddenly, many Democrats, in a new nightmare scenario, were equally having to consider the sorcery by which Trump held and might expand his base.